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I like to read articles about players who have just played well, especially if their good play has followed a period of not so good play. The fascinating thing to me is the variety of perceived reasons for the turnaround. Most players, if asked, would rather not talk about a slump, other than to say that they are “working on it” and that they see “positive signs” that things are “coming around”. However, players are far more effusive in their discussions of how good play arises out of bad play. The list of reasons is all over the map.
In this week’s issue of Golfweek the subject is Charles Howell. A rash of good results to start the season led the reporter, Sean Martin, to interview Howell and offer up a discussion on how Howell perceived his recent success. According to Howell he has been working with instructor Gary Gilchrist, who has “simplified things for me”. Howell states that his goal this year is to “stick to plan Gary and I have laid out, and on the golf course, seeing how free mentally I can play”. Later in the article the writer states that “Howell concedes that he changes practice habits too often. Gilchrist’s job is to keep him working on the same drills throughout the year, no matter how Howell has played in the past day or week”. Says Gilchrist, “We want to give him a plan so he’s not searching”.
Ok. I get this perfectly. As a player myself, I often switch from working on my swing mechanics to reducing the number of thoughts in my head to a usable few, then taking that out onto the course. Any good player does that, and it is a prerequisite for good golf. The swing takes just over or under one second from the first movement of the clubhead to impact. How many things do you think you can keep in your head in that amount of time? The obvious fact is that you can’t think through a golf swing. Practicing is completely different. There is no penalty for a bad shot. You are free to stop in the middle of your swing, to slow it down as much as you want, to start back from wherever you want, and to think as much as you care to. When you play you just have to trigger it and go. The thoughts must become more general and motion oriented, which is why good players usually describe what they do on the course as more related to “feel” as opposed to verbal instruction. Unfortunately for most non-Tour players their swing mechanics are not good enough to allow for a true “no thought” action due to the fact that they make consistent errors that are serious enough to have them unable to shoot good scores. Perhaps in a case like Howell’s he has never quite figured out how to organize his thoughts effectively, and what Gilchrist is doing with him is addressing that weakness.
On the other hand, there could be mechanical flaws that have never been addressed or fixed that simply won’t allow Charles to hit the shots necessary to win when it comes down to the wire. This type of failure (Howell has only won twice in 14 years on Tour after coming out as the best college and amateur player in the country) is usually attacked through swing analysis and mechanical changes, but Howell is a mechanics aficionado and this approach hasn’t seemed to work for him. One of the reasons I became recently interested in Howell was a post from a website member noting his good play and wondering if there was something in his swing that might be keeping him from advancing to the level of consistent Tour winner, which by all appearances he should be.
Interestingly enough, in my analysis of Charles’ swing I find things that I think are egregious for a player of his ability and in my humble opinion are serious enough to make it difficult for him to rise to the next level. I always look at the Tour pro analysis’ in two ways: on one hand these are great players and the reason we are looking at the swings in the first place is that they are highly successful. No matter what my perceived issues are with the swing technique it works and deserves the utmost respect. I am never critical of a successful player to the point where I will say that a movement is bad. On the other hand, I also treat the analysis as though the player were coming to me for a lesson and asking what I see and what I would recommend to improve it. In Howell’s case there I see a major error in transition that he overcomes with his superior strength, shaft control ability, and overall talent.
There is another item in the article that I noticed that has become somewhat of a mantra for the media these days when it comes to Tour players working on their games and trying to improve. Check out this quote from the writer: “Howell grew up in an age when players tried to overcome this game’s challenges by mastering swing mechanics at the expense of creativity”. Now, where did this come from? Of course, it came from all the other nonsense being spewed out by announcers on television such as Brandel Chamblee, and old school instructors such as Butch Harmon. These are the anti-video, anti-launch monitor souls who claim to be upholding the “natural” state of the golf swing by taking the analysis (other than by the practiced “eye” of someone like Harmon, or Harvey Penick) out of the work and replacing it with “just go out and hit it until you “own” your swing. Would someone tell me what kind of creativity it takes to hit a drive from the tee box down the fairway, or an iron shot of any length from the middle of the fairway to the middle of the green? Now, if you have to bend one around a tree or knock one down into the wind, you are introducing variables that require you to vary (note that the key word here is “variability”) your approach for the situation at hand. This is no great discovery. No player can be great without the ability to vary his or her stroke pattern to meet the requirements of the situation. Solid swing mechanics are the foundation any stroke that has to be changed to allow for changing conditions. The great depth of players on the Tour today can be directly associated with advances in the knowledge of what makes a swing work and what exactly makes a golf ball fly. Howell is 33 years old. To say that he “grew up in a generation” means that just about everyone playing at a high level (except Bubba, of course) these days is not creative enough due to overindulgence with swing mechanics. I don’t believe that for a second, and I am getting tired of people like this writer insinuating that the game is actually easier than it is being made out to be. It’s not, and anyone who tees it up and keeps score in competition knows that.
Of course, there is no follow-up to any of these articles, and we are left to our own devices to figure out if the player a) broke out of the slump eventually or b) continued to be successful using whatever remedy led to the improved play. Let’s pay a visit to Charles and Gary in 6 months and see if the drills are the same and whether the plan is still being followed. My experience tells me that players stick with stuff as long as it works, and their patience runs thin when it doesn’t. Howell is an extremely nice guy so I am definitely rooting for him, as I do for all those who try to squeeze a living out of this ridiculous game. I would also hazard to guess that if he started missing cuts and kept missing them then he would at some point be looking very closely at his swing (with all available technology) to see what was up.