The Art and Science of Learning Golf

By Wayne | Articles: Technology, Equipment and Teaching

As you probably know I have been deeply involved in music over the last 7 or 8 years, trying to learn to play the blues harmonica. I have found the learning process to be remarkably similar to that of learning to play golf, and since I teach golf for a living, being involved again in the attempt to master a skill that involves both technique and feel has helped me to assess and improve my own teaching skills.
 
When I was a kid I didn’t really ever have formal instruction in golf. My Dad showed me a few basics (a good grip and set up, one piece takeaway, left shoulder under, head behind the ball, legs drive toward the target, high finish) and I just took it from there, competing in junior tournaments each summer from the time I was 13. For some reason I was very good when I was at the top end of my age group (the groups were 12-13, 14-15, and 16-17), and without any lessons I managed to qualify for the U.S. Junior, the U.S. Amateur, and be picked “Junior of the Year” in the DC metro area in 1975. I went off to Wake Forest and found that I was not really good enough to play on that team (one that had just won 2 straight NCAA team titles and had 4 All –Americans including Curtis Strange and Jay Haas). I still stubbornly wanted to do it by myself, and after 2 years (I played my sophomore year because the coach left for another school and a few guys quit) and ended up transferring to LSU, where, after sitting out a full year, had an incredible junior year in 1979,winning the Southeast Conference Championship and making First Team All-American. That summer I decided that I still wasn’t good enough to make it as a professional so I enlisted the help of one of my older teammates and made some radical changes to my swing. Things went great for a while but soon I found myself hitting the ball poorly and floundering. For some reason I never went back to my friend to have him look at me and my game simply disappeared. My senior year was a disaster, and I quit playing altogether as soon as the year was over.
 
I don’t think about these events that often, but I can see looking back how important that time was in helping form my approach to the game and specifically the way I teach. I was Ian Baker Finch before there was an Ian Baker Finch. I was on top of the world, then all the way down to the bottom before I had a chance to look around and appreciate what I had accomplished. I had simply tried to get better, with all good intentions, and it just didn’t work out at all. I didn’t understand the learning process and had no understanding or appreciation of the difficulties of pattern changes involving long practiced, instinctive movements. I needed to continue to get help on a regular basis until I fully understood what I was trying to accomplish, but I just didn’t do that.
 
I took a year off after graduating but couldn’t find a job out of golf and within a short period of time was playing again. I won a few amateur events and qualified for the U.S Open, then decided to turn pro and moved to Florida to take a shot at the mini-tours with my sights set on the PGA Tour. I played for 4 years while living in Orlando but injuries all but squashed my dreams of playing for a living. I did take a lesson from David Leadbetter, who was just establishing himself as a teacher of top players just south of Orlando in the early 1980’s, but I left there thinking that armed with a video camera there was nothing he was doing that I couldn’t do myself. I felt that I had advanced enough to be my own teacher, and when the realization that I had no future as a Tour player hit me it was a short leap to the job of golf instructor. I had more physical setbacks in the late 80’s, but by the early 90’s I was teaching full time and my body had mended just enough for me to play. I had always told myself that I would never want to teach if I could not play competitively at the same time, so I tried to apply myself to both. I won the Maryland State Open in 1994 and 1995, and after finishing 5th in the CPC in 95 I played in my first PGA at Riviera, making the cut. I was proving to myself that I could be both a player and a teacher, and my need to hone my swing thoughts down to a usable few in order to play decidedly helped my teaching. Playing the game competitively keeps a player humble. As I became more recognized as a teacher and found myself in situations where teachers would congregate and discuss the golf swing and their teaching methods I sensed a general arrogance and lack of humility that could only be explained by the fact that most of them did not subject themselves to the difficulties of posting a score. Theory was easy: application and execution were extremely hard. I knew first hand that while the swing and the mechanics surrounding it were complex and difficult, the player had to find a way take whatever he was working on and pare it down to usable thoughts that he could take out onto the course. I also knew that the game was played with a trigger thought, an overall image of a shape or pattern to the full motion, and a “feel” of motion, rhythm, and tempo that had to be present in order to overcome the natural increases in breathing and heart rate that came with the pressure of competition.
 
With that backstory in mind, I’d like to get back to a comparison of learning music with learning golf, and then lead into the discussion (debate) over whether golf should be looked at as an art or a science, and whether or not advances in technology have improved the way people learn to play golf.
 
I’m not quite sure why I decided to take an interest in playing music. I had always loved listening to music and was decidedly a rock and roll kind of guy, but with an interest in musicianship. My best friends in high school played jazz/rock fusion, and their level of technical excellence simply blew away the average garage rock band. Most of them were formally trained in jazz and big band playing, and many went on to be professional musicians. There was something about the blues that appealed to me, probably the fact that my favorite rockers, Led Zeppelin, The Stones, and The Beatles, all came from blues based backgrounds. I didn’t know that the harmonica that opens “Bring it on Home” was a direct copy of Sonny Boy Williamson and that Robert Plant had actually taken the aging Sonny Boy with him on one the band’s tours so that he could learn to play. I was a big fan of Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and after I got divorced and quit playing golf for a few years in 1986 I bought a Fender Champ and a Squire Strat and decided I would learn to play the guitar. After moving to New York I took some lessons from an excellent guitarist, but I never practiced enough and found myself dreading going to the lessons unprepared. I just didn’t have enough time to practice enough to get better, and the road to being a decent player looked to be way beyond my abilities. I gave up trying to be a guitarist, and instead picked up a harmonica, which, being a small, hand held instrument allowed me to play more often. This dalliance didn’t last long, however, as I really didn’t know what I was doing and made no serious effort to get any help. Fast forward to 2006 and at 49 years of age I decided that I needed a hobby to keep me from obsessing about golf and bought myself a set of harps for Christmas. This time I was determined get good as fast as I could, so I immediately sought out the best teacher I could find. I flew to Providence and drove out to East Dennis, Mass. to spend time with Jerry Portnoy, a legendary blues harmonica player who played in Muddy Waters’ band for 8 years and with Eric Clapton’s blues band for 4, and who had produced the best harmonica instruction audio CD’s I could find.
 
Jerry set me on the right track, and since then I have traveled (by car) to take lessons from two other great harp players, Dennis Gruenling and Steve Guyger. Locally I play every Thursday at a blues jam at the Zoo Bar in Washington D.C., and I have become friendly with the leader of the house band (The Big Boy Little Band) Bret Littlehales, who continues to help me with both my playing skills and my knowledge of music and song structure. The only thing that rivals being on stage with great musicians and playing great music is being out on the golf course fighting it out in a tournament.
 
Music, much like golf, starts with technical ability. If you can’t play in tune, with good time, and with an ear for note selection, no one is going to want to listen to you. Playing in front of people is a test, much like posting a score in an event. Sitting in your basement playing away is not unlike standing on the range practicing. You do it so that when it counts you will be able to perform at a level that will be at least somewhat satisfactory. Golf is more objective: numbers don’t lie. You are what you shoot, and style doesn’t count for much of anything. You can hit the ball like Hogan and two- putt every green for a nice round or you can hit the ball all over the place and shoot the same score with 22 putts. Music appreciation lies in the ear of the listener. The untrained ear may consider a musical performance to be stellar, while a trained musician may consider the playing to be horrendous. Different listeners may have wildly varying opinions of the same piece. Thus, judging a musical performance or a musical style becomes more like having people offer opinions as to whether or not they consider a swing to be “good”. Does Jim Furyk have a good swing? Is it as good as Adam Scott’s or Tiger Woods’? It is fun to debate the relative merits of a swing but in the end it is all about the success that a swing produces.
 
I think it is instructive to distinguish between the initial learning process of the beginner or the less accomplished player and the continuing learning process of the advanced player. Much of the commentary that revolves around golf instruction that you hear on television has to do solely with teachers who work with players who have already proven to be highly proficient at the act of hitting a golf ball. At a certain point in either a professional musician’s or golfer’s career there is going to be a separation from the rudimentary learning of technique into what we can call learning “feel”, or “style”. A musician finds himself paying more attention to what the notes sound like instead of which notes to play, and the golfer becomes more concerned with how to play the course and the individual shots instead of concentrating on the technique involved. This brings both to a higher level of performance and is where the individual finds out how good they can truly be.
 
So here’s the question: what if you decide at some point that you are not making progress and that as things stand you are not good enough. For a player it may be missing first or second stage of Q-School a few years in a row. For a musician it may be the failure to secure a recording contract, or perhaps just the self -awareness (after recording and listening to your own performance) that your playing is not very good, or at least does not approach whatever personal standards of competency you have come up with. Improving at this point means changing, and changing is fraught with difficulties. A musician is going to rely either on the opinion of others that he respects or on his own analysis of recordings made of his playing. A golfer is going to do exactly the same thing: either go to a teacher or get a video camera and work on what he sees. Most good players who plateau before they reach their goals seek instruction. If you have not spent years analyzing both your own swing as well as the swings of the greats it is difficult to properly pick out what the problems are, what to work on, and in what order to work on things. That is what a teacher is supposed to do, and at this point in their career most players decide to entrust their swing to someone who is supposed to know how to help them get to the next level.
 
The better players already know how to play the game, so they are much more likely to seek help with technique. They have the “feel” for the game already in hand. They have advanced to a point where it is their technique that holds them back, and they want to know how they can improve their mechanics in order to hit more fairways, more greens, hit the ball longer and hit it closer to the hole with every club. A teacher trying to change an already accomplished player is going to use whatever means he or she can find to make sure that the suggestions he makes are based on facts and evidence and that he can get the player to clearly see and understand what is going on. I teach “feel” by being as hands-on as I can when I give a lesson. It is nice to have the numbers that a launch monitor gives, but that is just in addition to and does not take the place of seeing and feeling the movements of the body, arms and hands that produce those numbers. When I talk about “pivot compression” the whole idea is to feel the ground under your feet and use that to help you create the type of body movement that allows for a high level strike of the ball. I tell students all the time that there are only 3 areas of the body that touch anything during a golf swing (the feet touch the ground, the arms touch the body, and the hands touch the club) and that these areas are the places to concentrate on in order to develop awareness of what is happening in the one second period of time from takeaway to impact.
 
I find it highly annoying to hear people complain that teaching has become too “scientific” and that the “art” has been taken out of golf. If these people would stop and think for a second they might consider how the artist makes a living. They try to sell their art, and if no one buys it they either starve or figure out how to change what they are doing to make it more commercially viable. Professional artists who are successful tend to be disciplined workers who create a work environment and go about practicing and producing their art every day. Musicians write music and perform, and they continually practice to learn the songs and to generally get better at what they do. Both regularly seek out those who they think can help them be more successful. Golfers do the same things. They seek to improve, and they expect an instructor to use any method available in order to help. Trying to pretend that there is no science involved in hitting a golf ball is simply foolish, just as believing that sitting in a chair and spitting out numbers from a Trackman is all it takes to produce effective and lasting change in a golf swing.