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When my editor asked me to write an article that would be the “last of the season”, I began to wonder: “What if it were the last one, period?” What if this was the end and I had to say what I wanted to say now, because there would be no more chances? Well, luckily I’ll be around and kicking for a while, so that won’t be the case, but it does offer up an interesting approach, almost like a last will and testament. So instead of telling a story, or making one particular point, I thought I might dispense some random thoughts that I find important, or that have been important to me in what has been my career in golf up to this point.
If you think you are somehow going to make golf easier to play, think again. The only thing that makes golf easy is superior talent, and that is doled out in very small portions, mostly to those who don’t really deserve it and don’t appreciate it. A case in point is Hale Irwin, who has spent his career castigating teaching professionals for making the game too hard. Irwin has never changed his swing, and wouldn’t know the first thing about how to do it if he had to. Of course, it is easy to say “just get up and hit it”, and “stop thinking so much”, when that’s exactly what you do, get up and hit it without thinking, only for you the results are mostly good to great, and for everyone else, well, they probably aren’t. If you stand over the ball, think of nothing, swing, and hit terrible shots, how do you think you are ever going to get any better? You would have to be an idiot to think that you would suddenly improve for no reason. No, your only alternative is to think about what you are doing, and you are going to have to use those thoughts to some degree when you play. Your search for the right thoughts and the application of those thoughts to your play define your career in the game.
Equipment is important, and good equipment is certainly helpful, but technique is exponentially more so. The only way to truly buy a game is to pay someone who has a huge amount of knowledge to share it with you, and even then you have to hope that the person you are paying is a good enough teacher to get you to actually do what he is explaining to you.
When you want to incorporate a new idea into your game, always remember that the important thing is what comes out when you put the idea in. Most people are smart enough to understand even the most detailed swing theories. They can discuss their own swing, the swings of current and past tour pros, and the ideas of all the current hot teachers. Once the idea is put into action, what matters is what that particular idea causes to happen. For example, if you decide that you no longer want to move to the right when you swing the club back, then you start hitting balls with the new idea of keeping your head in place, you need to know whether or not you are actually doing what you are thinking about doing. In the vast majority of cases, if you have been doing it one way for a long while, you aren’t going to change it immediately. In order to actually effect a change, you must provide yourself with visual proof, and that means filming your swing and analyzing it to see if any change is actually occurring. It is not uncommon for other issues to emerge when new ideas are introduced, and to leave all this to the “eye” of an instructor is asking for trouble.
You can’t measure your progress unless you play under pressure. Every level of the game affords to opportunity to compete. Handicap events, best ball events, individual club events, local and national amateur events, professional events, they all make your heart rate go up, your breathing to change and quicken, your ability to focus and concentrate harder to manage, your response to bad breaks and poor play to become increasingly negative. Herein lays the true challenge of the game. It is inherently a competitive sport, and when you respond to the demands of the situation, be it a 3 footer for 5 bucks, or a 10 footer for $10,000, or a 7-iron to the green to win the U.S. Open, you always learn something about your progress with the game when you compete. In fact, while you always want to win, if you want to win the next time you’ll use your experience in this one to help you focus on what to work on for the next one.
The only way to play is to go through your routine, hit the first tee shot with the swing you’ve been practicing, then walk after it and do the same thing until the round is over. The more you can keep your thoughts confined to the shots you have to play the better off you are. That means not keeping a mental scoreboard in your head, not worrying about what you need to do to shoot a certain score, not describing your bad breaks to your friends in your head before the round is even finished, not thinking about how great it would be to par in to shoot your career round, not worrying about what the cut might be and how you would have to birdie the last three holes to maybe make it, not thinking about how you’re not getting anywhere with your game because you just missed another shot or another putt. “One shot at a time”, perhaps the most uttered cliché in golf, deserves to be repeated over and over (and it is), because it is the best advice anyone could ever give. Were it to be followed by the masses, golf psychologists would be out of business.
The golf swing is a ridiculously strenuous physical activity that continuously taxes the body in ways that few sports do. Bending, twisting, and rotating at high speed while keeping the feet in place is not something the human body was designed to do, although it is certainly capable of doing it. Any golfer who improves his or her strength and fitness has a great chance to carry that improvement over to their golf game. I work out 5 or 6 times a week, combining weight training (on my Bowflex machine) with aerobic exercise (elliptical or treadmill) for an hour and a half in the morning before work. Because of my back issues (multiple surgeries) I have had to work on my body consistently over the years, but it was not until I met my trainer and therapist Charlie McMillin and received the benefit of his training in Muscle Activation Therapy Technique was I able to push myself enough to get stronger without hurting myself. I can only encourage everyone to start some sort of program to get healthier, but I will caution you to start extremely slowly, learn the concept of micro-progression, and to recruit people who know what they are doing to help you progress without killing yourself.
Introduce your kids to the game. Start them with a lesson and see how they take to it. It seems that golf either grabs a kid or appeals to his or her deeper sensibilities, or it just doesn’t. My two girls don’t play: we gave them plenty of opportunities, but it never grabbed them, and golf is not a game that can be forced. That being said, if there is any interest, I would do my best to encourage it, because there is no endeavor in sports that teaches character like golf. All the attributes required to be a competent competitive golfer, including patience, persistence, honesty, and dedication, are transferable to the real world, where they will be of great value toward future success. Golf is a game of disappointment and frustration, and to succeed at it requires one to learn to overcome the feelings of inadequacy that learning it engenders. Most people never learn to deal with pressure: in golf, it is all on you, and the process of working through the mental gyrations that pressure heaps onto your brain is one of the best things I’ve ever seen for increasing a kid’s (or anyone’s) self-esteem and self-confidence.
When you play, play by the rules. Count all your strokes. Don’t “take” putts over a foot in length. Hit a provisional ball when you think yours might be lost. Learn how and when to take relief from obstructions and ground under repair. Mark your ball correctly and replace it accurately. If you are playing in a competition of any sort make sure that your playing partners are following the rules as well. That is called “protecting the field”, and it is a close cousin to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Teach the rules to your kids and demand that they play honestly as well. If they see you following the rules they will follow your example. Learning to abide by the honor code of golf may be the most important thing they ever get out of the game.
A round of golf is an emotional roller coaster. At the end of the round, when reflecting on what had just transpired, most of us will wonder why in the world we acted and reacted the way we did. It is difficult to retain a calm demeanor, and make rational decisions, when it seems as though we have relinquished control of our minds to the intense desire not to add one more shot to our round. Bad swings, bad bounces, bad lies, lipped out putts, they all happen right after you go through your routine and plan out how to hit a good shot, or make a putt. You have given your best effort, used a positive attitude, practiced and prepared to the best of your ability, and what do you get out of it? Another snap hook or dead right drive, fat iron shot, chunked pitch, pulled putt: more shots to pile on to your already ascending score. It’s almost too much to handle, and usually we don’t handle it all that well. It took me a long while, decades in fact, to realize that the best way to handle golf is to make every attempt to keep an even keel. When a student makes a breakthrough and sees sudden improvement, or shoots a career round, I try to temper their enthusiasm a bit, without being too curmudgeonly. I tell them “try not to get too excited when you do well, and try not to get too disappointed when you do poorly”. You don’t “have it” when you do well, and you haven’t “lost it” when you don’t. If you keep after it, enjoy the practice, compete with passion and intensity, you will get better over time. Don’t let the bumps bump you off the path. Look for new paths, and realize that you are bound to make some wrong turns. It may sound hokey, but a true love of the game will get you through any bad stretch and with a bit of hard work, perhaps a little help, and a good attitude, you will find yourself moving in the right direction.
The years roll by, in life and in your golfing life. Can you remember what you were working on 10 years ago? If you take a lesson, does the video show the same problem a different teacher showed you 5 years ago, or 2 years ago, or last month? Did you figure you had fixed that one? Or was it too painful to try so you “went back to your old swing” so you could get it around. Did you decide not to work on something different because you had a tournament coming up, and then never really got back to working on it? It is hard to commit to a change, and harder to try to put it into play, but if you do, you’ll have that much more experience with it and the chances of you being better in the long run go way up. The key is to think about how you are going to be playing in a year or two or five, not tomorrow. Golf is a “game of a lifetime”, and your search for better technique is no different. It’s the old fight between the desire for instant gratification and the difficulty of long term planning. Build your game, don’t band-aid it. Work toward changes that you know are correct and that if you own them it will make you better. As an instructor and a player I know I am committed to doing just that, and if it were the very last thing I ever told you I would be happy in knowing that I had given you sound advice.
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