Working On It

Ask any serious golfer how he or she is playing and you’re bound to hear, in some form or another, the same answer: “I’m working on it”. That one phrase sums up the essential nature of the game. Everyone is always “working on it”. The game demands it. The best player in the world can’t hit a fairway, and when he is asked about his struggles he constantly replies, “I’m working on it, it’s coming, and I feel like I’m moving in the right direction. I like what I’m working on.” The fact that everyone is “working on it” suggests that no one, not even the best of the best, “have it”: if they “had it”, they wouldn’t have to “work on it”.
 
If you watch golf on TV you can’t avoid advertisements for a plethora of items designed specifically to take the work out of working. It’s “swing magic”, or a “perfect club”, or an “inside approach”, or 3 DVD’s that show you the “secret”, which is, of course, “simple”, but nevertheless requires 3 hours to explain. It’s just not sexy, or saleable, to call golf difficult and complicated, no matter how few people are any good at it, or how long it takes to improve any part of the game. People don’t want to hear that the best players all spend large amounts of time struggling: they want to believe that even at their mediocre level they have a chance to “hit the ball as straight as they can point”, without, of course, having to “work on it”, because all of the other evil, misguided instructors have purposely been misleading their students and keeping from them the real “secret” to the swing, as discovered magically by the guy yapping on the television who happens to have no record of ever having played decently in a competitive event.
 
It doesn’t take long to discover that none of these so-called cures for all your golfing ailments actually works. I want to revisit all the “testimonials” for infomercial items a year later. Let’s find out just how many of them have kept the strokes off their games, and indeed, how many are still using their magical tool? But those who put together the infomercials know that no one will ever check up on their actual success or failure. It’s all about selling now, and what sells is the promise, no matter how outrageous, of instant improvement without work. And after the gizmo, or the video, fails to provide true, lasting change for the better? Well, then, it’s back to work.
 
Let’s face it: we really don’t want to admit that the game is as hard as it is. Certainly those in the business, who rely on greater numbers of golfers to buy what they have to sell or play the courses that have been built, don’t want anyone to know how tough it is to play even a passable game. How do you “grow the game” when no one can seem to get better at it without a lot of hard work? And what about all the people who work hard and still can’t get any better? Many are victims of their own stubbornness, relying on books, magazines, television, and advice from other poor players in their search for a decent game.
 
Others do what should be the right thing, and sign up for lessons from a golf- professional. Unfortunately, being a golf-professional does not require even a modicum of instructional expertise. Anyone can be a professional: if you play for money or accept any sort of monetary prize for playing you are deemed to have forfeited your amateur status and are thus a professional. If you accept payment for instruction you are deemed a professional. There are outfits who advertise an educational course that purports to teach anyone to be an income producing golf instructor, in a week. That’s right, for $1500 and a week of your time you can leave with a card declaring you an “accredited” golf instructor. Do I have to spend any time on the ludicrous nature of this claim? Good, I thought not. I have been playing competitively for many years, and have been teaching for many years. I still study every aspect of the game, and do not begin to think I have a complete handle on any of it, although based on the success of some of my students I seem to at least know a little about what I am doing.
 
Beyond the obviously incompetent in the instruction business are the true PGA professionals who are no better, either through laziness or lack of interest. I have encouraged all who try to teach to play competitively and work on their own games, and I will always maintain that the combination of teaching and playing skills make for the most complete instructor. There are many good players, however, who find themselves unable to earn a living playing and opt for teaching instead, only to completely ignore any and all of the study and work needed to acquire basic knowledge of swing mechanics and methods of imparting the information. In other words, they can play but they can’t teach. On the other side of the spectrum are the teachers who have never played, and have acquired all their knowledge of teaching methods and swing mechanics from someone else. This lack of original thought leaves students at the mercy of the last thing the instructor saw or heard, and there is a great chance that nothing the instructor says will have any relevance to what the student is actually doing with his swing.
Nevertheless, we all soldier on, always working on something we think, or hope, will help us play better, whether we get the idea in a moment of enlightenment, read it in a magazine, see it on the Golf Channel, or pay a teacher to share it with us. I am right there with you all, struggling to find a swing, a putting stroke, a wedge game, that will enable me to shoot low scores when it counts the most.
 
If you have read my columns in the past you have probably noticed that I tend to avoid delving too deeply into swing mechanics, preferring to concentrate on the conceptual nature of learning the game rather than the specifics. The things that I teach are preferences among the vast array of variations that have been used successfully to play great golf. I have told numerous students that one could catalog every conceivable swing flaw that would seemingly ruin the attempt to hit the ball, and then find a great champion who employed that very same flaw with no apparent harm to his or her success. The key ingredient among players who incorporate idiosyncratic methods is talent. The talent factor is, to put it simply, huge, probably overriding every other factor that adds to players’ chances for success. I see talent in golf as the ability to pick up the instrument, in this case the club of choice, and immediately discern just how it can be wielded to produce results. For most, golf is counter-intuitive: hit down to make the ball go up, swing in an arc to make it go straight. For others, however, once the club is held and swung it becomes instantly apparent how the ball needs to be struck to make it go where it’s aimed, and thus follows the swing motion that makes that happen. It’s a freak thing, not a result of any study or hard work and dedication. It’s just luck, pure and simple. Very few who don’t start in this fashion and who don’t possess at least some of this “knack” for the game will ever achieve meaningful victories. It is this talent that may produce textbook swings that follow all the rules of geometry and physics, but it is also the same talent that allows a compensated, error-filled swing to balance all the wrongs and produce a wonderful “right”. And when such a method holds up under pressure and wins, it proves itself to be an acceptable variation, a combination of movements and positions that have succeeded, it becomes something worth studying to see how it works. It may not be anything anyone would want to copy, but elements of it may help someone understand how they might deal with their own particular tendencies.
 
In order to be a better teacher I look at every swing I can get film of, then scan them for similarities and differences, noting in particular the items I have found to be common among the best players. I then test these observations out myself in practice and in competition, hoping to improve my own method and thus understand more completely the process of changing and improving. I am interested in keeping the swing as efficient as possible, and thus I gravitate towards swings that work back and through without pronounced path shifts or excessive body movements. I would like to think that the swing I am still trying to build could be a model for my students to copy, but then again if I ever succeeded in that endeavor I would probably play too well to continue teaching. In any case, I thought it might be interesting to get a bit more specific about what it is that I work on, in hopes that sharing my own process with you might help you in your own search.
 
Bill Cosby once began a monologue with the immortal words “I started out as a child”. Every golfer starts out as a beginner, a “tabula rasa” (clean slate) who, when first introduced to the club and ball, begins to formulate a plan to attack the problem of how to hit the ball. With the very first attempt at a swing, tendencies are apparent. For the select, lucky few who have a true “knack” for the game, (some would call them “naturals”), the initial attempts not only meet with some success, the technique that emerges is very close to what would be termed ideal, and for no particular reason. Others will struggle all their lives to come close to what the natural does without conscious thought. Those “others”, who happen to be the vast majority of all golfers, solve the problem in an infinite variety of ways, all at some point in the motion leaving the rules behind, forcing compensations that make their technique necessarily erratic and thus highly frustrating.
 
At 10 years old there wasn’t much to indicate that I was a “natural”. I began by hitting plastic wiffle balls in the back yard with my dad, and was able at least to hit the real ball by the time I made it out onto the course. My first tournament was at age 12, when I shot 92 in my first event, and didn’t really find that I was particularly good at it until winning a few junior events at age 13. I don’t remember much about my swing at that age, but I do know that my main thought was to turn my left shoulder under my chin, as instructed to do so by my father, who at his best was an 8 handicap. I played far more than I practiced, and whatever success I achieved was due entirely to my knack for playing the game and scoring. Somehow I managed to compile an excellent junior record, dominating the local D.C. junior tour (run by the great Frank Emmet) and finished my 17th year by winning 3 matches at the U.S. Amateur in Richmond.
 
I was good, but I was also erratic, as proven by my record of winning multiple junior events every other year. My good years were excellent, my bad years were horrendous, but I never quit, at least not until after my last year of college, when I went from 1st Team NCAA All-American in 1979 to not even qualifying for the NCAA championship in 1980 (you want to talk about Ian Baker-Finch? I’ve been there). I didn’t understand my swing, and I certainly didn’t get how I could be so good, then so bad, in such a short period of time (I don’t think I saw a moving picture of my swing until 1980 when I borrowed a video recorder from my girlfriend’s father). I couldn’t stay away from the game, however, and less than a year later I would qualify for my first and only U.S. Open. I turned pro not long after, moved to Florida to play the Space Coast mini-tour, and my long journey into the technique of the swing had begun.
 
As I mentioned, I got hold of a video system, (you had to carry around the deck along with the camera- it was heavy.) and began to study my swing. I still have those old tapes, and I can hardly bear to watch them. I cringe when I see how misguided I was, and it is painfully obvious that my swing contributed to my upcoming lower back problems. The great players of the day had large amounts of knee drive and tended to stay behind the ball until the end of the swing, producing what was glowingly referred to as the “reverse ‘c’ finish”. The purveyors of this travesty should all be whipped in front of a studio audience on the Golf Channel, or at least be forced to apologize for their blatant lack of common sense. What did I know? I figured that if Nicklaus, Watson, and Miller looked like that, and Toski was advocating it, why shouldn’t I be imitating it? Who knows, maybe those guys had spines that could stand up to the constant grinding that such a swing pattern produced, but I didn’t. I continued to drive my knees to the target and stay behind the ball forever until my back blew up and I had to have surgery.
 
By this time (1983) I had spent 2 years struggling to make a living and now had to contend with a damaged back. It was time, I decided, to change my swing to make it more spine-friendly. I had read Hogan’s 5 Lessons in college, and although I had never tried to swing that way I was familiar with the gist of his information. I got a hold of a tape of Hogan hitting balls, and what struck me was the result of his flatter swing and more rotary action: just what I needed, a flat-backed finish that resulted from the right side driving through the shot, more of a covering or trapping action than the hang back and hit from underneath action I had been employing. The changes kicked in and worked out well. I won a Space Coast tournament in 1985 and made it to the Q-School finals, where my back gave out again under the strain of too much practice.
 
I had other problems besides my finish. I always had a tendency to take the club away too far to the inside, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to beat the problem. After the club started low and around me my hands would get too deep in the backswing, my hips over turning with my left knee kicking in and my left heel lifting off the ground, the end result being an across the line shaft position at the top with my right shoulder over turned and my right arm behind me. I now had to uncross the club and get the shaft back on plane, but with my body over twisted I could never get open enough coming down. I was “stuck”, way before Tiger ever knew what the term meant, and I just couldn’t hit the ball well enough to shoot low. To make matters worse, my back was getting to the point where putting pressure on my right leg in the back swing made it hurt, so I physically avoided what I needed to do to correct my swing.
 
As crazy as it may seem, I am still working on remedies for the same problems to this day. At times in my career I have hit the ball quite nicely, and have some decent wins to show for my constant struggle to have a good swing. Unfortunately, the good play never lasted for long, and I have had to constantly work to understand more fully how my swing works and why I am prone to prolonged periods of poor ball-striking, and come up with ways to think about and execute the movements more correctly and efficiently. The fact is that for most golfers the patterns and tendencies that emerge early in their games hang around stubbornly forever and changing or getting rid of them requires constant work and attention. Most of us strive to find the one thought that will “fix” our swings, and as a result we jump around from thought to thought, theory to theory, never spending enough time focusing on the patterns that make up what we do when we don’t think about what we are doing.
 
Physical limitations have a lot to do with the way we swing the club. I have compensated for my back for many years, and each time I prepare for a competition I have to deal with some degree of pain, and more or less ability to move the way I would ideally like to move. We “work on it” for only a couple of reasons, either to build a swing so that we can play well in the future, or to prepare to play in competition, where we need to play as best as we can at a certain time. I love to compete, and I have to measure my desire to build an uncompensated swing with my desire to play well when I tee it up in an important event. To be truthful, every event I play in is important to me, a fact that could be backed up by speaking with anyone who has played with me in a tournament. I am quite intense, a lot of which has to do with my having to fight my body and my unruly swing at every turn. But I continue to search for the answers that will allow me to make the game easier, (not easy, just easier), as does every fellow golfer who is trying to raise the level of his or her game. As my body feels better able to move the way I want it to I feel as though my learning curve is accelerating, and that the swing that I have always pictured but has eluded me is now closer than ever to being a reality.
 
Of course, that is what you will hear from every player who is in the process of “working on it”, which means just about every player who plays. Golfers are relentlessly optimistic, and each practice session ends with the feeling that we have just gotten closer to our goal of achieving a swing that will work without our having to think about it. The problem is that we all have to go home and go to sleep, and by the time we wake up and get after it again it’s a new day. Will we remember what we were doing yesterday? Will our bodies feel the same? Can we trust our games to not to disappear? Ask Ian Baker-Finch, Sandy Lyle, Chip Beck, Corey Pavin, and anyone else who has been good and has watched his game disappear either slowly or suddenly. The answer is simple: keep working on it. If you love the game, you have to love the work.

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