Playing better golf in 2014: My mission statement.

Like most mission statements, this one may not be worth much. 

Still, here it is: 

From now until the end of the 2014 golf season I am going to practice solely on swinging with good tempo and staying in balance. Attendant with this effort is staying more in touch with the feelings that lead to both and also the feelings that tell me my tempo was off or I was out of balance at any given point in my swing.

Methodologies: Home practice

• Swinging my knock-off orange whip thingy in a good tempo and in balance. I've also borrowed a technique from Harvey Penick and started to take 10-15 orange whip thingy swings with my eyes closed. This feels quite odd at first but after a while feels pretty good and it really sensitizes me to how my swing feels and makes any loss of balance very obvious.
• Continuing on that theme I hit eyes-closed shots using wadded up sheets of paper as balls. I like swinging at these. I get a little sound and a slight suggestion of impact feel but no fear of breakage.

On the course:

• Take a meaningful practice swing. For me, that's a swing that is intended to feel like the swing I hope to take at the ball. I know; lots of luck. But still, that's the goal. It's an especially tough one for me since I've gone years without taking a practice swing. My regular golf buddy, The Playah, takes two and sometimes three. Over time I got fixated on how long it took him to get ready to hit a shot and started going the other way, all the way to no practice swing.
• After hitting a shot I'm going to grade the feel of the swing as well as the result. I've been doing this for the last few weeks and it's sobering. Even good shots don't feel like I think they should. But, last week I hit one driver and one three wood off the tee wherein the actual shot felt quite similar to my practice swing. Pretty neat but so far also pretty rare.

I'm not making any predictions about the state of my game at the end of the 2014 season. In the end, what does it matter if my handicap goes up (or down) two or three strokes? In the end, I've simply grown rather tired of the infinite, formalized notions of the golf swing and what it takes to improve. I still want to get better, I'm just going to try another path.