I started playing when I was just a little kid but quit when I was 15. The game was simply too much for me. At the time, it had proved impossible for me to apply any of the swing elements I had developed playing baseball. As much as I wanted to play, I knew I couldn't.
When I was about 40, I started to think about playing again. I was lucky enough to find Harvey Penick's Little Red Book. Even though I haven't looked at my copy in years, it was the perfect book for someone looking to correct some very stubborn misunderstandings about the golf swing.
Clip the tee.
Aim at second base and hit the ball over the shortstop's head.
See three knuckles on the left hand.
And the biggie; take dead aim.
These seemingly simple ideas penned by Harvey Penick got me playing golf, really, for the first time in my life. Earlier this year I started taking lessons again and it's gotten me to reflect on all the lessons I've taken and the pros who taught me.
My first lesson was a putting lesson from a driving range pro at El Cariso in Sylmar. Serious guy, no BS. He managed to square away a simple address and setup problem that was holding me back. The thrust of the lesson took about 3 minutes to impart but the benefit of that lesson still helps my putting today. Then, I went to see a local guro at Little V who was a very big staunch proponent of TGM. Interesting guy, great swing, but not really all that able to create a path forward. He talked a lot (and so did I) but the talk didn't really seem to go anywhere. It pointed out, in the end, the limits of metaphor when it comes to learning more about the golf swing. Sometimes information needs to be literal to be readily applied to golf even though I've never met a logically consistent metaphor I didn't enjoy.
A couple years later I took a lesson from a high school buddy of mine who had become a teaching pro at Robinson Ranch, which was about 10 minutes from where I lived at the time. It was a lesson in the sense that I handed him $80 when it was over, but it was really just a chance for us to reminisce. He did have some helpful things to say about my swing like, "Gawd, you are so lucky you're a halfway decent athlete otherwise there would be no way you could ever hit the ball. Geez!"
Thanks, Larry!
Sometime later, I got divorced and totally by coincidence my game went to shit. And I mean really to shit, as in ready to quit shitty. Out of desperation, I went to see another driving range pro at Westlake. He was the nicest guy on earth. But my problems kinda had him flummoxed. He liked to say, "Well, you hit that one pretty good. What's not to like?" We spent more of my lesson time chatting about golf than hitting balls. It was almost worth it for the good conversation and the warm vibe.
Later that year, I took a trip to Palm Springs and figured it couldn't hurt to take a lesson from a local guru so I asked around and found a well-regarded pro at Tahquitz Resort. Great guy. He had been a caddie on the LPGA tour, had lots of juicy stories, and had me figured out right away. My posture and stance had gotten sloppy and he was a stickler for posture and stance. Also, I had been unknowingly moving further and further away from the ball. He actually got out a measuring tape and said, "15.25 inches! Don't get any closer to the ball than this."
So, I did what he said and my game started to improve.
Still, I felt the need for a big push so I began to toy with the idea of going to see someone with big-time street cred. He was one of those Top 100 guys from one of the national golf magazines. At $125 a lesson I was forced to establish my first golf fund to finance the lessons. It was worth it. I could tell he had the gift of being able to see relationships in my swing almost as if they occurred in slow motion. I walked out of my lesson knowing what I doing and what I had to do differently to get better. I went back to see him two or three times but the drive and the cost made it difficult. Plus, I was really playing pretty well.
Fast forward to now.
The most important goal is to create a productive kind of practice, something I've never been able to do before. I've always relied on playing to get better and it's held me back. This dovetails with my goal of minimizing the decline my game suffers in the fall and winter while reducing the amount of relearning I have to do to get back into my game in the spring. I also wanted to make my misses smaller.
Hitting the ball further was never a goal; hitting it better and more solidly was. For some reason it had always been hard for me to keep going to the pros I have worked with. This made it all too easy to slip back into what was comfortable in my swing and so minimize my progress. I didn't want to repeat this error (again) so I decided to check out a guy who came highly recommended by a guy I played golf with at my club.
He teaches at one of the oldest and most humble golf courses in the valley. He's a valley guy, born and raised, like me, and is right around my age. I made an appointment for a lesson really not knowing what to expect. To cut to the chase, I was really lucky to find this guy. The first issue he nailed was my tendency to set up closed to my target line. This led me to slide forward in my move toward the ball and to bring the club into the ball from too far inside. I could hit a lot of good shots that way but a low & left miss was distressingly common from 125 yards and in. He is also working with me to minimize my shoulder turn on pitches and short approach shots, encouraging an accelerating arm swing. When he first said this I realized how many bits of good of advice like be sure to make a full shoulder turn, can become excessive or just not be applicable to a given kind of swing or shot.
I've been going to him every week for the last month or so and I am really pleased with my progress. After my lesson last night I realized that seeing him consistently has helped my pro, too. It gives him a chance to learn not just what I'm do but also my swing patterns.
Let's say the bad result is Z and the initial cause is identified as Y. But, over the course of a few lessons he has had the chance to recognize a preceding cause I'll call X which acts as a kind of trigger to the problem. So, this allows me to finally become more sensitized to essential causes of the things that go wrong with my swing.
Now that I trust my guy, it's been important that I give him the keys to my game. I want him to identify issues and decide how to address them. Then it's up to me to practice effectively and play as well as my ability allows. I can be very hard on myself when it comes to golf. And, I am finally learning what a waste of energy that is.
Free will makes me totally free to grind on myself about how I should have done this years ago, or about how much strength and flexibility I've lost (and will continue to lose) but to what purpose? I am an optimist when I work with others, but an overly hard-edged realist when it comes to me. It feels sensible and logical but it has surely held me back and I'm working hard to be done with it.
For me, that last part may be the most important change of all.
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