Looking back on golf lessons & working toward the future

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.

Claremont's only golf course closes: An open letter to Joe Lyons, Mayor of Claremont, California

Dear Mayor Lyons

I read this in a local online newspaper:

"This city’s only golf course, a nine-hole facility at 1550 N. Indian Hill Blvd. that opened in March 1959, is scheduled to close Dec. 2."

As a member of Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, I am a frequent visitor to Claremont. As you know, the golf course shared a fence with the garden. Members of my family have lived in and around Claremont since the early 1940s. In all those years, I believe the town has had but one public golf course and now it's closed.

The clubhouse in happier times

I can recall playing that little 9 hole course with my father back in the 1970s when we were in town visiting my aunt. But, I do not write merely to ask you to reminisce with me. I write so you might be emboldened to look ahead. The loss of that little golf course may not seem like a big one today, but I can assure you that it will become a great loss in the future. A modest golf course like that can bring a community and, indeed, generations together in a way nothing else can. Worse, the effects of its loss will grow over time as Claremont residents are forced to leave their city to enjoy such a basic form of recreation.

I understand the operators of the course had failed to make their payments to the CUC. If the city has the vision, it will take the course on as a part of its recreation department. CUC has indicated they have no immediate use for the land, so now is the perfect time for the city to step in for the sake of its citizens to ensure the ongoing resource only a small, community golf course like this one can offer.

At this point, the city has lost the jobs the course provided and the citizens have lost their place to play and their place to come together. How will the senior citizens of Claremont manage to enjoy golf now? How far will they have to drive and how much will they have to pay? The same question now applies to your middle and high school students. The loss of the course is a loss to everyone in your city not just today but on into the future.

In closing, please ask yourself and your city council what you can do to bring your city's only golf course back to your citizens.

I think they deserve it.

Best regards,

Paul Cervantes

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. 

Monte Scheinblum's Impact Handle

I have great respect for product development and even more respect for inventions, whether they're golf-related or not. 

Golf-related inventions have two instantaneous effects on me. 

First, they turn on the skeptical part of my brain. 

Second, they make me irrationally hopeful that some device could actually help me to suck less at golf. 

As my rocket-scientist friend used to say, "Not bloody likely!"

Monte Scheinblum has really great web cred and his videos are some of the best I've seen. Beyond that, he endows his teachings with a very genuine style or pitch, as I like to say. Teachers, of golf or whatever, are also salesmen so I am prone to relate to the style and quality of their presentation as their pitch.

Monte: Teeing it high & preparing to let it fly!

Anyway, Monte Scheinblum's pitch is refreshingly free of that tiresome preachiness that's become so common in golf instructional videos on the internet. Monte's is truly a no nonsense kind of guy, as evidenced by his shorts.

Comes now the inventor and his product, The Impact Handle. I have to admit it; the first time I saw this I was a little dismayed. It looked too simple, possibly bordering on simplistic. But, the more I thought about it, and watched the videos on the kickstarter website, the more I started to think Monte was really on to something special.

Proper impact position is the latest term of art for the kind of swing wherein the club head is delivered into the ball with the hand leading and the rotated well beyond their position at address. Instead of achieving this position, most players flip, arm swing and body stall their way to lousy ball striking. I can't tell you (yet) if the Impact Handle really works. I can tell you that it has my attention. You can also check out Monte's blog if you haven't already.

Best of luck, Monte!

The unusual athleticism of the head drop in the golf swing

I can't remember which golf forum I was reading wherein a high-mileage member was looking for a swing that would be easier on his back.

Some well-intentioned poster advised him to watch some Moe Norman videos.

That struck me as funny since I recalled that Norman had a pretty significant head drop at impact. This move has always struck me as one of the least discussed hallmarks of a certain kind of atypical athleticism. Looking at Norman and Trevino I can only imagine how hard the drop was on their backs. I know it hurts mine just mimicking this kind of drop working on my swing in the mirror. People talk about flipping and casting; try to flip or cast from a posture anywhere close to what Norman and Trevino achieved. Impossible. It's the opposite of the coming out of it move that most high handicap players have perfected.

I recall when Hank Haney was working with Charles Barkley that Haney missed this completely. A head drop like Norman's (maybe six inches) is tough, Trevino's had to be closer to a foot and I recall Barkley's was even more than that (as well as a part of a wildly ugly, almost tragic swing). My approach with Barkley would have be to have him start his swing at the top of his backswing. Then, his job would have been to swing down toward impact while keeping his head at position he had set at address. It was the transition that destroyed Barkley's,

Anyway, the dynamics of the good player head drop are interesting to me.

Why is good tempo in golf so elusive?

Over the years, I've worked on and been frustrated by pretty much every part of my game. Still, more often than not it's my full swing shots that get out of whack. A natural analytic, I tend to consider active issues like path and plane and then more passive issues like stance and alignment.

It's natural for me to think about the angle of the club face at impact when the ball goes on a line I never intended. But, there have only been a very few times when my full swing woes were provably attributable to issues like these.

Almost always, the root cause has been poor tempo.

There have been times when I got too slow going back and there have been times when I was too fast at the transition but tempo (and lack of it) always end up being the source of my problem and also of its solution.

The longer my tempo stays bad the harder it becomes for me to recognize it's has gone bad. The new bad tempo starts to feel correct, at least in some perverse, only-in-golf, way.

Years ago, my internal timing really left me leading to immense frustration. At some point I stumbled onto the creation of a very effective tempo aid. I took a 6 foot length of 1 inch PVC and fill each end with the equivalent of about a foot and a half of number 9 lead shot. I was still shooting a lot of skeet in those days.

Anyway, I'd lay the PVC across my shoulders, behind my head. Then, I'd take my full swing stance and I'd work on my back swing and down swing tempo. The mass of the lead and the flex of the PVC made me very much aware of the need for gradual deceleration at the end of the back swing and gradual acceleration at the start of the down swing. I could turn quickly (and fully), but not abruptly. The mass from the lead also made it easy to rotate fully and well beyond the ball. It was immensely helpful and cost about $10. One day I ran out of 20 GA and I loaded the shot into some shells for a league shoot.

So, that's one thing that worked.

Here are some that haven't:

The Whippy: I always wanted to love these clubs. Cool guy. I always felt that as more of a hitter than a swinger, the Whippy was basically making fun of my natural swing. I got OK with it after a while but I always found the transition back to my regular clubs simply felt too weird.

Metronomes: What a great idea, but not for me. There are lots of free metronome apps for the iPhone but I have never been able to correlate the mechanical regularity of the beats to the human tempo of my  movements. A golf swing has pace, timing and tempo but it doesn't really have rhythm (though good players obviously do) that can be readily associated with the external and continual beats of a metronome.

Counting, or Fre-ddie Cou-ples, a la Johnny Miller: I've known guys who count back (1 and 2) and make impact 3 and finish 4. It makes sense, and I've been known  to do it between holes or when I warm up. It's totally harmless (I think) and maybe helpful for some but it's never gotten me out of a tempo tailspin.

In the end, my best ally against poor tempo has been my own sensitivity. I literally feel for it. I find that I can zoom in on a certain part of my body (my shoulders, usually) and feel the point at which they start to move at a speed that doesn't fit with the swing I'm trying to make. My goal is always to equalize the pace and feel of my back swing (and turn) with my move into the ball. This has proven far more effective for me than to feel as if I am swinging slowly or easily, etc. I need to feel my hitting impulse I just need to have it happen at a pace I can handle.

Filling the gaps: Determine the clubs you should buy to make your set work.

Loft is simple, unless you refuse to pay attention to it.

My friend, Jay has refused so far.

He has little to no idea of what loft means to ball flight and distance. Of course, one also has to factor in length to make a loft equation work. Let's look at a couple loft and length tables.

First, here are the specs for the classic Ping Eye 2 irons.

These are the irons Jay used to play:

We can see that the Ping Eye 2 5 iron had 28.5 degrees of loft and was 37.75 inches long.

Here are the specs from Jay's new irons, the Ping G20:

The G20's 5 iron is two degrees stronger than the Eye 2 5 iron. Even at the same length this makes the G20's 5 iron close to the loft of the Eye 2's 4 iron.

Now look at the 9 iron lofts. There's a full 5 degrees of difference. That means the G20s are over one club stronger than the Eye 2s in the short irons.

That, my friends, is a big difference.

Stronger lofts at a given length mean generally longer ball flight. Yes, I am purposefully ignoring issues such as the club's center of gravity and shaft flex (for now).

So, it should come as no surprise to Jay that his new 7 iron flies further than his old 7 iron given its 4 degree stronger loft.

Let's look a bit closer at Jay's set:

Jay plays a 10.5 degree driver that is 45.5 inches in length yet his longest iron (his 4 iron) has a loft of 23 degrees and is 38.25 inches long.

It's pretty clear he'll need some clubs to fill in that length, loft and distance gap.

Happily, it's a simple problem to solve now that we have our length and loft tables.

As a brief aside, for the last 20 years stronger lofts and longer lengths have been the fashion. The explanation for this is easy; people like to believe their new clubs result in longer shots than their old clubs and club makers are happy to help facilitate the illusion.

Stronger lofts create a problem, though, that's different (and I would say more difficult to solve) than weaker lofts. In a weak loft set (like the Eye 2), the player can go directly from his 50 degree pitching wedge to a sand wedge.

But, in a stronger lofted set the player will be forced to learn to play and use a gap wedge which will fill a gap between his strong-lofted pitching wedge and his sand wedge that shouldn't be there in the first place.

We can forget about all that for now...

Jay still needs to address the gap between his 4 iron and his driver.

The first step is to find a club that will take care of the range a 3 iron would cover. We can see the 3 iron loft would have 20 degrees of loft. A much easier club to hit would be a 3 hybrid which will have a loft of 20 degrees and be just a touch longer than a standard 3 iron. Those of you who are paying attention have noticed a classic gap between clubs of around 3 or 4 degrees...

In the old days, a set would either have a 2 iron or a 5 wood. Most modern sets have neither but we still have a length, loft and distance gap to fill. The next club could be either be a 17 degree fairway wood (likely a 4 wood) or a 17 degree hybrid. A strong player might choose a longer, 17 degree hybrid (which would create the lower ball flight of a traditional long iron. But, Jay's not a very strong player. He needs clubs that are easy to hit and get the ball into the air.

A 20 degree hybrid and a 17 degree 4 wood fill the gap between his 4 iron and driver just fine.

His basic set should consist of 9 irons (sand, gap wedge, pitching wedge, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 and 4 irons), a 20 degree hybrid, a 17 degree 4 wood and his driver. When he adds in his putter he's at 13 clubs.  Many players have a specialty club they add for specific conditions or courses. Some add a lob wedge, a chipper, a low bounce wedge or maybe even a two wood or a strong 3 wood, on any given day, thereby maxing out their bag at the USGA limit of 14 clubs.

Here's something that doesn't matter at all, but lots of people (Jay?) think it does:

People are prone to get all worked up over how far they hit their irons.

They'll say things like, "I used to hit my 7 iron 150 and now I hit it 130."

They say this as if it matters but it doesn't.

The distance a player hits a club is a function of club head speed, the path of the club and the angle of the club head as it strikes the ball. Each one of those are variables for any player, and are wide variables for the recreational player.

Don't get worked up over losing distance which really hasn't been lost. Try to focus on striking the ball squarely and play the distance you get. Then, figure 10 yards distance between each club and get out there and post a score.

See, Jay?

It's simple.