Muscle Memory

The previous post concluded promising to confront the question, "Can a control freak learn a good golf swing?" The "control freak" I had in mind is me, and at first, I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to swing a golf club correctly. My pro, Mark, repeatedly showed me how fluid and graceful and almost effortless a good swing should be, but that concept was very difficult for me to understand and absorb.

My brain and body acted in concert, telling me that I had to use muscles to swing the club along the correct path and that only muscles could generate real clubhead speed at impact. Hitting a hundred or so balls at the range would leave me sweating and my arms feeling as tired as if I had just sparred three rounds with a young boxer. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t hit a driver more than about 180 yards, my yardage with other clubs correspondingly anemic. Whenever I heard other players start talking about their clubhead speed, I would estimate that “My clubhead speed would be legal in a school zone.”

Muscles aren’t good listeners, however. They want to continue to show you what you have taught them to do for you. They are extremely reluctant to forget what they’ve been taught, and when you try to teach them something that must appear to be the exact opposite of what they already spent so much time and effort mastering, in their inimitable, non-verbal way, they protest, “Are you kidding? You can’t be serious!” I distinctly remember wondering if I was, indeed, capable of relaxing my upper body. Reluctance to let go—that was a big problem for me. And I knew it. In search of a cure, I remembered an easy-swinging PGA great whom I had seen play. Julius Boros. And I found his book, Swing Easy, Hit Hard. I got it and read it. It didn't make a big impression. I thought the ideas were pretty boilerplate. The secret I was looking for wasn't there. Or, more accurately, I wasn't able to see it. Not yet, anyway.

For months, I continued to play early morning back nines and hit practice balls in my backyard and go to the range, and my swing did get better. Slowly. Very slowly. Methodically, I practiced my way through the rest of Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. Early on, as soon as I started taking my lessons with Mark, I regularly videotaped myself, sometimes as often as every day. Usually, I would capture the video on a computer and use some editing software to make slow motion sequences so that I could see exactly what I was doing. It was hard to watch.

Lifting my left heel, turning my hips too much and straightening my right leg on the backswing, the reverse pivot, head moving, left arm bent—in short, all the mistakes that a beginner could possible make were all there in my swing. No surprises there. And I wasn’t discouraged by any of this. I would isolate one thing at a time and work on that until I started to see improvement. After months of this, I started to realize that the list of individual components of a good swing is quite extensive and that I might be practicing like this for years before I started to get the results I wanted.

After all, when Hogan, the player I wanted to emulate, turned pro in 1929, he hardly made any money. As he said to Ken Venturi in a 1983 interview on CBS,

I was always last if I got in the money at all. As I said, I was a terrible player.

It took Hogan another ten years to develop the game that made him famous, becoming the Tour’s leading money winner for the first time in 1940. And even then, he didn’t really discover the inspiration for his championship game for almost another decade. With three years off the Tour while he served in WWII, it wasn’t until 1948 that he won the U.S. Open.

Hogan’s example, of course, cast serious doubt on the likelihood that I would live long enough to see myself with a good golf swing, and I still hadn’t convinced myself that a “control freak” could break bad habits. In the next post, I'll describe how I continued to believe that a good swing is the result of a conscious application of muscles, but that subtle timing is required as well.