More Muscle, No Memory

In the previous post, I was reviewing some of my first year as I tried to build a good golf swing. Chief among many problems that I recognized, through videotaping myself and watching slow-motion clips of my swing on a computer, was my personal tendency to want to control everything using muscle control. Practically all the visual cues I saw told me that muscles made the swing.

I looked at the drawings of Hogan in Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf and saw his muscular arms and shoulders and legs. I looked at “Swing Vision” videos of Ernie Els on YouTube and saw the big shoulders and upper body strength of a great athlete. The same with Tiger Woods, the paragon of the muscular, athletic golfer who is in fantastic shape. Camilo Villegas is another one. Watching the pros and hearing about their yardage, I thought that physical strength was the only way they could hit like they do.

The trouble was that I wasn’t getting the results that I knew my expenditure of energy should give me. Even when I hit a driver a good distance (say, about 200 yards), I remember saying to my companions that “I’m working too hard.” A friend of mine, Clint, after watching me hit a short iron to a par three, told me, “You’ve got no whip.” I pretended that I hadn’t heard him. I was swinging as hard as I could. Wasn’t that enough whip? Apparently not. After months of hitting a driver as hard as I could and watching it go only about 180 was enough practical evidence. I knew that I was making this all much too difficult. That’s when I started trying to develop some “whip” in my swing.

I assumed that there must be some very subtle aspects of the swing—things the naked eye couldn’t detect, even in my slo-mo video clips— and that these subtleties must, therefore, take place in the area of the release, when the club is moving so fast, it’s just a blur. The solution must have something to do with an exquisite sense of timing, of letting the club go at the exact millisecond when the clubhead will behave as Hogan describes it.

THE CLUBHEAD IS SIMPLY TEARING THOUGH THE AIR AT AN INCREDIBLE SPEED AS IT DRIVES THROUGH THE BALL. ALL THIS HAPPENS SO QUICKLY, OF COURSE, THAT YOU CAN’T SEE IT TO APPRECIATE IT. BUT THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS.

I concluded that it must be the hands that provide the whip. After all, just before Hogan talks about all this clubhead speed, he mentions that the hands multiply all the power that is developing during the downswing. Then I’ve got to practice the release. By itself. In slow motion. That’s what I thought. I had to get control of the only part of the swing that is basically invisible. With this as my next goal, I began slow practice, trying to capture the ball with the clubhead, my left wrist curved and pointing to the target, the right wrist laid back the way a second basemen in baseball does when he flips to first. Just the way Hogan describes it.

Of course, what I failed to remember, or notice, were a few lines on the very next page of his book. These were also in all-caps, just like the lines about clubhead speed. In fact, the first time I read the book, I had used a green highlighter to underline part of this section and to write a large exclamation point in the margin to make sure I would always pay attention to this section.

THE MAIN THING FOR THE NOVICE OR THE AVERAGE GOLFER IS TO KEEP ANY CONSCIOUS HAND ACTION OUT OF HIS SWING. THE CORRECT SWING IS FOUNDED ON CHAIN ACTION, AND IF YOU USE THE HANDS WHEN YOU SHOULDN’T, YOU PREVENT THIS CHAIN ACTION.

Despite the fact that I had already read this, despite all the capital letters, despite the green hightlighting, I wouldn’t notice or re-read this crucial section for months. I thought I was on the right track and didn’t need Hogan’s book any more. I had discovered a secret of golf, and I had done it without anyone’s help. I flattered myself with my new understanding of the subtlety of the golf swing.

The prospect of a long period of breaking down my swing and of the pure drudgery of practice that I expected would be agonizingly slow to show any results—all this worked together to convince me that I was on the verge of a major break-through, an insight that would put me among the sacred brotherhood of those few, touring professionals mostly, to whom golf had revealed its most abstruse secrets. In spirit, I was the modern equivalent of the medieval flagellant, seeking penitence through scourging and self-abnegation.

Let me suffer for a while. In my next post, I'll talk mostly about YouTube golf videos.