More YouTube and a Couple of Books

YouTube videos, especially the “Swing Vision” ones, are extremely helpful, and I continue to go back to them. Very early in my attempt to develop a good golf swing, I made video a central part of my plan. Pictures don’t lie. But golfers do. To themselves. I can’t tell you how many times I set out to learn a facet of the swing—from something I had read or a video I had watched— and practiced and practiced faithfully until I was sure that I had learned it, only to discover, much later in most cases, that I was completely mistaken. I thought I had been doing what I set out to learn, but in fact, I had been doing something else. As I said to a pro, who came along later in my development, “You think you’re doing it, but you’re not.”

After all this time spent practicing and learning, I’m still in awe of the elusive nature of the golf swing. You think you’re learning it, but you’re not. Or you’re learning only a tiny part of its intricacies. I remember my first pro, Mark, who told me about the swing, “You have to feel it.” At the time, I didn’t say anything to him, but I thought to myself, then and for a long time afterward, “What a ridiculous thing to say!” Surely, I thought, it has to be more concrete than that. “Why is it so hard to describe what happens during the swing?” I wondered. More than a year later, I understood what Mark meant. But long before that, I realized that I was going to have to teach myself a swing.

After my package of lessons with Mark, I went into a period where I just practiced and played. Then I went to see another pro, one who actually had played on the Tour when Hogan was playing. The trouble with this pro was that he was beyond retirement. He had lost all patience and wasn’t a good teacher to begin with. However, that really didn’t matter to me. I was such a beginner that I could pick up something useful from just about anyone.

During this time, I bought two books. The more influential one was Swing like a Pro by Dr. Ralph Mann and Fred Griffin. I liked it especially because of the mechanical and scientific nature of the model. I was hooked when I read,

Golf is a very difficult game.

And yet, when [you watch] a great pro swing[,] the motion seems so smooth, so fluid, so natural. It looks simple. But as the millions of amateur golfers who strive to develop a proficient swing can attest, it is more difficult that it looks.

The golf swing is not simple. It is enormously complex, perhaps the most challenging sport we humans do for recreation. Errors of a small fraction of an inch or a minute change of angle lead to large differences in the direction and trajectory of the shot, and where the ball comes to rest.

In what they call “The Biomechanics Approach,” Mann and Griffin filmed “over one hundred PGA, LPGA, and Senior PGA Tour players” and identified “the best characteristics of the entire group.” Then, “to demonstrate the model swing, [they used] the 3-D performer, which [they] have termed ‘the Pro.’ He has the best characteristics of all of the tour players.” Pictures of the Pro fill the book and illustrate every teaching point. Photographs add a “human element.” Griffin demonstrates each drill, while another instructor mimics common swing errors. Some of the diagrams of clubhead and hand paths were difficult to grasp, but in general, for visual learners, like me, this book is indispensable. Below, "The Pro."

When I ordered Swing like a Pro from Amazon, I got a second book as a bonus. Right up to the present, Tour Tempo has been of limited use because I'm just not ready for this yet. Once I get a good swing, then I can start thinking about tempo. Nonetheless, when I first looked into it, I couldn't resist conducting a little experiment. I wanted to see how my swing tempo compared with the tempos on the included CD, which includes a calibrated soundtrack. It didn’t take me long to videotape myself, capture the video in some computer software, see what the tempo of my swing was, and compare it to Hogan’s tempo. Virtually the same! Can you imagine how gratifying that was? Of course, you can! I remember telling my wife I had the same tempo as Hogan. Knowing he's dead, she was unimpressed.

What Tour Tempo has to teach me is way beyond what I can handle. It's like the "transition" at the top of the backswing. I just can't absorb that idea now. I'm still trying to figure out the fundamentals of just hitting the ball. In the next post, I begin to see the light.