Pilgrim's Progress

In my first lesson with JJ, part of a five-lesson package, I explained that I needed these lessons because learning a swing was so difficult. When we started lesson one, he might as well have said to me, “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” I couldn’t restrain myself. I started telling JJ about the books I had read and what I had tried to accomplish in practice. He listened to it all. Then I asked my key question (key, because I didn’t think there was an answer). “How can you tell what’s going on with my swing when it all happens too fast for the eye to see it?”

He was ready. As I learned later, JJ attended the San Diego Golf Academy and learned how to become a teaching pro. Obviously, I had turned over the discussion to him. He took over and calmly gave me his response. “The path of the ball never lies.” Then he explained what he meant. He planted a golf shaft out in front of my mat as a target and told me to hit the ball right at it. With each shot that I made, he let me see where it went. Either at the shaft, or just left of it, or to the right of it. That direction indicated the path of the swing. Then if the ball tailed off left (which it usually did), that indicated that the clubface was open at impact.

This was a huge leap forward for me. All of a sudden, JJ gave me a way to assess the results of my own swings. From then on, whenever I practiced, I could analyze my swing based on where the ball went. This was a tremendous insight, one that I couldn’t have found in my reading, my videotaping myself, or watching “Swing Vision” on YouTube.

That first lesson started me on correcting the path of my swing. Obviously, it was “over-the-top” and “outside in.” Breathless, practically, I went back to my backyard and started hitting plastic balls, trying to get the inside-out swing. This is a perfect example of something I’ve said before. After a certain period of practice, you think you’re doing one thing, but, really, you’re not. Here, I could see that I was coming at the ball from the outside, not from the inside, as I thought I was. All I wanted to do in my backyard was to see the ball fly from the tee out to the right. I didn’t care what happened next. As long as the ball went right, I knew that my swing path was inside-to-out. And that’s what I wanted. In my next post, I'll describe how I attempted to draw the ball.