Reality Bites!

My previous post described the virtues of slow, patient practice and the rewards of working at a gradual, methodical pace toward building parts of the swing over time. It certainly makes sense on paper. Hitting my Callaway soft-flight practice balls across my backyard, I felt I was rounding into good shape for April 1, the beginning of the new season. Then I went to a range and hit real golf balls. That’s when I came back down to earth. Reality bites!

You’ll remember that for a couple of weeks, I had been practicing drills, shortened swing drills to learn the feeling of “slinging the ball,” like Hogan. Drills like that are the only practical ones I can hit in my yard, which is about 65-70 yards long corner to corner. A full swing with a driver would probably, if it was a good swing, send my Callaway balls out onto the main road.

At the range, my only goal was to hit the driver with a full swing and see how my short-swing practice was contributing to a better swing. I could see definite improvement. I was able to hit the ball more consistently and felt that my mechanics were more reliable and comfortable. On the other hand, I still had a problem with distance. Even when everything clicked and the ball went arcing across the range toward the yard markers, I could never hit 200 yards. Then I tried a seven-iron to see if I could hit it any farther than I did the last time at the range a few weeks before. Myabe it was because I hadn’t been swinging an iron at all lately, but I couldn’t hit it more than about 135 or 140 yards. The results with both clubs told me I needed to go back home and start thinking more about clubhead speed during my practice sessions.

Reality may be hard to face at times—most of the time—but my next practice session at home, the day after the frustrating visit to the range, put me back into a positive mood. Before I went out to practice, on a blustery, 24-degree day (wind chill made it feel like the teens), I re-read some of the last sections of Tom Bertrand’s The Secret of Hogan’s Swing. I’m constantly surprised, when I revisit my golf books, at how frequently certain details jump out at me, phrases that I have either forgotten or missed on earlier readings. This time, the detail that caught my attention came from the “Impact Zone Checklist” (p. 156) where the first item, in bold and bulleted, instructs “Left knee remains flexed.” How did I miss that before? As Tom explains, this tendency can lead to, among other problems, topping the ball, which, you may remember from earlier posts, I do with gruesome regularity, those hot infield grounders I hit in the backyard.

Despite the bitter weather, I went out to my practice area and set up the hitting mat and tee, but with no plans to hit balls. Even if I’d wanted to, the wind was too stiff to allow teeing up. Instead, I wanted just to go through the motions, the slow motions that Tom advocates, and full-swing motions rather than abbreviated swings. Somewhere in the full swing, good players generate clubhead speed, and I wanted to start finding out how to do that myself. Twenty minutes out in that gale was about all I could take, but at least I did get some swinging in. And those slow motion swings must have helped because the next day, I started to understand why I had such slow clubhead speed.