Left Arm Alone Drill: Frigid Fun

The next day, the weather was so delightful, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to go to the range and hit a bucket. Driving my daughter to her varsity basketball practice at nine in the morning in my Matrix, which gives the outside temperature among the dashboard instruments, I saw that it was eighteen degrees out and with wind chill (advisories out for the whole day), it probably felt around ten degrees, at most. But the range I was going to had good heaters above the mats, and I thought I might be able to hit a hundred balls before losing all sensation in my hands.

First of all, the heaters didn't come on right away. For some reason, they really didn't start making noise and producing real heat for about fifteen minutes, maybe more. Even so, I was doing OK. I was dressed warmly in layers and was gripping the clubs with my winter gloves, not ideal, but that's how I've been swinging in the backyard the last couple of weeks when outside temperatures have been consistently in the thirties. My ears were getting pretty cold, though, and I took off my baseball hat and snuggled on a knit hat that, fortunately, I had brought along.

Once the heat kicked in, I decided to take off the gloves and swing normally, with a golf glove and one bare hand. Hitting that way, I had to stop every five to ten minutes and warm up my fingers. At first, I just put them under my layers and grabbed some material and tried to surround my fingers with warmth. Walking back and forth across the mat while I waited for my fingers to thaw, I realized that my head was staying pretty warm from the heat reflecting down from the overhead heaters. Tentatively, I put one cold hand up on my head and felt the warmth of my hat, which felt warmer than under my layers.

So, one at a time, I put one hand and then the other on top of my head, burying my fingers as deeply as I could into the heated polyester, walking back and forth, and waiting for the cold stinging in my fingers to ease up. Pacing back and forth across my mat, with one hand on top of my head and the other grabbing a handful of clothing right on top of my stomach, I must have looked like I was doing that stunt we all did when we were children of trying to pat your head and rub circles around your stomach at the same time.

I didn't have to worry about being seen acting like a third-grader, however, since there was only one other person outside with me, and he was down near the other end of the range, and with all the mats separated by plastic partitions, there's no way he could have seen me. The circumstances, in a case like this, are crucial to any attempt at interpretation. Observed, I would have looked ridiculous, but isolated and by myself, I was simply practical. In any case, it was the best I could do. Once my fingers started to get cold, there wasn't much I could do about it. And, in the end, it didn't really matter. I hit the ball well.

At the beginning, when I tried out the seven-iron that I use every day in the back yard, I tried to duplicate the loose, relaxed swing I had been practicing, and it worked, from the very first swing. Holding the handle loosely in my fingers, letting in hinge at the top and lag and then coming down and whipping the clubhead through the ball, I could feel that the swing was good. The ball was going straight out there, about 150 or a little more, which looked good to me, considering that I couldn't really warm up in this weather and that the wind was blowing steadily across the range.

Then I tried my hybrids, which have become my favorite clubs. The results were even better. In the course of hitting the whole bucket (100 balls, early-bird special), I found I could hit the hybrid 4 about 190-200 yards and the three about 200-210. On really good swings, I was conscious of seeing the ball really well (I like to pick out a dimple and focus on that) and feeling the club handle loose in my fingers and rotating my shoulders and releasing my left wrist late into the swing and feeling the clubhead really compress the ball with a great, cracking sound. And when all this happened, I knew where the ball would be flying when I looked up during the follow-through.

With frozen fingers, I went through the eight-iron and the five and the six. With all the clubs, now, I'm hitting straighter and farther than before and getting closer to hitting distances that I know are decent for an amateur ( I did laugh to myself at one point, however, when I hit a 4 hybrid about 180 and remembered writing down at my desk at home that some pro in a recent tournament hit his 8-iron 183! How do they do that?).

I also hit a few with the driver, just enough to satisfy myself that I could swing that with my practice swing, too. I ended the session with some fives, just to prove to myself that I'm making progress with that club and getting nearer to my goal of hitting the five somewhere over 180. Today, I probably was hitting it around 160-170, and it felt really good. The last few balls I hit with the 4 hybrid, and by this time, I knew they were going out there about 190 and right around my target. After the last ball, I was completely satisfied. The results confirmed that the left arm alone drill is, indeed, a valuable way to improve the swing. I'll keep on practicing that way all winter.

On my way out of the range, as I was walking past the front desk inside the heated main part of the building with the pro shop and the cafeteria, a couple of men were standing in a group talking (none of them dressed for golf outdoors and none had clubs with them) and one of them looked directly at me as I approached, in my layers, my winter gloves, my knit hat, and my golf bag slung over one shoulder and said, "And here's a die-hard...," but before he could finish his sentence, I interjected, "Frigid Fun!" Obviously, he liked the alliteration because he stopped what he was saying and smiled more broadly at me and repeated, "Yeah, Frigid Fun!"

As I drove up the hill toward the highway, I noticed that the wind had been so strong there that it had lifted up a whole section of the turf carpet and thrown it right through the netting alongside the road. How to deal with this must have been what those men inside the range were discussing as I passed them. "Frigid Fun!"