This blog is for idealists and perfectionists, those willing to sustain demanding practice for months and years like Hogan, questing for their ideal swing—Don Quixotes of the fairway. This blog is for seekers willing to forsake family and friends and food—wait! Let’s just stop at that. I think you get the point. You know whether you should be reading on or not.
If you choose to leave, that makes me glad. It means that either you are already an accomplished player, one whom the rest of us can emulate, or you will remain a hacker, which means fewer competent players around me. Or, if you choose to stay, that, too, makes me glad. I will enjoy your company, take gratification from your progress, and celebrate your contributions to this great game. I shall stop here. This is tending too much towards the great St. Crispian’s Day speech from Henry V, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Learning a golf swing is not the same as going into battle, but poetry and philosophy and drama do, indeed, transform our search for the essence of the perfect golf swing into a devotion to recondite, exquisite, subtle, elusive, and grudgingly revealed Truth.
My own struggle will serve as the case study. Early on, I decided to adopt the teaching of Ben Hogan. On the face of it, pursuing such a model seems ridiculous at worst and unrealistic at best, but Hogan himself gave me encouragement and inspiration. In his book Five Lessons, Hogan says,
I see no reason, truly, why the average golfer, if he goes about it intelligently, shouldn’t play in the 70s—and I mean by playing the type of shots a fine golfer plays.
The first time I heard about the Hogan book happened during one of my first lessons with a PGA professional.
And when that pro, Mark, mentioned Hogan’s book to me, I was ready. Ready for inspiration. Ready for hard work and unlimited practice. Mark was speaking to someone—little did he know—who was ready, like the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to leave behind everything that was familiar and go on a pilgrimage. My Holy Grail would be the Hogan Swing. The instant Mark mentioned Hogan I was converted. I knew some things about Hogan, some vague recollections, enough to know that he was a great player. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was also a great teacher. As Mark said, “He was way ahead of his time.”
Mark had caught me at a pivotal moment. Like those Chaucer characters, I was intensely dissatisfied with the golf world around me, and I was completely, desperately receptive to any rational plan that would enable me to play golf in a decent, respectable way. I was ready to devote myself to what Hogan had to say. Once I ordered the book from Amazon and had it in my hands, I began to immerse myself. To me, he was perfection. He was perfect mechanics. He was the work ethic. He was the repeatable swing. He took nerves and chance and luck out of the swing and replaced them with precision, calmness, and control—the complete antithesis of almost all the golfers I’d ever seen anywhere. Having played tournament tennis as a junior, I knew a good tennis swing when I saw one, and having watched the PGA on TV, I knew and appreciated a good golf swing when I saw one.
Aside from the PGA Tour, not many people know how to swing a golf club well. Of course, there are those with the brute strength to hit balls three hundred yards or more at the range. But I rarely see a swing that any serious player would want to emulate. This display of incompetence makes me wonder, “Why don’t these people learn a real golf swing?” I can’t understand how anyone can continue hitting golf balls in such a random, ugly way. When I started playing, I wanted to be different. And after a few early-morning back nines, shooting anywhere from 45 to 72 and unable to hit a drive more than two hundred yards, I knew I had to change. Definitely, I had to learn a swing.
That was the beginning of this blog. Surely, I thought, there must be other people like me who want to learn a good golf swing. And after all my study and practice, I am now in a position to help these players. I can save them time and help them get to the swing they want in less time than it has taken me. Like Hogan, who said he learned his swing by digging it out of the dirt, I have been learning my swing through incessant practice.
In the Northeast, I have been practicing outside in good weather and in bad, in rain and in wind, in cold and in snow and in ice, wearing sneakers or Sorrel boots. The circumstances haven’t mattered much. Only wind blustery enough to knock the practice ball off the driving tee stops me. Otherwise, I am outside, determined to practice my swing every day. Think about it. That’s what it takes. Practicing every day, no matter what the weather. Typically, I get up with my children, and when they take off for school at about 7:00am, I start practicing in the back yard. All I need is firm footing on a slate patio, my hitting mat, and a couple of dozen white plastic Wilson practice balls.
This May, I will have been practicing for two years. The next post will take you back to my early practice. Meanwhile, here's a recent video (late December, 2008) that will show you where I am with "Learning a Good Golf Swing."
