From Sawgrass to Sixteen Degrees

That's how cold it was today, with a bitter wind to bring the chill factor down to around zero. I couldn't last long outside, but just long enough to hit a bucket of 50 balls and pick them all up in the fresh snow, probably two inches or so, that fell yesterday when Boreas, the Greek god of winter (his name meant "North Wind" or "Devouring One"), shocked, no doubt, by a few warm days and thawing soil and sod, decided to put an end to all ideas of spring and sent this sunny hillside back into the frozen caverns of deep January. This modern mythology serves as an object lesson to all avid golfers in the Northeast. Take a club out on your lawn in January, especially when all the snow and ice have melted away, and you will anger the gods!

Foolish mortal, I ignored the gods and took my trusty 9-iron out into the teeth of the gale. My plastic balls too light to stand still on the hitting mat, with my Callaway Soft-Flite balls and my Almost Golf" balls, I hit my two buckets in the course of the afternoon. That was all I could manage. I knew that if I tried for more, I could definitely count myself among the certifiably insane. When it comes right down to it, I don't know why that thought even occurred to me. The idea of hitting outside today at all was completely insane. Even in extreme circumstances, like these, there is humor, if you can ignore the sore throbbing of your nearly frozen fingers long enough to think about it. At the end of my second bucket, as I was wandering around the backyard with the shag bag in one hand, I thought that if I fell down for some reason and couldn't get up, I would be frozen solid by the time anybody found me, a solid statue to the mindlessness of my preoccupation. Thankfully, the outside ordeal was worth it.

The reason that I was willing to confront the elements for a few swings was that, since my practice two days ago, I had a new realization, and I wanted to try out my swing to see if I could do what I imagined I should do. And that thing was a full swing. A completely relaxed swing around a full arc, just like Bobby Jones. No muscular control that would prevent me from a complete follow-through.

You're saying to yourself something like, "Well, what do you think you've been trying to do these three years?" But that's where I now know more than you do. This thing—this golf swing—is so subtle and recondite and elusive that we amateurs can hardly reach the end of our exploration of it. As my wife often says to me after a practice, "That's what you always say! 'I've got it!'" She's right, and by now, I know that all I have, after the last practice, is the latest revelation and that there are many more revelations to come.

This one happens to be about the weight of the club and being able to swing it around an arc without interposing oneself. In other words, I'm starting to feel the sensations associated with actually swinging the club, instead of controlling it. Now, if you've been reading my posts, you'll know that this idea has been growing on me. Even lately, with all the help of the left-arm alone drill, I tend to think about the swing as ending at the ball. If you look at my videos, including the one below, you'll see how I characteristically take a slow motion practice swing that ends at the ball, not one inch farther.

So my idea, which came to me, I think, yesterday, when it snowed all day, courtesy of Boreas, was that I needed to loosen up even more and let the swing go all the way to the follow-through. By now, I think my left arm knows about the release. What I needed to teach it was to continue right on through without interruption or hindrance. As Mark, my first teaching pro, said, you swing "and the ball is in the way." Such a simple thought, but how difficult to do.

So today, I concentrated on being loose and relaxed. I wanted to feel the club hinge at the top of the swing. I wanted to feel the clubhead lag behind the swing. I wanted to feel the club go flying through the release and continue into the follow-through and finish up over my shoulders, the way the pros do. And I wanted to be able to still hit the ball where I wanted to! That's a big condition. As you know, if you change the slightest thing in your swing, that change has major ramifications, all of them bad.

In my layers of warm clothing and my too-thin gloves, I worked on feeling loose. On keeping my left arm as straight as I could. On keeping my right knee flexed. On keeping the lag deep into the swing. On letting the club go and feeling a complete follow-through. As you'll see in the video, I succeeded to an extent. I made progress. And that's what we want from a practice session. Especially at sixteen degrees.

Playing #17 at TPC Sawgrass

Bad things lead to good. At least that's what happened today. After the awful experience at the range this morning, I had a very rewarding practice back home in my yard, on a glorious January afternoon, about forty degrees and blue skies and bright sunshine.

By now, you know my proclivities. I went back to the basics: the one-arm drill. At first, I was terrible, swinging just as I had at the range. Then I started to make a few adjustments, and by my second bucket (60 plastic balls), I was hitting the ball pretty well again. And what made the difference was my recollection of something I had come across several times in the past when the concept was over my head.

It's the idea that at impact, the hands slow down, and the clubhead goes flying ahead. Now, it's seems so obvious. But, until this moment, I never understood this part of the whipping action of the swing. This is how good golfers generate their clubhead speed. It's not the swinging of the arms, or a rush anywhere in the swing. It's what makes a swing like Els has look so effortless. It's an accelerating motion from the top down to impact. At that exact point, where the hands are ahead of the ball, the hands slow down and Hogan's supination takes place.

Once I got this concept, I could hardly believe how effortless the swing became. It was just as Johnny Miller said. You bring the club back steeply, with that early hinge, and then you don't have to do anything until the release. You turn to a certain point (don't ask me where, right now) and then you stop the forward movement of your hands, and you turn the club, leading with a bowed left wrist. Nothing could be simpler. Right? Right! Sure! It's taken me over three years to get to this point!

With greater confidence, I was able to start thinking about accuracy with my 9-iron and the one-arm swing. This is when I started playing #17 at Sawgrass, just for practice.

You know that hole. It's the one that's an island. If you miss, you're in the drink— stroke and distance. Try again. There's nowhere to drop. And this is the hole that Johnny Miller hit to when I described his teaching lesson on pressure in a recent post. For me, this hole has lost much of its terror. With my new understanding of the release—stopping the hands and letting the club go flying ahead—I had a new consistency that I have never felt before. More and more often, it seems, the parts of the swing come together, the coincidence enabling me to dial it in and go for birdie.

The other day, keeping count as I hit 60 balls, I hit roughly a third for possible pars, another third for birdie, and the last third went in the drink. That didn't really bother me because I was able to pick them all up with my shag bag, #17 being my imaginary practice hole in my driveway, where I had put down the empty bucket and hit to it from a flagstone path about thirty yards away. The lawn is too soft to hit to, and I leave footprints when I walk around picking up balls. So this offered a good alternative. I really liked Johnny Miller's video, and getting used to the idea of hitting to a difficult target and avoiding real trouble seemed like a good way to practice.

Me on #17 at Sawgrass

Discouragement

After a couple of weeks of practice in my yard, the one-arm drill and hitting Callaway Hx Soft Flight Practice Balls and "Almost Golf" balls with a full swing, I went to the range early this morning, eager to try out my improving swing.

At first, I hit the ball well, starting with the 9-iron, which I've been using exclusively in my yard. Nice and easy and smooth, hitting balls real high and around 120 yards. Looked good. Then I went down through my irons, all pretty good. Not great, but good for not hitting them in a long time.

Trouble began with the utility 4 and 3. I hit a couple of decent shots, but, for the rest, I topped them or shanked them, all kinds of bad swings. Then, in a display of utter perversity, I tried the driver, too. How bad could it be? I thought. Really bad. As Lily Tomlin says, things are going to get worse before they get worse. Couldn't hit it to save my life. Anticipating that it would be a disaster, I took only four balls with me to the next mat with a driver tee in it. So bad, I had to laugh. Black humor.

Then, trying to regroup, I went back to the nine, which was awful, even worse than before. So bad I took a few one-arm swings to try to get my tempo and path and bowed wrist back again. I was able to hit a couple of balls OK, pulled hooks left, but at least they were airborne, vaguely resembling a golf shot. I couldn't wait to get to the last of the 100 balls in my bucket.

On the way home, I surveyed the debacle, the wreckage of my swing. No more forecasting breaking 80. I'll be lucky to break 100, or worse. I may spend another season going to the course only occasionally and spending my time practicing instead. I'm not panicking, since the same thing happened the last time I visited the range. From that experience, I knew that transferring a swing with practice balls to a swing with real balls is hardly automatic. With real balls, the desire to get the distances you think you should have destroys your relaxed, smooth swing with lightweight balls.

Back home now and ready to go outside and begin the one-arm drill again, I'm hoping that, at some point, I'll be able to maintain my swing, first at the range, and then on the course. But the greatest lesson is that a golf swing is like Mt. Everest. If you want to learn the swing or climb the mountain, you cannot expect to do it on your terms. Just as you have to cling to the mountain take the right path and make the right steps, you have to let yourself go and immerse yourself in the swing. You must become the swing. As an old Russian piano teacher once adjured me (and I didn't know what she was talking about), "The music is in you!" It's a hard thing to get over the concept of yourself as an individual, as a being or entity, and give yourself over to something else—a belief, music, motion and transcend the self. But that is what golf demands. Probably all sports do. Become the music, become the tennis serve, become the baseball swing, become the Zen archer, become the golf swing. Just think of those lines from Yeats' "Among School Children."

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Or the familiar image from Zen in the Art of Archery.

"(...) The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art (...)"

At some point, you have to lose yourself. When you're making a golf swing, you're not you any more.

Great Golf Swings: Johnny Miller

After thinking about the Jeremiah's comments (in my last post), I did some online research and came across a great article from Jim McLean about Johnny Miller's iron play. I haven't come across Jim before, but he's been a pro for decades and actually played some rounds with Miller when Johnny was at his peak. He's insightful and appreciates the greatness in Miller's swing, giving us a good chance to revisit a good model for those of us who are starting to learn a swing.

Talking about Johnny practicing with one arm, Jim got my attention right away. As you know from reading recent posts, I really like that drill and knew Miller used it, but I got the idea from another source on the Web. Jim filled in with some interesting background information.

The first thing I think about when I look at Johnny Miller's swing is that he's left-handed. And that's quite different. Most left-handers, I believe, should play left-handed. But Phil Mickelson is a right-handed player that plays great left-handed golf. Well, Johnny was a left-handed person who played right-handed golf.

One of the things that Miller can do that's really great to watch is hit balls just with his left arm and really hit the ball tremendous. He can hit a 6-iron 160-yards with one arm, quite incredible and something that he practiced quite a bit.

Johnny Miller (on hitting shots with one arm): "And what happens is when you're tall and you can play the ball close in, you get a very upright swing and the club doesn't rotate quite so much. Combined with a reverse-C, a lot of people "poo-poo" the reverse-C, but I had a reverse-C and it keeps the clubface square. It doesn't turn it over. But the thing that set my swing apart probably the most was that I was the first guy to have an early-set, and I got that from hitting balls one-handed. When you hit balls one-handed left-handed, you always set the club gradually. By halfway up, you're already at 90 degrees with the forearm and so you don't have to do anything until you're way down here and then release it."

Being a neophyte, I found confirmation that my recognition of the value of the one-arm drill actually has merit. It's one way of practicing that will help me hit consistently straight.

Then, Jim talks about Miller's grip, which he learned from looking at pictures with his dad.

Now, when we look at Johnny's grip, we really see the Hogan influence. In the evenings when he was a young kid, Johnny's dad would bring him downstairs and they would look at pictures of Hogan and Nelson and Snead. And I know he studied the Hogan book and that's the grip that Johnny put on, which was a very weak left hand grip.

That meant his left hand was turned toward the target, the "V" on the top of the left hand pointing directly up to the chin. So that's an anti-hook grip. But being left-handed and being a little stronger here, that might have something to do with being able to play so well with this grip.

A weak left hand grip tends to lead to an open clubface at the top for most people, and it did with Johnny Miller as well. Now that open clubface pretty much takes the hook out of the game. And I'll tell you one thing about Miller—nobody hit the ball straighter than this man! Now if he did miss it, he would tend to miss off to the right. And as his game went off a bit, he would miss a little too much out to right field and partially because of that weak left hand. But when he was on, he could hit that golf ball as hard as he wanted to and hit it dead straight.

A Hogan devotee myself, I use a similar grip, but Jim's commentary sheds some light on its pros and cons. It'll help you avoid hooking, which was Hogan's main problem, but you have to watch out for losing balls right.

Then I was interested in where Miller learned the steep backswing that was characteristic of his swing. Partly, it came from the one-arm drill, butalso from a coach named John Geersten.

Mr. Geersten also believed in certain swing positions. So that went right along with what John had already done in his career. And he was developing into a fine player.

One of the first positions was the Halfway Back position. Mr. Geersten liked an early wrist set and that's something that Johnny had in his swing the rest of his life. Setting the wrists early put the golf club really out in front of him. And that's a term that we hear nowadays all the time—keeping the club in front of you. Well, Miller really did that as well.

He had that club outside his hands going back, and he also had the toe up. Now to do that, he almost felt the left hand pushing down as you go back or the clubhead getting up. That gets the club pretty vertical going back, almost standing the club straight up and down. That's also a balance position where the club is very light. A lot of amateurs will get the club off to the side and it's very heavy and moves slow. But when that club gets up here, you have a lot of leverage.

You can see a good example of this swing on YouTube in the video "How to Handle Pressure - #17 at the TPC Sawgrass."

Jim goes on to describe Miller's swing at impact, with the left wrist bowed, just as Hogan advocates. From all my one-arm practice, I have begun to feel how important this position is, one that can't be repeated too often or emphasized enough. In my own study, I've read Hogan on this, and I always keep in mind that Hogan uses Jimmy Demaret as a great example of an accentuated left wrist. I also think of something I read somewhere about Camilo Villegas, who also stresses this bowed position.

And as he came into impact, that left wrist kind of bowed and went into the golf ball, I would say, almost exactly like Ben Hogan. Talking with Johnny, I know he felt that that golf ball compressed against the clubface and stayed there for a while as he went through.

He felt that wrist stayed in that position through impact without having the right hand flipping over at all. And that is probably one reason why he drove the ball so straight off his target line with every club. It was a great, great move, but a very advanced move.

When Jim says, "advanced move," he reminds me of the pro who introduced me to Hogan's book, calling it "advanced," too. Now, here we are, more than half a century after it was first published, and we're still calling this bowed left wrist an "advanced" swing thought. We must conclude that not enough people are reading

Five Lessons.

Jim ends with some astute observations, ones which, I happy to say, coincide with aspects of my own practice, one being the importance of visual models. For me, these are videos on the Web and the video analysis I do every time I practice.

What can you learn from Johnny Miller? Well, if you have young children, one thing you can learn is what Johnny's Dad did for him, and that was to show him pictures of great players. Have them visualize those players and copy some of their positions. It's a tremendous thing to do.

Then, what Jim says about getting the club up on the backswing reminds me of what Don Trahan teaches with his Peak Performance golf, the idea of swinging back into the catcher's mitt and then swinging "up the tree." It seems to be the same concept.

Now as we look at the golf swing, there are two things that I'd like you to look at or remember from this Johnny Miller lesson. Number one, when he took the golf club back, he really got that golf club up in his backswing.

So when you do that, you don't have to do it quite as much as John, but really try to get the clubhead up at the ceiling, up at the sky here, and that makes the club light. And when the club's light you can move it a lot faster.

One of the major problems that I see at all of our golf schools is the player who takes the club around his body which gets his swing too flat. That puts the weight out on the end of a fulcrum where gravity is pulling down on it. So it makes the club very heavy and throws the club way off balance. So that's a tremendous thing you can learn from watching Johnny Miller.

And when he talks about the angle of the shoulders during the turn, he echoes what my pro, Jeremiah, pointed out in my swing.

The other thing I would say, and this is especially true for tall players, is make sure that you get some angle or tilt on your shoulders when you go back. Again, I do see players who tilt too much straight down.

That's something I'm working on right now, that and keeping the flex in the right leg and continuing to focus on keeping the club lag "deep into the shot," in the fashion of Els, and then at impact feeling the bowed left wrist. In the last day or so, the results look pretty encouraging. I'm hitting fairly consistently and with a good degree of accuracy. And after watching that Miller video on #17 at Sawgrass, I'm mentally hitting for that island green. It's a good thing that I'm on dry land, though, or I'd be out of practice balls by now.

Swing Tempo

At this point in my swing development, the most successful period ever, is a good time to look forward and plan what I should focus on next in my practice.

To get some ideas, I contacted a pro who worked with me two summers ago and whom I frequently see at a local range. Jeremiah looked at one of my latest videos and had some good comments.

First, he wrote

Your right leg is too straight at the beginning and throughout the swing, so straight it almost causes you to pivot towards your target(not good). First, try and bend both knees together the same amount and hold during the swing allowing the upper body to coil around the restricting of the hips. Usually, when the the right leg stays straight or unbent at the knee, then the right hip side will tend to follow the turn instead of resisting the turn, producing an effective coil.

No doubt about it. He's right. I haven't thought about my right leg being straight in so long, I can't even remember. I know it was a problem when I first started building a swing three years ago, but somehow, it got lost among all the other details I was trying to think about.

Then, he said,

I'm not certain, but it does appear that you left arm is bending too soon on the follow through. Do your best to keep it straight as long as you can. When the left arm collapses slightly too soon on the forward swing, it sometimes causes the swing path to go from right to left or an in to out swing path. Just keep an eye on that.

Now, this is something that I do keep an eye on. Lately, since I've been hitting the ball so well, I've been concluding that a straight arm isn't causing major problems for me. When I do think about a straight left arm, I think about it in the context of a wide swing, and when my swing is wider, I can see that I hit the ball farther. Definitely, this is something to work on.

Next, he questioned the ball position at address.

What club were you hitting? If it was anything like a 8-sw, I would say nothing, but it really appears that your ball position is way too far back. Remember the general rule of thumb. Four balls........

6-iron dead center of stance
one ball back of that 7-sw
one ball ahead of center 5-iron through 3-wood
driver farthest most ball. two balls ahead of dead center closest to left front foot

In my practice, I'm actually playing the ball in the center of my stance, hitting with a nine-iron. It's the camera angle that makes the ball look so far back in the stance, since the mat is angled diagonally across my backyard, not perpendicular to the camera. Still, I started thinking some more about the ball position. That's why I went back to Hogan's book so that I could see the illustration he uses.

Last, the pro said,

Here's a big one.......your shoulders at impact are almost vertical. Left shoulder is the highest and the right being the lowest. Your shoulders at impact should be generally speaking at a 45 degree angle. Yours are like 180 degrees. The right shoulder should be lowest and the left the highest at impact but no more than 45 degrees. Please do not make this mistake. Correct ASAP.

Wow! I looked at myself, and I could hardly believe how steep my shoulder angle is. I don't know where that came into my swing, but in the next few days, I need to correct that

Then, one other aspect of my swing could use some attention. And that's the tempo. As I said earlier, I've liked to watch real-time pro swings lately so that I can get a sense of their tempo. In my hitting, I feel as though I have a good, relaxed tempo that results in balls hit with good distance and accuracy. As a test, in the video below, I put my latest swing up against the 21/7 swing tempo from the book, Tour Tempo. As you can see, I'm way behind. That's OK, however. I'm very happy with where I am right now. As I work on a dependable swing, and work out the problems that my pro commented on, I can work on tempo, too. That should maximize the efficiency of the swing, a phrase I couldn't have imagined writing more than a few days ago. I would have written something more along the lines of, "My swing, when I get one!"

It's Getting Better All the Time

Early this afternoon, I hit a bucket of practice balls (45 swings), in the yard, just ahead of some rain and before a slight lower-back twinge could become something worse. The results were extremely gratifying and reassuring. I didn't hit one bad ball, which made me think that I finally have a repeatable, efficient swing—the good golf swing I've been working toward.

As I focused on staying in the shot, I began to see how the release snaps the clubhead through the hitting area. The physics of it suddenly seemed so obvious, just like snapping the end of a wet towel. I picture the swing arc and mentally time the release at the point where my hands are just past dead bottom center. At this point in the swing, a delay measured in milliseconds will add significant power and distance. This is the part of the swing that people must be referring to when they talk about holding the release as long as possible. What seems so clear to me now, almost a childish concept, has taken me only three years to discover, but when the time came (which was yesterday), the discovery happened very quickly—within 24 hours or so. Now that my swing is consistent and reliable, I can work on greater accuracy, distance, and control. This understanding has put me on a whole new level of development.

The split-screen below shows my swing yesterday with my swing the day before that. No glaring differences here, which goes to show how subtle and invisible this release point of the swing is, hard to see and hard to learn. Looking back on the way I've learned the swing, I see that Swing Vision, though it's certainly helpful in some ways, is of no help in showing how the release works. For that reason, I stopped looking at Swing Vision videos on YouTube, for the most part, and searched more often for real-time swing videos, which would show me something useful about tempo.

In addition to the invisibility of this crucial point in the swing, there's another impediment to learning more readily. That's is the power that we see in all the PGA pros on TV. To us amateurs, that power implies muscle and the leverage of pure strength. Even when we watch some pros who are in questionable physical condition, the opposite of Villegas and Woods and some others who are in great shape, we still think that strength has to be responsible for the tremendous distances these pros can hit. Getting beyond this conception of the swing and understanding what the clichés mean ("Let the club do the work," "Swing easy, hit hard," and all the others we've all heard forever) takes patience and diligence and dedication.

I just went back to look at the end of Hogan's book and had to laugh when I re-read the last page.

The golfer-reader who has applied himself with some diligence to these lessons, spending at least a week on each, should already be well on his way to developing a correct, repeating swing. However, you cannot expect to acquire a real control of the correct movements in a month's time. You must continue to work on the fundamentals throughout the golf season, both on the course and on the practice tee. Through this steady familiarization you will gradually come to execute the movements of the swing more easily and efficiently. Within six months—as soon as that—an average golfer who has applied himself intelligently should be coming close to breaking 80 or actually break 80.

Six months? How about three years! I guess I must be a remedial case, a slow learner.

Big Day

Three years. That's about how long I've been working on learning a good golf swing. And the last year has been consecutive months of intense practice and video analysis. Today, for the first time, January 16, I felt that I had a real golf swing. I was hitting the ball exactly the way I wanted to, and I was hitting it with accuracy. The backswing felt in place, my left wrist felt flat, the tempo felt good, there was lag in the downswing, the release was easy and relaxed, and the follow-through was a natural conclusion of an efficient swing. Behind this sudden emergence of the swing was the way two aspects of my recent practice (described in earlier posts) coincided: the left arm along drill and the Els idea of staying in the shot.

For the last several days, I've been concentrating on the left arm alone drill. It seemed a good idea to get back to this basic kind of practice after my last visit to the range, where my hitting made it clear that I didn't succeed in transferring my swing with practice balls to the swing with real balls. And the drill felt so good. I was able to isolate certain basics of the swing and work on repeating those. After a day or two of nothing but the drill, I started hitting a few full swings at the end of each bucket, maybe five balls, just to see if the full swing could change. And as I practiced the drill, I was able to think of staying in the shot, holding the release until the last nano-second, and getting comfortable with staying in the shot—turning around my spine, keeping my head centered, and finally, with my hands in front of the ball, releasing the clubhead and feeling the clubface perfectly squared up precisely at the moment of impact.

The arrival of a couple of packages of practice balls and a new mat made all the hitting feel better than ever. I got some more of the Callaway practice balls that I like so much and a new mat (I finally banged out the last remaining patches of usable turf on the mat from New York Golf that I've been using for the past three years). Another propitious sign was the return of some temperate weather. The temperature rose into the high thirties and then into the forties, the snow started melting away, and I was able to go out and hit without warm layers and winter gloves. Today, I actually wore my golf glove, the first time I've been able to do that in about a month.

As you'll see in the video below, my swing is very clean. I'm not banging the mat, the way I used to (and that's why I destroyed that old mat). You can hear a clean, brisk swing right through the ball over the surface of the mat (which is not a turf-like surface, like the previous mat, but more like an indoor-outdoor carpet kind of material). From the results of the swing, I could tell that I had the radius of the swing under some kind of control. It wasn't perfect, but almost all the forty ball I hit from the bucket went right toward the big maple tree, my target. I really felt that I was "dialling in," as my golfing friends like to say (and as I used to think was a prospect way off in the future).

Today, as I was swinging, and could tell that my swing was on a new level, I thought of the Els swing and of the Jan Stephanson swing (from my Tour Tempo videos). My mental picture showed my shoulders turning and the club hanging back and finally whipping through to a high, full finish. With each shot, when I was able to do all this, I was amazed at how far and how high the ball would go, and I wasn't even thinking of height or distance. As long as the swing was good, the results were unbelievable. I started lining up my Callaway balls and aiming for the V on the cover.

Now, with my recent visit to the range in mind (where I couldn't replicate the swing I used with my practice balls), I know that the next challenge will be to transfer my backyard swing, with Callaway and Almost Golf balls, to real balls. First, at the range, and then, on the course. Trusting Hogan, as I have, from the beginning, I don't see why I can't shoot in the mid-70's this coming season.

For the rest of this winter, I'm going to continue with my practice plan. I'm going to keep the left arm alone drill going, but I'm also going to do more full swing practice where I can work on consistency and accuracy. Feeling as confident as I do right now, I also want to go out to the range when I can and see how I hit the ball there. I also keep in mind that in my backyard practice, I'm using a nine-iron. I'll need to work on the same swing with the other clubs in the bag. And then, there's the driver. I'll be very interested to discover how far, and how accurately, I can hit drives with this efficient swing.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Working It into the Swing

Every day now, I can feel progress. In the state of my swing, I feel as though I can hit the ball far and relatively accurately. I'm feeling the lag from the top of the swing on down to impact, and, most gratifying, I'm feeling the full release. All of these aspects are benefits of the left arm alone drill. I'd still be trying to hit the ball, instead of swinging through the ball, without this drill. I'll have to find the link where I found this and include it in a post.

Yesterday, as I was tinkering with my developing swing, I really whacked what's left of my hitting mat, and during my breaks, where I went inside to warm my hands and look at video, I also went online to find another mat. After looking at the usual places, The Golf Warehouse, Amazon, and so on, I settled on the Callaway FT Launch Zone Hitting Mat from The Golf Warehouse for $29.95. The spec that persuaded me was that it was "Highly resistant to wear from heavy use." After what I did to two mats, I needed one that could take a real pounding. Of course, my swing is much better now, but still....

Hitting off the few remaining patches of turf on my patchy mat, I also felt a difference in my practice balls. As I've been saying, I really like the Callaway Hx Soft Flight Practice Balls.

But I also have five "Almost Golf" balls, that I like to use at the end of bucket as a "reality test." They made of some kind of hard rubber, where the Callaways are soft, and I can feel the clubhead hitting these balls and feel the clubhead squared up, where I don't have that feeling using the Callaways. So I've come to like hitting the "Almost Golf" balls better because they're giving me the kind of feeling and feedback I'd get from hitting a real golf ball. I'm still going to hit a lot of Callaways—I just ordered a couple of dozen more from The Golf Warehouse—but I also went over to my local mall to Olympia Sports, which had a package of 36 (list price $30.00) on sale for $20. With them, I'm all set to hit balls that will get me ready to go back to the range. As soon as the temperature around here gets above 30 degrees!

The Release: Split-Screen

This video shows what a difference a day makes. I've taken a clip of my swing yesterday, when I was just starting to understand opening up the left arm at release and compared it to a swing from today. Both days, I felt I was hitting the ball really well, much farther than ever before and with reasonable accuracy, peppering the high branches of that maple tree.

In the split-screen, you'll see a visible difference between the two swings. Yesterday's is quicker and shorter and more muscular. Today's is more relaxed, unhurried, and longer. It's starting to look like an efficient swing that I can repeat (we'll see about that tomorrow) and that gives me the distance and accuracy that I want.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Deep into the Shot 2

In my last post, I laid out my next practice goals: a more relaxed swing, like D. J. Trahan or Ernie Els, and a more complete follow-through. This practice was a revelation. A light snow had fallen early in the morning, frosting the landscape around me, and snow flurries continued during the day. By the time I went out to practice, at around two forty-five, I saw that the temperature must have been right around thirty-two or thirty-three because the snow wasn't sticking. That meant that I could have decent footing on my flagstone walkway for hitting off the mat. And the way this practice went, the flurries were like a benediction, a sign that—like that great scene in Fellini's Amarcord when snow starts falling out of a clear blue, sunny sky—something miraculous was possible.

The revelation didn't take long. After all my practice and preparation, I was, like an acolyte, ready for the annunciation. I practiced a few swings, feeling the transition and then the lag before descending to the ball. For this practice, I had decided that I didn't care about distance. The only important improvement was that I wanted my swing to look more like D. J. Trahan or Ernie Els. I wanted it to look slow and smooth&emdash;effortless. I had confidence that I was very close because my recent videos showed some good fundamentals. I was just missing the middle part of the swing, the most crucial part, I think, where the downswing goes into the release, and the release goes into the follow-through.

At this point, a digression is in order. This moment of epiphany (how many of those do we have?), took me back to my first lessons, a couple of years ago, with a driving range pro. My swing was terrible at that time, but I can remember him telling me about the swing, "You just have to feel it." That concept made no sense to me. It sounded like an admission that he couldn't teach the swing. I tried a few other pros, with similar results. I always learned something useful from the lessons, just not the key to the swing that I was looking for. Lately, since the left arm alone drill has been teaching me about the action of the club during the swing, I've started to "feel" the swing—feel the weight of the club in my hand, feel it lag behind my hand on the downswing, and feel it release at exactly the right split-second, without any conscious action on my part.

Three years later, I now understand that the range pro was absolutely right. Learning a good swing involves numerous epistemological moments like this one. You think you know, but you really don't. Then, after a long period of practice, suddenly, a truth is revealed. As long as you are receptive and ready, you will make progress in this fashion. Hogan is right when he says that the average golfer can break 80 if he learns the fundamentals of the Five Lessons.

With fresh snow on the ground and more flurries in the air, I suddenly felt one essence of the golf swing. I glimpsed it the day before, when I began to talk to myself about "opening up" the left arm. It was the idea that Tom Bertrand gave me, months ago, in his YouTube video about "'The "Missing Link' to Ben Hogan's Secret." I knew it was important then, and I've thought, ever since, that I understood what Tom meant. But I didn't. Not really. I didn't understand the speed involved.

I thought that at some point, after impact, your left elbow would turn out towards your target. What I didn't understand, and what is crucial to this key move in the golf swing, is that the turning out of the left elbow is part of the release and that it happens in a millisecond. When you watch Tom demonstrate it, it looks very muscular and deliberate. He never talks about the duration of the turning. Never mentions milliseconds. That would have helped a lot. As a matter of fact, this is a huge problem with most of golf instruction.

When you watch Swing Vision on YouTube or listen to a pro describe the swing, you have absolutely no idea about the timing that is involved. Speaking from where I am, in my development of a good swing, this seems to me to be the single most important problem in teaching a good golf swing. That's why my range pro told me, "You have to feel it." He was talking about a part of the swing that the naked eye can't see. It's basically invisible. When you watch a tour pro swing on TV, you see the backswing and you see the follow-through. You do not see what happens in between. And that's where all the magic happens, I think (remember, I'm a beginner, not an expert). Angel Cabrera does something in that area that few other players can match. As a result, he can green drives on holes that are around 330 yards. This is the imperceptible action that weeks of assiduous practice revealed.

You're relaxed during the swing. Or you try to be. You're not a pro, and this doesn't come easily. But you start off with that swing thought. You get to the top of your swing—the transition—you're loose, your fingers are relaxed, the club is balanced, you can feel that it's resting on top of your forefinger (as Shawn Clements suggests, in one of his videos), and then you start the down swing, and you have one swing thought in mind. You want to come down in a relaxed way, and you want the clubhead to lag behind. There's no rush here. But, at a certain point (we hope and think that this point will be where your hands are somewhere near or over or just past the ball), you have to think—"Release!" And it has to be "NOW!" This thought does not mean, however, that you are controlling the release. The left arm drill teaches you that the release happens naturally at a certain point in the arc of the swing. Instead of controlling the release, you are making yourself ready to let it happen. Basically, you're getting out of the way and enabling your body to cooperate with the club. In this millisecond, the club is in control. Not you.

If you don't have a Swing Vision camera, you cannot see what happens here. Instead, you have to "feel it." And that's what happened for me. I started to feel that I had to turn my left arm, the inside of the elbow, towards the target, during the milliseconds of the release. My thought at impact was to "open up." And once I started to do that, the swing became ridiculous. It seemed easy and effortless, and all I really had to think about was the "opening up" of my left elbow. With each shot, I was catapulting the ball out there towards Route 6 and into the topmost branches of that maple tree, and I could direct the ball with this release. The last few balls I hit were those "almost golf balls," those hard rubber yellow ones, and my swing sent them up into the highest part of my favorite maple tree.

I haven't planned it yet, but I think that my next practoce will be a continuation of that "opening up" of the left arm, the way Tom Bertrand describes it, and see how accurate and consistent and long I can get it.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Deep into the Shot

This title comes from that Ernie Els video on YouTube that I've mentioned several times in these posts, and I've been able to reach this point in the evolution of a good swing by assiduously practicing the left arm alone drill, which I learned from an online instructional video, in which, according to the pro giving the instruction, a great exemplar was Johnny Miller. "Back in the day," the pro said.

The pro said these words a couple of times, and each time, I pictured Miller, in his TV commentator's chair at PGA events wincing at being relegated to golf's ancient history. In my case, as the eager pupil, my mind skipped back three decades or so to the period when Miller was playing, and I was watching him on TV. The pro could hardly have picked a better exemplar for me. The pro also mentioned that when Miller practiced this drill, he was hitting his seven-iron about 170 yards, a distance that seems incredible to me. I tried it the range once or twice and couldn't hit the ball more than probably sixty or seventy yards, tops. In my backyard, with practice balls, distance didn't matter, anyway. I just wanted to uncover more secrets behind an efficient swing.

After about a month of constantly working this drill into my daily practice, I'm no more closer to hitting a real ball 170 yards, but that doesn't deter me or discourage me at all. My left arm alone swing has become much, much better. I can consistently hit the ball straight, with nice trajectory, and with some nice control of the release to get a little drawing action on the ball. I hasten to add that this is in my backyard, with plastic or Callaway soft rubber practice balls. I have no idea whether I would feel as competent, yet, with real balls, Next time I'm at the range, however, would be a good time to test the left arm alone swing.

In my backyard, though, it feels great. And in the video below, I wanted to see what kind of difference the drill was making in my full swing. To check the plane of the swing, I like to video from behind, as you'll see at the beginning of the video. Everything looks pretty good here. As Don Trahan likes to teach the takeaway and backswing, you want to feel as though you're taking the club back into the mitt of a baseball catcher behind you, and then you want to continue bringing the club "up the tree." So the takeaway and backswing look OK to me. From this camera placement, you can't really see "deep into the shot." For that, you need the camera shooting from in front of you.

During this practice session off the mat, I was using a nine-iron and the Callaway soft rubber balls, hitting from a flagstone walk in the front of my property, which gave me about sixty-eight yards straight ahead of me to hit into (I paced it off). The reason I'm using a nine-iron, instead of my heretofore usual seven, is that I'm starting to hit the ball farther. From this spot on my walkway, I'd be hitting some seven-irons out into the main road. You can see from the swing my concern for distance. My arm speed is too fast, and there's not much follow-through. It's a familiar sight to me. As a neophyte, I've always been too concerned with hitting the ball. Until recently, my swing was basically over at impact. I've advanced beyond that, I think, but I really haven't yet discovered the end of the swing. That happens tomorrow.

Today, however, I must say that I feel as though I'm killing the ball. I can feel the clubhead at impact and making a really good, solid, "Whack!" And then the ball goes sailing off, generally hooking, way up into that maple tree. If that tree weren't in the way, my nine irons would be flying around fifty to sixty yards. Translated, that means that, if these balls go about a third of the way a real ball does (which, I think, I read about these Callaway balls when I first got them), then I'd be hitting a nine-iron about 150-180 yards. The thought of that kind of distance elated me. That would me, I told myself, that my eight-iron could go around 180-190, seven 190, six 200, five 210, and so on. These are great distances for an amateur, and distance is one of the ways I calculated the efficiency of my swing. For a long time, I've thought that if I can't hit a seven-iron at least 170, then something is wrong with the swing. Now, I seemed to have solved my problem with distance.

The swing still is too rushed, as you can see. After viewing the video, the goal of my next practice session is simply to calm down. Swing in a more relaxed way, and follow through all the way. With this in mind I looked up D. J. Trahan on YouTube and saw a good example of how easy the pros seem to swing. Els is my other prime model of a fluid, yet powerful, swing. After watching my video today, I knew what I needed to work on tomorrow. And the hook.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Transfer to the Full Swing 2

Starting with the left arm alone drill, I worked on several aspects of the swing. First, I wanted the plane to be correct. Next, I wanted to bow my left wrist on the backswing and at the top of the swing. Third, I wanted to bring down my left arm, following my hip and shoulder turn, and, last, I wanted to release with the left wrist deep into the swing and then continue all the way through the follow-through.

As you can see in the video, in the left arm alone drill, I have a good swing plane. Along with the bowed wrist at impact, the swing (when it works) snaps right at the bottom of the swing arc and continues all the way through and around over my shoulders.

It's getting better. Better all the time. And that's a good thing!

Several golf influences are shaping my swing and my swing thoughts. One is Shawn Clement, whose videos on YouTube are among the best instruction you will find there. His relaxed, rhythmical swing is a good one to try to emulate, and that's what I've been doing the last few days. Then, I signed up for Don Trahan's free 10 emails, and that turned out to yield some good information, two tips in particular. The first was about the takeaway. Don encourages his students to imagine a baseball catcher behind them and to swing the club back into the catcher's mitt. From there, Don says, "Swing up the tree," again, calling on our visual imagination to help us with the swing plane on the way to the top of the swing. The second tip was really more of a revelation to me. It's his email video with the topic of "Kinetics," and in it he says,

When we look at the motion of efficient golfers on 3 D motion capture systems or videotape, it appears that they are “holding” the club shaft in a cocked position deep into the downswing. Many amateurs, in an attempt to create more power, try to emulate this action. What you have to understand is that efficient golfers do not manufacture or try to hold this cocked position. The arms accelerating around the axis of the trunk on the downswing create this club lag or cocked position. When the arms decelerate before impact, speed is transferred to the club. The club accelerates and the angle between the arms and club shaft increases rapidly into impact.

If I had ever thought about the relationship between arm speed and clubhead speed, or the teaching tips I've come across often about hand speed compared to clubhead speed, I've definitely lost them. When I read Don's paragraph, I literally stopped in my mental tracks. What an idea! Of course, that's how it must work, I thought to myself. And for the last few days, that's become a practice goal: to start to get the feel of the clubhead lagging behind until my hands get in the hitting zone, and then letting my hands slow down and using the release to throw the clubhead around the swing arc at an incredible speed. My efforts to do this will be the subject of the next post.

And the last influence is that Ernie Els video where he talks about letting the club lag deep into the shot. He shows how, when you start to cock your wrists on the backswing, on the way to the top, a box-like shape forms among the upper arm, forearm, and club shaft. He shows how he likes to keep that shape to the top of the swing and then deep into the downswing. He says that it "Keeps you in the shot."

In the next post, I'll describe (with video) my attempts to get "deep into the shot."

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Transfer to the Full Swing

After all these days of practicing the left arm alone drill, I found that whatever I have learned from that doesn't automatically transfer to the full swing. It took some thinking and some practice and some videotaping. And beyond that, going back to the full swing also reminded me of how much I still have to learn, even though I consider myself very near my goal of learning a good golf swing.

First of all, during the left arm alone drill, I started out hitting a mixture of good and bad shots. As I started to get warmed up, the shots started to become more predictable, more of what I wanted. But, as I always do, I tinkered with the swing and found that when I felt as though I were leading with my left wrist, the shot would invariably pop off the club with a nice, solid feel, and it would go exactly where I was aiming. Once I realized this, I started concentrating on adding that to the swing, and immediately, I was hitting balls—all of them, one after another—right at my target. It was so consistent and dependable and good that it made me laugh to myself.

Really, it was just "lag and lead," as I've said before in these posts. But when you're learning, there are things you remember and things you forget. Then you have to re-learn the things that you forgot. Fortunately, that's easier than learning them the first time. The second time around, you recognize the problem earlier, and you know what the solution is. This time, I just remembered what I heard Camilo Villegas say in some YouTube video.

Gathering up my Callaway balls in the snow suddenly made me realize that this snow, in this very cold, consistently dry weather, looks and feels just like kosher salt. It's as if Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind and of winter, had dumped a box all over my yard. I can walk back and forth across it and it doesn't change. It doesn't melt, it doesn't change color, it doesn't pack down. It's definitely mythical.

Then came another "Aha!" moment. As I was examining the way I approach the ball— after turning my shoulders and then dropping my arms, trying not to rush, and finally releasing through impact and into the follow-through—I suddenly remembered a video of Ernie Els talking about the swing while he's practicing on a turf hitting range. That changed the course of the practice session. I wanted to see if I could do that, and finished the session trying to swing the way Els recommends. As I started to get used to it, I could see the superior results. I was hitting the ball higher and farther, though I have some work to do on accuracy (I was pulling the ball left a bit too much and with too much hook), but by the end of practice, as the afternoon was approaching 4:30PM and the sun was setting, I was feeling pretty good. I was hitting the ball solid and it was going right at my target, that big Norway Maple in the backyard.

When I came inside to capture the video, I had a Don Trahan video in my email inbox, with the topic of "Kinetics," and in it he says,

When we look at the motion of efficient golfers on 3 D motion capture systems or videotape, it appears that they are “holding” the club shaft in a cocked position deep into the downswing. Many amateurs, in an attempt to create more power, try to emulate this action. What you have to understand is that efficient golfers do not manufacture or try to hold this cocked position. The arms accelerating around the axis of the trunk on the downswing create this club lag or cocked position. When the arms decelerate before impact, speed is transferred to the club. The club accelerates and the angle between the arms and club shaft increases rapidly into impact.

I thought, "That is so good!" And I made a mental to note that this deceleration of the arms at impact and through the ball will be one of my focal points tomorrow. Another will be turning through around my spine a bit longer, instead of popping up to see where my beautiful shot went. At the same time, I want to extend the follow-through. It looks as if it quits a little too soon. However, on the plus side, everything looks pretty good compared to the way I was swinging at the range just a few weeks ago.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- What It Really Looks Like

I've been writing about how valuable the left arm alone drill is, adding a few illustrative videos, in order to encourage you to try it. The video here will help you realize what a tough drill this is. Maybe in previous videos, you've gotten the impression that this drill is a piece of cake, and if you can't do it, then there's something wrong with you. Well, this post is meant to correct that mistaken impression.

First of all, I hope it is abundantly clear by now that I fall into that over-populated category of golfers who have zero aptitude for the game. What they have, instead, is an obsession. There's quite a difference. Rather than describing what that chasm looks like, let's focus, instead, on how golfers like me, who struggle more than others with the game, can hope to play well and score in the seventies.

The obvious answer is that we have to practice more than the gifted golfers with whom we are often paired. And not only that, but we have to practice with a plan. As a semi-accomplished pianist, I know how carefully planned practice can produce more immediate results. It's not how many hours you put in. It's how you spend those hours. Anyone who has accomplished anything in their chosen field will tell you the same thing.

In this video, you'll see me start out hitting the first ball perfectly. Right away, as in Greek tragedy, you know that I'm set up for a fall. I think I hit another one almost perfectly, suggesting that I really know what I'm doing. But in the rest of the video, you'll see that my percentages are not that good. And, in addition, I hit some terrible balls.

Remember that I've been practicing this drill for probably a month by now, and I feel really good about it. When you start, I'm telling you right now that you're going to be really awful! If there is any drill that will discourage the casual golfer, this is it! You're going to have to break down your one-arm swing to the barest essentials, and you're going to have to put up with the worst swings of your life! If you're like me, you're going to wonder if you should consider going into your living room and reading a good book instead.

But if you're a fighter, if you are persistent, if you are determined to get a grip on this game, then you will ignore all the negative messages that this drill will send you, and you will focus, instead, on the distant goal of developing a great swing. It's way off in the distance, as we know. As a matter of fact, you can't even see it from where you are. But you know that somewhere, way out there in the hazy, blue future, your ideal swing is waiting for you. This would be a good time to review your memory of music and recall what Ringo tells us about singing the blues:

You know it don't come easy.

This post is intended to give you confidence that you, too, can learn a good golf swing. I know I say "you, too," gratuitously, since I haven't really accomplished it yet, but I feel I'm right on the cusp, and I know that with all the hard and consistent practice I've put into learning the swing, it's going to come to me. At this point, I'm not concerned with how much ultimate distance or how much ultimate accuracy I'm going to have. As we all know, the pros are different from the rest of us. We can use their examples as models to shoot for, but they're just general guidelines. As long as I'm relatively close, I'll be satisfied. If K.J. Choi can hit a seven-iron around 175 yards with accuracy, and I can approach that, in some acceptable way, then I know I'm on the right track, and my swing is where it should be.

Split Screen Video

In my last post I wrote, "If I can do it with my video software, I'll try to do a side-by-side video soon that shows my swing as it was not too long ago compared to what it looks like now." In the last two days, I learned how to do split-screen video editing, which you can see in the video below. I took two clips from that New Year's Eve Reality Check video and two clips from the videos I posted in early December. Seeing my swing at a three-week interval is instructive.

First, it confirmed some thoughts I already had after viewing my swing video two days ago: the backswing plane had dropped, the top of the swing crossed over the target line, the downswing is a bit too rushed, and I come out of the swing too early. All of this is pretty obvious in the split-screen view. Another thing that I wouldn't have noticed is the difference in swing tempo, but I attribute that to the different kind of hitting I'm doing in the clips. The other day I was hitting those Callaway balls that I like so much, while in early December, when there wasn't any snow on the ground, I was hitting my solid white plastic Wilson practice balls.

Because the plastic balls are so light (and many are cracked and misshapen after months and months of hitting), I was swinging in a very relaxed and unselfconscious way, not thinking about distance at all, just trying to feel a good swing. With the Callaway balls, which are made of some kind of soft rubber and which will take spin like a real golf ball, I was definitely thinking about distance and direction, too. You can see it in my swing—the downswing is definitely quicker and more aggressive.

In addition to highlighting these physical aspects of the swing, the split-screen also suggests a subtler realization, namely that learning a golf swing does not take a linear path; it is not a series of positive steps, each one representing an improvement. In the split-screen, you can see that I'm certainly developing a better swing, but you can also see that I need to go back and revisit certain parts of it that actually looked better in early December. It's good to recognize this recursive nature of developing a good swing. While the general trend is toward improvement, there are going to be times when the swing lapses back to some bad habits that you thought you had put behind you.

Now that I think of it, I've often felt reversals of this kind. Some days the swing feels good and what I'm working on seems to represent continued progress. There are other days, as we all know, when I make some little change, try something a little bit different, and then it seems as though the whole swing has been ruined. That's the way I often felt a few weeks ago, back in late November and early December, when I talked about shanking the ball all the time. That was really frustrating. We all know days and periods like that. But we keep coming out to practice day after day, and we look for answers, and we go back to fundamentals, and we search out instruction videos on YouTube, and we read articles.

Finally, learning a golf swing is like sailing directly into a stiff breeze. You expect that some waves will knock you off your course, but, with patience rather than panic, you waggle the tiller, you give the wind some time to fill your sails, you wait for your craft to regain her composure, and then, with gratitude, you watch as she slowly starts coming around and once again her bow is pointing right at your landmark on the horizon. Eventually, you'll reach your destination. Borne by wind and wave, you've chosen to travel with Zephyrus, not Evinrude. In golf and sailing, you can't be in a rush.