Saint Patrick's Day

As you'll see in the video below, St. Patrick's Day in the Northeast was beautiful—about 60 degrees and sunny and all our snow melted. It won't be long now before the local course open and we can go out and see how all the practice over the winter pays off on the course. Personally, I'm very optimistic. My swing feels really good and looks really good to me on video, and when I go to the range, as I did the other day, the swing holds up with real balls. I can't wait to start hitting off real turf.

For the past couple of weeks or so, I've been working mainly on the follow-through, trying to complete the whole swing. This is the last piece of my swing-building. Everything else is in place.

I've decided that hitting plastic practice balls in my backyard and into my driveway makes the most sense for me. The balls give me good feedback, and hitting them is free. Each day, I hit hundreds. This way, I can make various changes from swing to swing and instantly see the results. It's also easy to set up my camcorder and watch my swing whenever I want to.

The video shows that I have limited flexibility going back and following through. Still, you can see some differences from my swing weeks earlier. To start, on some of the swings, I'm concentrating on keeping my head still, and you can definitely see that. On all the swings, I'm trying to keep the swing going, all the way to its conclusion. You can see this, too. This full follow-through involves releasing the left hand, but also firing through with the right side. When both moves happen simultaneously, the result if fantastic. And I can actually do this, from time to time.

At this point in the evolution of my swing, I can see that complete relaxation is required. I also see how the left hand is supposed to react at release and how the right hand fires through, giving the swing more clubhead speed. I'm able to keep pretty good balance and to keep the flex in my right leg on the backswing and keep my head over the ball.

Today, for example, in addition to these fine points, I started trying to incorporate the Tour Tempo idea, that is, speeding up my swing for maximum distance. It wasn't too hard to do, since, at this point in my development, I have pretty good club control. And instantly, I could see the ball going farther.

It seems to me that now, to get ready to break 90 and then to break 80, I need to work on a consistent swing, putting all these thoughts together so that I don't have to think about them one-by-one during a round. That would be impossible. But I'm very close to having the swing that Hogan promised me when I began reading his book. I couldn't feel more gratified. Pretty soon, I'll be able to write about my first forays out onto the early spring turf.