Words without Pictures

After spending a futile hour or more trying to capture my analog video on my multimedia machine, I gave up and decided to write a post without any video. It's too bad because viewers could compare this video with earlier ones and see how the swing is coming along. The good news is that the swing is definitely worth watching!

It's been quite a while since I've posted, mainly because my swing has been changing so much. I knew that any post would be outdated by the next one, and I didn't have time to do that many posts. Now, however, I have some time to describe what's happened to my swing since last spring.

Over the summer, I took a series of seven lessons with Max Galloway at Mohansic Golf Course in Yorktown, NY, and Max was great. Every lesson, where I thought I had made progress that would impress anybody, Max would say, after I made one swing, something like, "You hit the mat first." And that was late in the season. Usually, he would target my weight shift and my left hip. Whatever he said, it was always something very basic and fundamental. And his tip always led me to discover other, more advanced, understandings.

Partly because I felt I was dealing with fundamental swing mechanics, but also because I knew that my swing needed so much work, I stopped playing on the course and just focused on lessons and practice. And every practice involved both the range and the short game, where I would go to the putting green and practice putting and chipping, and sometimes, pitching. It was a good combination, one that I think produced good progress over the whole summer.

By the fall, and even past Thanksgiving, I felt excited at a completely new understanding of some basics that I thought I had learned a long time ago. One was using the fingers of the left hand to hold the club. It turns out that I understood that only partially. I was still pressing my fingers against the left hand palm and losing much of the flexibility and whip that a good swing produces. I also revisited the idea of the right hand, at the top of the swing, facing the sky, and on the downswing, inverting and pushing the club through. I started appreciating the one arm swing drills again, both left arm and right.

And as I began to get the feel of holding the release until late into the downswing, I started to feel, in a completely new way, how the left wrist supinates and pronates, as Hogan describes in his book. And then I started to understand how the left arm coordinates with the right to produce maximum power. At the range, when I got everything right, I felt as though I was hitting the ball as far as many pros do. I can remember hitting a nine iron about 150-155, and the lower irons correspondingly farther. And with a good degree of accuracy. The driver needs work, but I felt that it could wait.

I especially liked swing the PW. With its extra clubhead weight, I could really feel the whole arc of the swing. And that was very gratifying. I could hit really high shots, right at my target, at about the right distance, and with minimal effort.

So my plan is to continue to work mainly with the PW in order to get all the essentials in place. Of course, I always like to have fun and hit the other clubs. I'll continue to do that. And when I feel as though I'm starting to get the feel of that late release, then I think I can start to work seriously with the driver. It's the same swing, but because a player expects distance as a reward, the mechanics change. As my first pro told me, with the driver, you have "to be more patient." Let it go a little bit longer, because of the length of the shaft.

I couldn't do any swinging today because of a blizzard we just had, but I'll update soon as I get to the range and see the results of holding the release and whipping the club through as the left shoulder pulls up. I'm definitely on the right track. I'm also thinking of signing up for a series of lessons over the winter at a nearby range in Elmsford. That way, I'll be able to keep my learning going and also get the advice of a new professional.

First, a little snow has to melt around here.