Learning to Draw and Learning to Swing

It is almost certain—indeed, beyond doubt—that most people and most golfers never engage in the struggle that anyone who can draw with a pencil or swing a golf club efficiently has undertaken. Go to a driving range or observe those around you when you play a round. Practically no one knows how to swing.

At my course, Mohansic, in Yorktown, NY, and at my favorite driving range, Yorktown Baseball and Golf, the best swingers are the high school or college players who come out to practice or play during their spring season. Everyone else stinks. When I have a lesson with Brian Lamberti, at Golfworx in Baldwin Place, NY, Brian usually does his own practice hitting after we finish, and I always watch him. No one else is in his universe! No one knows how to swing! It's amazing! All these people, spending their money, carrying their golf bags, and none of them knows how to swing. How does one explain that phenomenon? And it certainly must classify as a phenomenon.

Of course, the same is true of tennis. I used to play tennis seriously, and I can tell a skilled tennis player at a glance, just the way a golf pro can tell at a glance that I'm a beginner. At Club Fit, in Jefferson Valley, NY, where I have a membership, I never see anyone who's any good, except when the club hosts a sanctioned tournament. Yet all these people come out in their tennis clothing and rackets and shoes, and they poke at the ball. I wonder how this can be fun for these people. Since they can't hit the ball, they get very little exercise, and since they can't hit the ball, they can't get much satisfaction out of playing games, let alone sets. What is wrong with them? Maybe they simply crave something social, and this is an alternative to playing cards in the club's lounge.

Recently, Adam Gopnik's piece in The New Yorker (June 27, 2011) struck a chord: his difficulty in learning to draw corresponded to my difficulty in learning to swing. And as I read his account, I mentally drew parallels.

To begin with, in drawing, as in learning a golf swing, there is the problem of dealing with constant failure. In drawing, when he drew an errant line with his pencil, "...you could always erase and remake; the eraser was the best friend a would-be artist had." In my parallel case, after a wild hook, I could just use my club to ease another range ball into place and get ready to make a better swing.

Then, there is the teacher or golf pro. Jacob (Adam's teacher) would say things like, "Just make tilts in time.... Image that there's a clock overlaying what you're drawing." In a similar, Yoda-like way, my pro, Max, will say, "Use your fulcrum.... The swing is basically just a simple lever system." I don't know what Adam did when he got this kind of gnostic advice, but I went home and refreshed, on Wikipedia, my understanding of a simple machine.

Eventually, after much practice and failure, Adam begins to see some accomplishments in his drawings, limited and "terrible" as they seemed to him. The process revealed itself to him, and it sounds remarkably similar to learning a golf swing.

In truth, the rhythm of fragment and frustration, of erasure and error and slow emergence of form, was familiar. I'd hoped the drawing would be an experience of resistance and sudden yielding, like the first time you make love, where first it's strange and then it's great, and afterward always the same. Instead, drawing turning out to be like every other skill you acquire: skating, sauce-making, guitar-playing. Ugly bits slowly built up, discouragingly not at all like what you want, until it is. You learn, laboriously, the thumping octave bass with the chord two octaves above, and suddenly you are playing 'Martha My Dear.' And then you have it and you play along with the record and are half sad and half happy: that's all the magic of it? The bad news, I was finding out, was that drawing was just like everything else you learned to do. The good news was that drawing was like everything else, and even I could learn to do it.

"Even I could learn to do it." That is the premise of this blog. The golf swing is difficult, but even I can learn to do it. And I'm getting closer. Like Adam, I learned from failure. And lately, I'm not thinking so much about failure as I am about success and efficiency. More and more, I'm able to hit balls out there straight and farther than before. I've got the swing. Now I want to make it repeatable and powerful. The repeatable part is coming along pretty well and so is the distance part of the swing. There are huge deviations, however, and each evening when I practice at the range, I'm working on reducing those deviations. Fewer balls pulled left or blocked right. More balls hit to the max. In practice each day, I accomplish something lasting and positive. As Adam says, "Skill must always be the skeleton of accomplishment." This blog is all about that skeleton.