Watching Gary as Beethoven, in the YouTube scene where Beethoven visualizes the origins of the Ninth Symphony (which he couldn't actually hear, at this point in his life), I thought about the golf swing. It is just like the music that Beethoven couldn't hear. The swing is part of you. It is not external. It is not an action that you impose on an external object. That is what we call practice. Instead, a good swing is a performance, fully-formed and autonomous. You consciously start it, but then it proceeds naturally, independent of most conscious decisions (the golfer may be vaguely aware of the quality of the swing-in-progress and may attempt a quick correction or a further relaxation, if the swing feels really good). In the same way, Gilels lets his fingers produce music. As my first golf teacher said, "You make the swing, and the ball is just in the way." Now—more and more—I'm learning the meaning of what Mark Polchinski told me then.
That thought produced a flashback to my teenage years, when I was taking piano lessons from Vladzia Mashke, a pianist from the Russian school, whose pronouncements about music were way beyond me then. But one of the things I remember her saying to me was that "the music is in you." Whenever she said that to me, leaning closer and speaking in a serious tone, I didn't understand her at all and paid no attention to her when she talked like this. To me, the music was the sheet music in front of me. I was merely a stenographer, translating symbols on the page to the keys on a piano. Now, almost fifty years later, I'm starting to understand what she meant.
In my recent practice, I'm getting the same feeling I had when I played the piano seriously and could feel the music in me. Each day as I practice and continue to develop my swing, I work on beginning and continuing and finishing a complete arc. As my pro at Mohansic, Max Galloway, put it, the swing wants to make its full circle, and the golfer's challenge is to learn to get out of the way and allow the swing to happen.
Thanks to Gary Oldman and Vladzia Mashke and Max Galloway, I'm slowly learning to let go. And it feels great! Each day now brings another improvement, a further loosening of my grip and a new level of relaxation and a clearer appreciation of those familiar basics of instruction: use your arms and hands just to hold the club and use the big muscles of the lower body and the trunk to generate an efficient and repeatable swing.
In the short clip below, I'm doing a drill I just started using and which produces good results in a hurry. I heard Tiger Woods on YouTube talk about how he hated it when Butch Harmon would have him do this drill because "you can't fake it." I know what he means. You feel every little flaw in the downswing with this drill.
