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.

Come Together, Yeah!

Do you have the 1969 Abbey Road album? If not, you're missing something great. Check it out. Get it on vinyl, if you can. The developments in my swing lately have reminded me of the cut Come Together. To me, it now refers to three exemplars that have changed my swing in a significant way.

The first lead to my recent improvement was a pivotal lesson with the great pro at Mohansic public course in Yorktown, Max Galloway. I've been studying with him since last year, and he has been instrumental in the improvement I've made since last summer. In my last lesson with him, last weekend, he detected two problems with my swing. One was with my weight shift, the other with my release.

He said he likes to move his weight to the forward foot to the middle of the ball of the foot. That's as close as I can get it. Basically, you want to stride forward to the inside of the wide part of your front foot.

Second, he said that he was concerned about my arm-chest connection, and he described the fulcrum-like action of the left arm against the chest to create great clubhead speed in the hitting zone. This is something he told me last summer, but it was something I forgot about. When I asked him how to practice this, he said, "The 8 to 4 drill."

I did that for a few days, both at the range and in my backyard with plastic balls, and the difference was fantastic. I began to feel how real players generated their clubhead swing, making the golf swing look effortless.

Since then, as I've been practicing what Max told me, I saw some Justin Rose instructional videos on YouTube and noticed how effortless his swing looked. Then I watched some more lessons on Revolution Golf, the Paul Wilson Website, where I noticed, again, how effortless Paul's swing looks. Even though I've been very happy with my swing lately, I still wondered why these swings look different from mine.

Today, I think I found at least part of the answer. Swinging with plastic balls in my backyard, I suddenly felt what these guys, like Max and Paul Wilson and Justin Rose, do in their swings. And it reminded me of what Hogan says about the "hitting zone." It turns out that when you make your coil and uncoil, the clubhead develops its own speed, and then when you get your hands down toward the bottom of their arc, the clubhead is traveling very fast, and then--all of a sudden-- you allow the clubhead to release by letting your forearms go and turn over, then, "Boom!" (as John Madden perfectly captures the instant), the clubhead explodes through the hitting zone, taking the ball with it. It's magical. And not difficult. Once I got the concept, I could do this pretty consistently. I was using a pitching wedge for this practice and then switched to the driver. More on that club in a subsequent post. But the driver looked pretty good with the plastic balls.

Take a look at the video and see what you think. I'm happy with the way it looks now. You'll see me practicing Max's 8-to-4 drill, and then some other backyard swings. Notice how I'm not jerking the club through anymore. It's starting to look like a swing! Just what we're all after!

Home on the Range

As I said in my last post, I went out on the course at Mohansic with a friend and felt as though I had a swing I could use. That turned out to be definitely true. What also became immediately obvious—no surprise here—was that while I may be at home on the range, I am not comfortable on the course.

The first hole exposed my inexperience. I hit a nice drive, right down the middle of the fairway, a dogleg left and a blind tee-shot, but not terribly long. Having no idea of my distances, I hit a lob wedge for my second shot, right at the pin but twenty yards or so short, which was OK with me, since I definitely wanted to avoid any encounter with the two bunkers on either side of the green. I chipped on and then prepared to putt. I could tell immediately that this was not like putting on the practice green behind the clubhouse. I felt stiff and nervous, and could not feel the clubhead at all. Luckily, I two-putted for bogey and was glad to have such an easy start.

Putting really became a problem on the next hole, where I found myself on the green in two, with a (let's say, since I didn't pace it off) 40 foot putt. The first putt went about two-thirds of the way, and I missed the second. Three putts for a bogey. Whatever comfort zone I normally felt on the practice green was gone on the course.

On the next hole, a slightly downhill lie exposed my range habits. Even though I knew the lie was downhill, I still didn't align myself correctly and with a pitching wedge hit the ball way fat. Another bogey. The rest of the front nine was pretty similar. No good putts, but I was doing OK from tee to green. In with a 45. The back nine was a different story.

The first blow-up happened on ten, where I pulled my tee shot left into the trees. When I found it, the ball was lying on top of three rotten pine cones, and the best I could do was to chip out with a seven-iron. From the rough, I pulled a hybrid and lost that ball. I dropped a ball and hit a pitching wedge left of the green, across the cart path, into some thick rough. About three strokes later, I was finally on the green and probably two- or three-putted (I can't remember because by that time I was keeping track any more).

On the eleventh, I hit probably the best shot of the round. After a drive right down the middle and just short of the barber shop pole at about 200 yards out, I hit a three-metal right at the green. I bounced a few times and rolled on, pin high on the left. Naturally, I left the first putt short and took two more putts to get down. Another bogey.

The round basically continued in this way. A few decent shots balanced by a few pulled shots and no putting. I ended the round by pulling a five-iron left of the eighteenth green and losing that ball. then pitching into the sand trap (I needed the bunker practice anyway), and several more putts.

Total for the round was probably somewhere around 110. And this is for somebody who now has a golf swing. What do most people score? Or do they even bother? The round didn't discourage me, however. I felt I could hit some good shots, and once I settled down with my putting, I could save strokes. Now, I need to get out and play.

Swing! Swing! Swing!

Before we go any farther, you have to read Larry David's piece, "Fore!" in the July 4^th issue of The New Yorker. Hilarious! This material shows he's one of us. You'll find yourself in familiar territory, once you get past his allusions to Kűbler-Ross. "So you hit down to make it go up and swing easy to make it go far?" And then he ends with another nonsensical idea—hitting blindfolded. "I have a very good feeling about it. Very good."

Now, back to the present, where I have some ground to cover. Since my last post, some good things have happened to my swing. From the Depths of Depression and the Salt Flats of Frustration, I have attained solid footing in the Confidence of Competence. I solved my shanking problem and discovered the Missing Link in my swing, which gave me a complete swing and reminded me of the great January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman band performance at Carnegie Hall. Benny, Jess Stacy on piano, Gene Krupa on drums, Harry James on trumpet—just a few of the virtuosos in that band, which laid down a musical standard that night.

In my last post, I was ready to quit. I had spent a completely fruitless visit to the range with nothing to show for it and didn't understand the point of my last lesson. I felt I couldn't even hit a ball, now after four and a-half years. Within twenty-four hours, my clubs and bag and balls and all accessories would be on Ebay, with no minimum.

Then, the miraculous happened. I have to think that the Golf Gods spoke to me and planted the idea of going to the range one more time the next morning.

Once there, I just wanted to make swings. Leave all the thinking and the doubting and just make swings. And, surprisingly, that worked. Not only did it work, but in one serendipitous move, I found out how to rotate the hips to bring the club through. This is the most amazing breakthrough! When you lead with the hips, the lower body movement brings the left arm down to the bottom of its arc, at which point the club releases automatically. The clubface is squared up with no consciousness required. Later practice showed me that if I continue the rotation, past where the hips are fully rotated, and use the upper body to sling the left arm around its arc, that's where you get that easy, full swing that you see good golfers make. You can actually feel the lower body bringing the left arm along its arc, and when you feel that, you know you are making a great swing. I'll try to get some video of my latest swing so that you can see what I'm talking about.

This all happened early this week, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. By then, I had made a tee-time at Mohansic to play eighteen holes with a friend, assured that I knew the stroke and could play a round with confidence. In the next post, I'll relate what happened during that round. I blew up on a couple of holes in the back nine and stopped keeping score, but in spite of those horrendous swings, my play was pretty encouraging.

One of the main lessons was that hitting on the range is not always like hitting on the course. The other lesson—and probably the main one—was that I have to learn to make the swing and trust the swing and get over my habit of trying to hit the ball and hit it harder if I have a longer shot. I learned the Larry David lesson: "Swing easy to make it go far."