Learning a Good Golf Swing

Second Baseman's Throw

2011-11-13T18:16:00.003-05:00

Anyone who has read Hogan's Five Lessons knows my reference. In the hitting zone, the right hand is laid back and the right elbow is leading the right hand. It looks simple, but it's taken me six years to get to this point, and I used to play baseball. This is such an important concept. This is where most of your power comes from. This is where you have to be in order to extend the right arm, as all swing instructions advocate. This is how you get to that post-impact V that we players all try to emulate. This is how you get that tremendous clubhead speed that whips the clubhead around its arc and finishes somewhere behind your back. All these good things&emdash;all golf swing clicés&emdash; will happen once you work this arm motion into your swing. And when you do this, you will take a place in the golf pantheon: only good golfers have this sequence in their swing. You will immediately separate yourself from almost every other golfer you'll run across at the range or on the course. You will establish yourself as a real golfer.

In the video below, you'll see me working on this move from several different postions, both in my back yard and then, finally, at the range, where&emdash;when I can do it&emdash;I hit my three-wood a good 220 or so carry uphill at the range. And straight. It's really quite amazing. Waiting is the key. You have to give your lower body time to turn, instead of trying to initiate things with your arms. And the feeling I try to get to is turning my upper body so that my left arm can use my left ribcage as a fulcrum on which to lever the left arm and really fire the clubhead through the hitting zone. I'm not near perfectly this yet, but, already, I can see the results, which are quite exciting. With this move, I can hit the ball respectably.

Use Big Muscles

2011-10-01T21:02:00.003-04:00

Over the past few weeks, I've been making major changes in my swing, mainly as the result of a lesson I had with Max Galloway at Mohansic Golf Course, a lesson that started me thinking about what happens, exactly, just before and through and after impact. I've realized that I had never really understood how the complete swing works.

Now, I think I'm starting to get it. I'm starting to feel my core—lower body and torso—turning and pulling my arms through the swing. The interesting thing, for me, is that practicing pitching and chipping and putting showed me how the full swing works. As Paul Wilson of Revolution Golf, advocates, the hands and arms are passive, while the engine of the lower body and torso provide the torque that propels the clubhead.

I've also been viewing Jim McLean's videos on YouTube and in my email subscription to Revolution Golf. His videos have been very powerful. It also helped that Max Galloway, my pro at Mohansic, know Jim and mentioned him to me in conversation.

Slowly, I'm putting the idea of using the big muscles. It's not easy. Especially for someone like me who's a control freak, full of tension and the exact opposite kind of personality suitable for golf.

I've decided that it's better for me to practice with plastic balls in my backyard than to hit hundreds of balls at the driving range on Route 202 in Yorktown. In my backyard, I can practice swinging without hitting any balls or hit plastic balls and not worry about distance or anything else. This kind of practice pays high dividends.

Aside from the full swing, I've also been practicing pitching with the yellow practice balls I've mentioned before, with satisfying results. And the pitching helps me understand the full swing.

To pitch well, I have to feel completely relaxed and allow my torso to bring my left arm through the hitting zone. I use the Mickelson hinge-and-hold method, and if I can relax and feel my upper body bringing the club around, I invariably get a good pitch. That's the kind of feeling I'm trying to establish in the full swing. And, after five years of study, I'm finally learning about creating the fastest part of the swing at the very end, from release through impact and on to follow-through. It's hard, and a lot of swinging without hitting a practice ball gives the best results.

See what my swing looks like now, both full-swing and pitch. You'll see there's more follow-through now in the full-swing, although it still slows down. Still, it's a lot better than before. And the pitch looks pretty good.

I think that in my next post I'll be talking about how I'm learning to use leverage and connection.

Immortal Beloved

2011-09-10T22:36:00.005-04:00

After dinner tonight, I wanted to finish listening to a recording of Emil Gilels playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, and as I listened, I thought I would search YouTube for Gilels and the Gary Oldman movie Immortal Beloved. The search, and the videos, reminded me that the golf swing, in several ways, resembles music.

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.

It's Getting Better All the Time!

2011-08-20T21:13:00.006-04:00

Every day now, when I practice, I feel the same optimism that the Beatles sang in their 1967 song on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I feel as though the golf swing is now revealing its secrets more cooperatively than before. There's less negativity (today I hit only one shank at the range) and more gratifying success.

In my putting and chipping, I'm starting to feel how using the upper body works to pull the left arm through, and I'm now starting to apply that principle to the full swing. So today, in my backyard practice and, then later, at the range, I worked on feeling the lower body turn and pull the left arm through to a point where I could release and use that leverage that Max talks about.

See what I've learned in the last one or two days.

And here's the same video with some lines superimposed to check various positions. In general, I like what I see, although my hands at the top are still too close to my head, and I have to drop them as I start down. I do notice that my head stays in its vertical spot pretty well. I don't know how that happened. One of the things about my swing is that I can do a good swing only now and then. The good swing is replaced, often, by variations where certain predictable things happen. For example, I pull the follow-through way to the left, or I lose my balance, or my release isn't quick enough, resulting in a push to the right. Or, certainly, I revert to old habits, typically pulling with my arms. I'm aware of that, and when that happens, on the next swing, I try to feel my left arm pushed against my ribs as I turn my body left. That's a key move and one that I want to feel more often. Also, the right elbow is flying out still. Today I worked with a head cover in my right armpit, which helped. I'll need to work that into my practice regimen.

Plastic and Progress

2011-08-20T14:44:00.003-04:00

In my last post, I showed a video of the state of my swing and ten comments about what I saw. Since then, over the past week, I've worked on some of the flaws by hitting plastic balls in the backyard, the kind with the big holes and soft plastic so they don't go very far. I videotaped often, and after three of four days, I was happy with the way the swing was beginning to look. See it below. Here are comments from last week.

Steeper backswing
Keep right leg flexed and reduce hip turn
Drop right arm at top -- straight down
Keep spine angle (I stand up)
Lower body -- legs -- rotate first and let arms follow
Hands stay back (my arms start moving too fast and too early)
Arm angle is pretty good on way down
Keep working on opening hips and holding lag
Keep right toes grounded
Do something with the follow-through so that the clubhead is on the swing plane

In the swing now, there are some notable improvements.

the swing plane is much better. I worked often on swinging the driver back and forth, without a ball, in order to get the feel of staying on plane.
I'm using my big muscles better and keeping the arms more passive. This involved learning to speed up the leverage that Max taught me with my left arm against my left upper ribcage.
That late speed with the left arm gives me that complete follow-through, something I've always lacked, mainly because by impact, I had always expended whatever clubhead speed I was able to generate.
Right knee is more flexed.

Now I'm going to work more on keeping the hips from turning so much, keeping the right knee flexed, and really relaxing my arms. One other thing I noticed is that on the backswing, my head moves away from the ball considerably. This is something Wayne DeFrancesco sees in his own swing and works on correcting.

To the Max!

2011-08-14T18:10:00.012-04:00

"OK. You're booked with The Max at 5:30 on Thursday." So did the staff member in the pro shop at Mohansic confirm my appointment for a lesson with Max Galloway at Mohansic Golf Course in Yorktown, NY. I wanted a progress report and a check of my putting. In my last lesson, Max gave me a great tip about using my left arm as a fulcrum that levers the club through the hitting zone. In my early practice, doing the 8-to-4 drill that Max gave me, I could tell that this tip was a great revelation for me. I could see that this movement of the left arm against my upper ribcage was how I could generate power that I never knew existed before. I think Max told me about this last summer, when I was taking a series of lessons with him, but, at the time, either I forgot about it or didn't understand it and then forgot about it. But now, it was a tip that came at the right time to a receptive audience.

This is a good example of what I've learned about taking lessons. I go to Mohansic for a lesson to take golf "To the Max!"

So I did the 8-to-4 drill every day for two weeks, feeling the benefits, and then decided that I had made good progress and could use an evaluation. At the same time, if Max could do it, I wanted him to look at my putting, which I also thought was looking much better.

The lesson went very well, and Max was very encouraging about both my swing and my putting. He had one comment on my swing, which was about the takeaway. He thought I was moving my arms back independent of my upper body. Immediately, I knew he was right. I've been conscious, lately, about my takeaway and the image of keeping the clubhead outside my hands. To do that, I'm sure I've been consciously using my arms to get to the position I wanted. Max was talking more about momentum. That would get me there and would continue and get me to the top of the backswing. Once again, Max pinpointed a discrete tip that really helped.

A few days later, at the Mohansic range, I videotaped my swing to see where I am. Here are the results.

As I watched the video a few times, I watched it and took notes.

Steeper backswing
Keep right leg flexed and reduce hip turn
Drop right arm at top -- straight down
Keep spine angle (I stand up)
Lower body -- legs -- rotate first and let arms follow
Hands stay back (my arms start moving too fast and too early)
Arm angle is pretty good on way down
Keep working on opening hips and holding lag
Keep right toes grounded
Do something with the follow-through so that the clubhead is on the swing plane

Because of rain today, I cancelled a tee-time with my son. Now that I've studied the state of my swing, I see that there is no rush to go out. Maybe in September.

Learning to Draw and Learning to Swing

2011-07-28T20:43:00.007-04:00

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!

2011-07-24T20:51:00.005-04:00

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

2011-07-02T21:30:00.003-04:00

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!

2011-07-02T18:21:00.006-04:00

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."

Shankopotamus Redux

2011-06-26T11:19:00.014-04:00

After my last post, Brian Lamberti, the other pro I've been seeing, called to see how I was doing, and I told him about my shanking problem. We scheduled a lesson for the next morning.

He watched me hit two wedges (which I thought I was hitting great) and said, with conviction, that my weight was on my toes and that unbalanced stance was causing the shanks. That diagnosis began a long conversation about posture and turning. After he left, I hit a couple hundred balls, just working on turning and balance and posture. Of course, this working on basics represented a huge regression. I had to forget about hitting full shots and focus, instead, on an abbreviated swing where I could pay attention to keeping my weight under my ankles and finishing with my chest forward and vertical over my left leg, the post around which I was turning.

After a break for a little while at home, until about 4:00, I remembered that I had to pick up my driver at Yorktown Baseball and Golf and that when I did, I could hit another hundred balls and do some more practice. While I hit (I hit only a couple of shanks, none of them as bad as the day before), I felt really good about the irons and hybrids. Even with a short swing, I was getting decent distance and, even more important, consistently accurate shots. I liked the way I felt and liked the way I looked at the end of the swing. I had my balance, my chest seemed to be erect, and my left arm had swung around my body over to the left side. I felt as though it must look something like the pros after they hit an iron shot for accuracy.

The 3-metal was a wreck. I continued to slice it and mis-hit it and hit the ground behind the ball, all kinds of swing problems. Out of curiosity, I tried the repaired driver a few times and actually hit one decent drive, after which I quit; ending on a good swing seemed more positive than pushing my luck by trying to hit one more drive.

After my hundred balls, I went over to Mohansic to practice the short game, which has become, be far, the practice I enjoy the most and which is the most rewarding for me. The putting felt great. I can see that I'm getting good touch in my hands. Observing Dave Stockton's advice, I hit with one ball and practice a complete putt every time I hit the ball. The long putts are the focal point of my putting practice, from, say, 25 feet up to 90 feet, with the primary goal of controlling speed and getting the ball to the hole without leaving it short, one of Stockton's fundamentals about putting (he always wants the putt to die at the hole but get to the hole and stay within 17 inches past it). Letting the back of the left wrist take care of the direction is another fundamental I keep in mind.

Lately, I've been practicing chipping with a 9- or 8-iron, following up on Brian Flanagan's suggestion during a recent lesson down at Fairview Golf Center in Elmsford. Today, I chipped with the lob wedge from thick grass to a short-side hole and then used a 9-iron to chip uphill across the green, just to a spot, working on rolling the ball consistently, probably about 60 or 70 feet. That felt awesome. I could really feel the similarity of the putting stroke and the chip, and I was able to chip ball after ball at the same spot and roughly the same distance, concentrating on using the toe of the club. As usual, a very satisfying hour or hour and a-half.

When I got home, though, the enormity of my predicament started to weigh on me. Here I am, I felt, four and a-half years into learning a golf swing, and I am really hitting like a good beginner. Nothing I'd want to take to the course, and no real competence with either the 3-metal or driver. The thought of just calling it quits seemed like a reasonable response to a completely hopeless situation, especially since this isn't the first time lately that the rhetorical question, "It's hopeless, isn't it?" has been running through my consciousness. It seems as though the more you learn about the swing, the more you realize how ignorant you are about it. The swing is a far horizon ahead of you, obscured by a slight haze (even on a clear day), reminiscent of a Cézanne Mont Sainte-Victoire landscape. The abrupt disappearance of apparent competence, or near competence, a week ago I'm finding hard on my ambition. Golf, in my musings, may be giving me a lesson in exactly how many disappointments and failures it takes to subdue one's hopes.

Like a minor god in classical mythology, Golf looks down on pale mortals with amusement. As King Lear says, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport." At least there's an end in sight, and, fortunately, we don't have to suffer the eternal futility of Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his boulder uphill. All we have to say to the Golf immortal is, "OK. You win." Easy. The problem is that golfers are nuts. The Golf gods must be crazy, and they make us crazy. We can't recognize an impossible situation when one squats right in front of our noses—in the correct posture and weight under the ankles. Completely oblivious, we show up at the practice tee or the driving range the next morning. That's where I'm headed now.

Shankopotamus

2011-06-20T19:54:00.003-04:00

"Read the rule book, shankopotamus!" Great TV ad. It's given my golfing coterie an epithet that we can use often. Even though I haven't been playing, I've noticed at the range that every once in a while I shank a few balls. Then I make some correction, and the problem disappears. Since my last lesson with Brian Flanagan at Fairview Golf Center in Elmsford, NY, shanking (if it occurred to me at all) was a distant, if amusing, memory.

On Saturday, I wanted Brian to talk to me about the driver. At the start of the lesson, he asked me how my swinging was going, and I said, "I'll show you," and hit a 9-iron, fortunately hit pretty well, really high and on target. Then I hit a driver, and Brian said, "That's not your 9-iron swing. You wanted to jerk the club down to the ball." I recognized that immediately, and we went through the rest of the lesson talking about a smooth, long, shallow swing, with a level hip turn.

The lesson over, I went to a nearby mat and hit 300 of the free balls that a lesson provides a student and worked on what Brian had taught me. After about 150 balls, I started to get the feel of a level hip turn, and then everything fell into place, giving me the misconception that I had leaped to another level of golf competence.

The next day, I happened to be near the Doral course in Purchase, NY, and I hit about 60 balls at the range, generally cracking the ball and starting to feel like a pro. I hit mostly 3-metals, since Brian had told me, "That's the last piece of the puzzle." If I could hit that repeatedly well, then I had learned the swing. I left Doral feeling really good.

Today, I went to my usual range at Yorktown Baseball and Golf to hit several hundred balls. In the morning, I reviewed a Dave Stockton DVD on the short game, and at the range I tried out what he says about hitting various short shots. At first, I hit the ball great. Wedges right on target, irons right at the flag 155 yards away. All Systems Go.

Then, I made the fatal -- or revelatory, considering the eventual outcome -- mistake of trying to hit low punch shots. All of a sudden, I started shanking the ball. Time after time and no matter which club I picked up. If I made a slight adjustment, I could hit a 9-iron or a 7-iron OK. But the 5-iron was recalcitrant. No matter what I did, I shanked it into the net on the right side of the range.

I actually began to panic. "What has happened to me?" I wondered. "How could I have hit the ball so well yesterday, and now, today, I can't hit it any better than a complete beginner?" "What gives?"

Finally, I saw Eric, who sometimes works at the desk, and a very good golfer, come out the front door where I could walk over and talk to him. Desperate for help, I did.

"Eric! What causes a shank?"

He explained that it's being off-plane and swinging the hosel into the ball ahead of the club face. I recognized that as my problem instantly. Earlier in my practice, I had been hooking many balls way left, and now I understood why. I was coming from way inside and either shanking or hooking.

So I went back to my mat, with the mirror behind me, and paid close attention to the plane of my downswing. It didn't take me long to solve the shanking problem. Pretty soon, I had demonstrated to myself that I could hit the ball cleanly and straight. Then I started working on fades. I never really got it, but I could feel that I was close. And I thought that I need to go back to YouTube and find some instructional videos on shaping shots.

Three hundred balls and several hours after I started, once again, I felt as though I might be competent in the swing. Tomorrow, at the range, I'll see. But it felt like a good day's work.

Mania and Depression

2011-06-15T20:55:00.005-04:00

I know I recently promised to show you how I use the club shaft and bungee cord when I want to work on staying connected. Interestingly, I just saw a Paul Wilson video where he says that he doesn't like this idea very much because it prevents the golf student from reaching a good position at the top of the swing. Paul's point really doesn't deter me much. I'm not so interested in whether or not I can get to a good position at the top of the swing. I'm more interested in what happens after impact. And the bungee cord teaches me the feeling of my left upper arm connected to my ribcage as I complete the follow-through. The latest example of a player I'm trying to emulate (please hold down your laughter!) is Dustin Johnson on YouTube.

He's 6'4" and hits his driver about 350 yards, or about 150 yards past where my drive would be. That would be pretty discouraging. However, his swing is very instructive for anybody. I've looked at two analyses, one from PurpleGolf.com and one from WayneDeFrancesco.com. The detail in each video is fantastic, and both analysts make great points. A couple of fundamentals struck home with me.

One is the "squat," which I haven't really thought about in quite a while, not since I was poring over the Swing Like a Pro book that I've mentioned in these posts. And the other is the whole phenomenon of the follow-through, something about the swing that has mystified me forever.

When Dustin swings the driver, he's very athletic, and that gives me hope. He squats and uses his legs and rotates his hips with the upper body following, and he keeps that left upper arm connected to his ribcage after impact. I think it's this connection that must help to give him the whip that sends the ball out there to places on the fairway that most players never venture.

After watching Dustin on YouTube, I started experimenting with the squat and posting on the left leg. Result: Mania. I felt great. The ball went out there straight and traveled a good distance for me, about 200 or 210 or even 220 yards slightly uphill at this driving range. I thought I had found the answer.

Then I started doing some more reading about the squat and did some more thinking about the clubhead traveling around me as I uncoiled my body. Result: Depression. All these variables are far too much to think about during the swing. As usual, I found that I could focus on maybe one thing on any one swing. Every once in a while, a lucky swing would produce a nice drive, right down the target line and carrying a pretty good distance. Usually, though, the result was much worse. A depressing sight.

The good results did tell me that I was onto something that I should pay attention to. Now I need to do much more practice on each new swing thought that I have. I'll see what works and see how I can start to build a repeatable swing. Remember, I'm four and a-half years into this. And it's still far from complete. Not even enough to go out and play a round.

Still, I feel as though I'm really close to the good, basic swing. With any luck at all, I ought to be able to settle on a decent driver swing and a decent 3-wood swing and go out and play Mohansic.

Let's see if it's "Famous Last Words" or "Stranger Things Have Happened."

Drive, He Said

2011-06-08T19:15:00.002-04:00

I was reminded of this Jack Nicholson 1971 picture after I finished an exhausting and fruitless day of hitting at Yorktown Baseball and Golf in Yorktown, NY. I have blisters on my fingers (as John Lennon complained out loud, too, on The White Album) with not much to show for my exertions.

My practice started out well. I put on the club shaft and bunji cord and started hitting, thinking that this would be the answer to whatever was missing in my swing. Not!

When I really relaxed, I could hit the 3-metal with a satisfying "Click!" sound, but, in general, I'd have to say that "Tension" is my middle name. I feel as though I'm hitting my wedges great ( though sometimes I pull them left or something else is missing, and I get a less than perfect shot), and if I could play golf with just those 4 clubs, I'd be very happy.

I'm still pretty happy with the 9-iron and even the other irons, down to my two hybrids. And I'm happy with the 3-metal, some of the time. I feel as though I can hit that. It doesn't go huge distances, topping out at, maybe, 190 carry, uphill, but I take the satisfying sound that the head makes on impact as a good sign.

The driver, in contrast, is a disaster. I have the idea that I should be swinging this club the same as I swing my gap wedge, but it's not happening. Either that bit of golf wisdom is mistaken or else I just am not making the same swing.

I am not easily deterred, however. I continued to hit with the shaft and bunji cord wrapped around my upper arms. And I hit without that training aid. It didn't make any difference.

Then I started swinging more slowly, trying to concentrate on turning my hips and letting the release just happen. The results were less than stupendous. Some drives went 150 yards, some 175, some 190. Balls were not flying over the fence out there at the 250-yard mark. Most results looked like what a beginner could do.

Self-pity -- let's not go there!

Instead, let's think about tomorrow's practice.

Obviously, I'm missing something obvious in the driver swing. And I'd really have to argue with someone who tells me that it's the same swing as my gap wedge swing, even though, when I watch the ladies on the LPGA, it seems that they make the same swing every time, no matter what the situation. I guess I just don't get it. Or I'm not making that hip turn.

Tomorrow, I think I'm going to think about Iron Byron. Somehow, I'm not getting the clubhead to release and swing through. I have no follow-through, and, most of the time, when I hit the ball solidly, I push it right.

My pros tell me, "Turn, Sean, turn!" If only it were that easy!

After hitting at the range, I went to Mohansic to practice the short game. Much more gratifying. I love my putting, although I need to do some more practice on super-long putts (like 90' or so), but when I extend my arms and lead with the left, the ball rolls beautifully.

I did some chipping with a 9-iron and worked on that from various distances and learned a lot about how that shot reacts and how to hit it.

I finished up with some pitches, short ones, from relatively thick rough, and, for the most part, I was happy with the results. It was 6:30 or so, ninety-something degrees and high humidity, and I was ready to go home and have a Corona.

Tomorrow, I'll be fresh, and we'll see about "Drive, He Said."

Turn, Turn Turn!

2011-06-07T19:48:00.005-04:00

Maybe you remember The Byrds song "Turn! Turn! Turn!" If you don't, check it out.

I'm thinking seriously about the song right now because of what my pro, Brian Lamberti (at Golfworx in Baldwin Place, NY) was advocating in my last lesson with him.

Brian qualified for the sectional qualifier for the US Open at Canoe Brook CC in Summit, NJ, and finished the 36 holes yesterday, turning in 78-68-146, not quite good enough to make it to Congressional.

But in my last lesson with Brian, I watched him do his hitting routing, and he told me that all he was doing with every club was turning. He continued to say, "All I'm doing is turning." Certainly, every swing looked the same. If he wanted to hit the ball farther, he would make more of a turn through the follow-through. That was the only difference I could detect. And he could do whatever he wanted to with the ball flight: fade, draw, high, low. I think he accomplished those different shots with his address, but don't quote me on this. He was just awesome, and I didn't want to distract him with novice questions.

At the time, I tried to do what he told me during the lesson, but, naturally, my old habits made that impossible. However, over the last two weeks, I've been working on that turning as my main practice goal. Brian Flanagan, my pro at Fairview Golf Center in Elmsford, NY, was telling me the same thing. I'm a hard case, and it takes a second opinion to convince me.

I've been hitting 200 or 300 balls a day at Yorktown Baseball and Golf in Yorktown Heights, NY, and it wasn't until late this afternoon, after a frustrating time with the driver, that I finally started to feel what the full hip turn feels like. Before that, my other clubs felt good. I feel like a pro with my wedges, and the other clubs felt good when I swung on plane.

But suddenly, I tried something different. It may have been the videos I've been watching of Brittany Lincicom, with her quick hips, that made me try something a little different. So I started focussing on the hip turn and not thinking about my hands or the release or anything else. And, suddenly, I was cracking the ball straight out there!

Dubious, I grabbed my 3-metal and tried the same swing. "Crack!" right down the middle.

Back to the driver. "Crack!"

The driver still isn't hitting the fence at the 250-yard mark, which means I'm missing something, but what I'm doing is a lot better than what I was doing before.

In the next practice, I want to practice this turn with the irons and see how my accuracy and distance change. With all the work I've done, I feel as though I can make flexible changes without too much trouble.

As The Byrds sing, it's "A time to build up, a time to break down." Tomorrow, I'll work on the new concept of turn and try to forget about the old swing habits.

Hitting and Swinging

2011-06-02T10:52:00.008-04:00

After four-and-a-half years of learning a golf swing, I'm still mostly a hitter rather than a swinger. Until recently, my "swing" (I'm using the term loosely) ended at impact. I just wanted to hit the ball. My lessons at Mohansic with Max Galloway last fall helped me think about using the lower body and doing some turning, and lessons with two other pros this spring have helped me immensely.

Brian Flanagan, at Fairview Golf Center in Elmsford, NY, saw my problem right away and started urging me to coil and uncoil, to continue turning the hips all the way through the swing. It took me about six weeks to feel comfortable even attempting that. Then I took a single lesson from Brian Lamberti, a pro at Golfworx in Baldwin Place, NY, who basically told me the same thing, along with a few other valuable comments.

Brian is a touring pro and is getting ready to play in the sectional qualifier at Canoe Brook CC in Summit, NJ, this coming Monday, June 6. He just played a practice round at the Trump course in Briarcliff, NY, and shot a 29 on the front nine en route to a final score of 64. I'm going to go down to Summit and watch as much of the 36-hole qualifier as I can. I told Brian that I'll pick up my lessons with him, sometime in late June, after he wins the US Open.

Both pros told me, each in his own way, to think about the whole swing, rather than focusing on individual parts or positions. And this advice was crucial. Brian also gave me an idea for a learning aid, using a club shaft and a bunji cord to help me maintain connectedness through the swing. I'll have more to say about that in the next post. For now, you can see where my swing currently is in the latest video.

Words without Pictures

2010-12-27T17:58:00.003-05:00

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.

Catching Up on Progress

2010-11-08T20:30:00.005-05:00

In the five months since my last post, I've taken a series of lessons from a local pro, which have led to significant improvements in my understanding of the swing. Note that I say, "Understanding," and not, "Execution." There's a big difference. While now i think I understand what should happen in a good golf swing, I can't actually do it very often. Now and then, I feel as though I can crack the ball, but generally, something is missing. That's OK. I'm four years into learning the golf swing, and, if another pro I've consulted is correct, I have have another six years to go. I'm in no rush.

My first goal, set four years ago, was to develop a good golf swing. It was not to break 90 or to break 80 or to shoot any particular score or attain any specific handicap. By now, I would say that I've achieved my goal. I have a decent golf swing, certainly better than most of the people I see out on my local course, Mohansic. I've achieved my goal. Now I'm hooked. And thanks to the teaching of my pro, Max (at Mohansic), I'm on my way to trying to learn a really good golf swing.

I've stopped playing rounds. I probably played around a half dozen rounds this season, and I didn't record a real score in a single one. Sometimes, I hit balls out of bounds or into lies where I picked up and just took a stroke, and these situations couldn't give me a real score at the end. Another time, when I thought I was playing well, my partners hustled me along to get ahead of the group in front of us, and that made my score unofficial. That was too bad because I played the last five holes at about one or two over par, and my playing partners, whom I joined on the tenth hole, asked me, twice, if I were a teaching pro. I did play well.

But all the other rounds amounted to walking around the course hitting balls. I did get to see two good players, who probably shoot in the 80s, and that was a good experience. I could see that they had a knowledge of the course and a certainty about their swings. The worst they could do was bogey. When they put together good swings, they were shooting par or getting a birdie now and then. It was quite impressive. And neither player had a swing I would want to emulate. I could tell that they had played enough so that they knew what to expect from their swings. Each had an efficient, powerful swing--made without much effort--and both were very accurate. Their short games, too, were skillful. They were good to watch.

So I decided that playing rounds wasn't what I needed. Instead, I devoted myself to practice: the full swing, chipping, and putting. I didn't bother with sand or pitching. Maybe next season.

Each time I had a lesson with Max, he would give me a basic drill, and I would work on that for two or three or four weeks before I felt ready to take the next lesson. In this way, I went from June and into November taking lessons and practicing.

At this point, after my last lesson the other day, I feel as though I understand what has to happen during the full swing. Now my work over the winter is going to be trying to incorporate my mental images of the swing into my physical performance. More than ever before, I appreciate how difficult a good swing is. In my penultimate lesson, I hit a nine-iron for Max and thought I hit it well. He said, "You hit the mat first."

That was a tremendous revelation. Whereas I was used to judging my swings by ball flight, not I started to add the sound of the clubhead hitting the ball first. It's an adjustment I'm still working on.

I plan to pick up my lessons with Max in the spring. I've realized that the timetable for learning a good swing is open-ended. I can't set a target date. Instead, it's better if I continue to think about practice and improvement. My lessons with Max have also showed me that I can't learn the swing without a good coach.

Winter is coming, I've got my drills, and I'll continue to practice on the range. At the same time, I'll work on chipping and pitching in the backyard. Putting will be more difficult, but maybe there's some way I can work on it in the living room. At the end of the 2010 season, I'm philosophical. I'm doing as much as I can. The golf swing will improve slowly. I need help and I need practice. That's the best I can do. I'll see how it goes during the next five months. It just snowed or sleeted up here outside New York City, and it's only November 8th. It could presage a long winter.

My Local Course: Back Nine

2010-05-13T15:46:00.001-04:00

The tenth doglegs left slightly across a flat field, seemingly easy to get to. A surprise is in store when you arrive at the green, however. There's a relatively flat shelf on the left, but on the right, the whole green tilts toward the bunker on the right. If you try to go for this green, you have to be as accurate as only a professional can be. Therefore, I think that laying up is the right move. From there, you can chip or pitch up towards the pin and leave yourself an uphill putt, rather that an impossible downhill situation. A bogey here is a good score, for me.

Eleven is another tough hole to get to in two. Even with a good drive, which will probably end up in the rough, since the fairway is relatively narrow, you still are looking at a five-iron or maybe even a four hybrid to get to the green. Since it is protected on both sides by bunkers, and again slopes toward the fairway, you might be well off by approaching short and chipping on. I'm sure you're beginning to see a pattern here. Once on or near the green, you're in pretty good shape. A bogey here is another decent score.

The next hole is fun. You can hit a drive, and if you hit it well, it'll go over a slight rise in the fairway and roll down quite a bit. A drive here of 275-300 yards is quite possible.

The next shot is where the problems begin. After a long drive, you're now standing over a shot on a downhill and, probably, sidehill lie. Only a really good golfer can get this short pitching iron or sand wedge onto the green with any accuracy at all. Most of us will probably skull the ball or flub it entirely, wasting a prefectly good tee shot. What seemed to be an easy par at first now turns out to be a complete disappointment and a bogey at best.

Adding insult to injury, the next par three demands a perfect tee shot. A five-iron is pretty much the right club for me, but you have to hit it very well or you'll end up in trouble in the greenside bunkers or way down the slope on the right. Take a par, if you can get it, and move on.

Fourteen is fun, starting from an elevated tee with plenty of room to hit to on this dogleg right. If I'm set up with a good drive and a decent lie, I can try for the green. If not, the smart play is to hit something in front of the green, pitch or chip on, and one- or two-putt for par or bogey.

Fifteen is all uphill, with a rolling, lumpy fairway with few flat spots to hit to. Lately, I've been able to hit the green in two with a seven-iron second shot, and even birdied it the last time I played it with a nice, curling fifteen foot putt. It's a treacherous green, however, steeply slanted toward the fairway, with no flat areas. If you're not beneath the hole, you're in deep trouble. If you miss your first putt, you're almost certainly looking at a three-putt, at the very least.

Sixteen is a par hole, a bit of a respite from the rigors of this course. You can reach the large green in two, and as long as you're below the hole, you should be able to get your four.

Seventeen is also a friendly layout, starting with a straight tee shot and a good second shot to a large green. It's slanted toward the fairway, but not too bad. Most of the time, you can expect a two-putt here.

The finishing hole is a 180-something par three, slightly uphill, with bunkers on both sides. Once more, stay below the hole for a good chance at par. I've been hitting a 4-hybrid here the last few times, with good results, but now that my swing has improved a bit more in the last couple of weeks, I could probably hit a five-iron, if the pin placement is in the front.

Last time I played the back nine in a full round, I shot 41, with four pars and a birdie. I should have had another par on thirteen, the elevated par three, if it weren't for a three-putt. So if I can put together a front nine like this, I'll be very close to my goal this season of breaking 80.

My Local Course: Front Nine

2010-05-12T18:23:00.006-04:00

As a beginner, I've identified my goals and have chosen ways of meeting them. Basically, I want to break 80 on my nearby public course. In all my previous posts, I've talked at length about developing my swing, but never about where I would apply it. Just today, that impetus arrived.

I subscribe to the Andy Brown email, and I spent some time today with his latest two emails, both about the common mistakes that amateurs, like me, make. The videos were great, and I highly recommend them. Go to the videos or subscribe to Andy.

The first lessons come from John Richardson, a Scot who has written a book called Dream On about learning how to shoot par within a year, after never breaking 100 before. You'll definitely benefit from watching the videos, but they reminded me about the importance of having goals and strategies. I think I've kept both in mind as I've concentrated on building my swing, and I've also thought about how to play the course that I'll probably play most regularly, my local public course, Mohansic, one of Westchester County's public courses. John advocates developing a plan for playing your primary course, something I've been thinking about for about the last six months or so, or ever since I could tell that my swing was becoming effective. This is a good time to lay out the ways I can see myself playing this difficult (in my opinion) public course.

Located in Northern Westchester just off the Taconic Parkway, it features a hilly landscape, trees and woods lining narrow fairways, and some very difficult greens. After playing it, on and off, for a couple of years, as I've been building my swing, I have some clear ideas of the way a novice golfer, like me, can play this course successfully. That means breaking 80. Even though I feel good about my game, I'm not so sure I can really do that on this course.

When I think about strategy for Mohansic, I think that most amateurs, with the amount of experience I have, will usually shoot in the 90s here. You really have to be sharp to do better than that. The main reason for this is the greens. I'd say that all of them pitch toward the fairway, and many are so tough that it's better not to attempt to get on in regulation. You're probably better off hitting a lag and pitching or chipping up to the pin. If you find yourself above the hole, most of the time, you better get ready to three- or four-putt. It's really discouraging. Basically, at least the next few times out, I'm going to try this strategy and see what happens. If my short game is accurate and dependable, I'll have a shot at breaking 90.

A pro from a driving range near me, Brian Lamberti, during some kind of pro-am last fall, shot 18 consecutive pars, the best score of the day by a couple of strokes, and something that seems quite remarkable to me. He's a top-notch golfer, to begin with, finishing high in the Massachusetts Open last summer and winning the New York State Open at Bethpage Black last fall, winning the tournament in awful conditions on the last day (rain and wind) with three consecutive birdies on the final three holes to win by a stroke. A superior golfer by any standards. And it takes a player like Brian to play Mohansic gracefully. The rest of us are constantly in trouble. Here are my thoughts on the best way I can play the course.

The first hole is the easiest on the course, although the green is hidden from the tee box. It's a gentle dogleg left, 340 yards or so (I'm going to use approximate yardages for my description, since I know, from pacing off my shots, that the yardages on the scorecard are not accurate), over a hill and then down a slope toward a green that, while relatively flat, is protected by bunkers on the right and left. If an approach shot is too strong, it'll fly the green, roll down a steep hill, and wind up somewhere near the entrance road to the course, a bad place to be.

So assuming I can hit either a straight drive, or, even better, a little draw, I should get over the hill and walk up to a second shot, probably a pitching wedge, to the protected green. If I'm in the rough, which is probably the case, given the narrow fairway, that makes the shot a little tougher, but, still, I have a PW into the green, which, since it's relatively level, I always decide to shoot for. From my drive position, I hit my second and probably land somewhere on the green. If the shot strays, and I find myself in a bunker, it's no big deal. The green is so relatively flat that I can blast out and still have a putt as my next shot. If I'm short of the green, that's a good place to be. I can chip or pitch on, going uphill slightly, and have a good chance of getting close. With any luck, I should get a par.

On the next hole, the course begins to exercise its personality. I'm faced with a drive uphill, with a tall tree on the right, around which I should try to hit a fade. Naturally, most of my tee shots find the branches of this tree and carom off to the right behind a red maintenance barn, with no option but to pitch out onto the fairway and take the third shot from there.

But let's be optimistic. My ideal shot is to aim right down the center of the fairway that I can see (since there's quite a hill in front of me) and hit a slight fade to the right. Hit correctly, this cut should take me down the fairway which slopes down toward the green. Let's suppose that I can do that. Now I'm looking at a shot of probably 150 yards. Here's where the subtleties of the course come in. It's not simply a 150 yard shot with an eight-iron. I'm probably on a downhill lie and it's probably slanted a little toward the right. Not a gimme, in other words. So now I'm hitting from a downhill, right-tilted lie toward a green that is slanted right, also. Right toward a larger bunker on the right. The whole landscape tilts toward the right.

This is where my general course strategy starts to come into play. To me, the smart play is to hit anything that will get me close to the green, but in front of it, taking the traps, left and right, out of play, and allowing me to chip aggressively toward the pin. Anything else is asking for plenty of trouble. I could find myself in a bunker, or on the green someplace where I couldn't possibly get a long first putt close to the hole. To minimize my difficulty, I think the wisest course is to hit something that will land short of the green, and because it's in longer grass, will stop, without rolling too much. From there, I'd like to be able to chip close to the hole and make the first putt. That would be the dream scenario.

After missing the first putt, I walk away with a bogey toward the third hole, a par three featuring an elevated green protected by two bunkers. If you miss with your tee shot, probably an eight-iron, you're either on the beach or pitching up a steep hillside. If I can hit the green, I'm pretty confident about two-putting for par.

The fourth is a long, long par four, with a long, uphill drive as the first shot. Assuming I hit a decent drive, about 235 or so uphill, I should have a second shot about 200 yards to the green. Like the first hole, this one is protected by bunkers and trouble behind the green. Again, the smart shot is to hit something that will get me short of the green. Then I can chip or pitch on. Are you starting to see a pattern? So, with luck, I get a par or, more likely, a bogey.

Now we come to a very difficult par four, with an uphill drive, followed by a second shot over a vale to an elevated green. Again, we're looking at bogey at best. My tee shot is woefully short, leaving me a three-hybrid second, which lands short of the green, but on the uphill, a good place to be. I hit a good chip and get close to the pin. A two putt, and I have bogey, a good score.

Feeling pretty good, I step onto the teeing ground on the next hole, an uphill par three with bunkers left and right and disastrous results for the golfer who hits over the green. This is probabably an eight-iron for me. I feel it's a seven, but it I hit that, I'm probably above the hole, and you don't want to be there.

So I hit an eight and find myself short. That's a good place. From there, I can chip up and then putt for par. A bogey here is not such a bad thing.

I can get back to par on the next hole, I think, a 370-something hole straightaway. If I can hit a good tee shot, I can get over the first hill on the fairway and with a good roll, find myself just a pitching wedge from the green. It's tricky, though, The green slants toward the right and front. The smart play, I still think, is to play to the front of the green, a shot which will take both right and left bunkers out of play, and then offer a nice chip shot close to the hole. One putt should do it. Of course, we can't one putt, and we take our bogey, feeling that we're even.

By now, we're used to conceding to the course, aren't we? The eighth hole reminds us of our limitations. Not a long hole from the middle tees, it is still an uphill layout and dogleg left, great for players who draw the ball. Still, even if the player hits a good draw, he still has a good pitching wedge up the the elevated green, a treacherous green under the best of circumstances. If you hit above the hole, this is one place where you cannot possibly keep the ball on the green if you miss your first putt. So you have to be below the hole, no matter what. Then, just take your medicine and putt uphill and take two or three putts. That's the best you can hope for.

The ninth hole is a conundrum. I can hit a great tee shot, hit a good second shot, and still have have no good view of the green. Your third shot is an act of faith. Two large bunkers right and left, and a huge fairway bunker just in front of the green, I'm not sure what the best play here is. I have hit the green in three, which means a good two-putt and I've got my par.

I've never broken 50 on this front nine, but with the progress I've made since last year, I should be able to keep my score close to 40 or so. We'll see. In the next post, I'll describe the back nine.

Right-Wing Politics and Swing Correction

2010-05-08T19:27:00.005-04:00

As I get older, I find that many of my views become more conservative. Aside from a woman's right to choose and the NRA and probably a number of other issues, I sort of get what the Republicans stand for. They have the assets and they want to keep them and retain their status. That's completely understandable. If I were one of them, I'm sure I would feel the same way. Definitely, I'm leaning to the right. The trouble is, so is my golf swing.

Or has been, lately. I've noticed that I'm pushing the ball right, unless I'm very conscious of bringing the butt of the handle to the ball from the inside. When I look back to last fall, I was doing the same thing, pushing to the right, but I didn't really understand why that was happening. Now I think I do. The reason that I'm pushing right is that I'm coming into the ball with the face open, and something that is supposed to happen that will square up the clubface is not happening. At first, I thought it was the clubhead path. But even when I was sure that I was coming from the inside to the ball, I would still tend to push it right.

In situations like this, I go immediately to the research department. YouTube is generally the first place I look for help, but in this case, I finally went to a DVD I have of A. J. Bonar talking about the driver. He's a long-winded teacher, but a good one, and I've had loquacious teachers before who taught me, in unintended teaching outcomes, to be patient and listen. Finally, A. J. talked about turning the toe of the club around as you come into the impact zone. I had watched his video several times before, but I think I just wasn't ready to understand this crucial point. Now I did. It helped me to picture what my own swing must look like coming through impact: an open face, with the arms dragging the clubhead through the ball at the point where the clubhead should be moving at its greatest speed.

The obvious answer was to remember a few things. One of them was where the release beings. So I did some research online and refreshed my memory about that, reminding myself that the release begins at about hip level or where the left arm is about at a 45 degree angle to the level of the ball. Then I remembered how the left arm has to slow down in order to let the clubhead swing through at maximum velocity, thrown by the right hand, creating forces that result in that classic image of the overlapping forearms after impact. Until now, I've been trying to achieve that position consciously and manipulatively, which, I've learned for myself, doesn't work. That started to help.

Then A. J.'s admonition to control the toe of the club added another dimension of understanding. As I practiced that, I could see that it added more power to my driver swing. Still, I was lacking that really powerful "Bam!" at the ball (as Johnny Miller likes to say), and, on top of that, I was still hitting that mat before the ball way too frequently. Something was still missing. Even a neophyte, like me, could see that. Then I discovered what that missing piece was.

In a recent post, titled "Sean of Arc," I talked about how I was trying to let my swing describe an arc. In that post, which was only a few days ago, I thought I was making progress. Now I know that it was just another example of how "hard-won" or "hardly-won" swing improvements can be.

As I experimented with A. J.'s metaphor of turning a screwdriver counterclockwise after impact, I suddenly felt the missing piece of my swing. That was the part after hitting the ball. I've always felt that this was not right, but I never understood why. Now I think I do. After impact, the clubhead has to continue on its arc, but at this point in the swing, the arc is upward. It is not flat and out towards the target, and the right hand does not control its path. No, it's still the left hand that is in charge. As the left hand turns to toe counterclockwise, it also lifts and allows the clubhead to follow a circular arc.

Once I realized this, I suddenly understood how these good players swing through the ball without hitting the mat or hitting mostly tee. They are swinging on a perfect arc, and they have located the bottom of the arc precisely where the ball is waiting. And their perfect arc is what gives them that beautiful follow-through up and around the left shoulder.

Once I started practicing this at the range, I really had to laugh to myself. This was the answer, I thought, as I hit balls right at my target. Of course, now and then, I'd push one to the right, but that didn't bother me. I knew that what I needed was practice. Finally, I was at the point where I could make a correct driver swing and repeat it without serious error. As A. J. says, controlling the toe is the mark of a good player. But, in my experience, what teachers fail to explain or illustrate is the way the left hand and arm bring the club UP after impact, completing the arc that the backswing and downswing previously established.

Another thought occurred to me as I though about A. J.'s advice about the toe. That movement is probably what Hogan meant when he talked about "slinging" the ball down the fairway. I mentioned this in an early post and thought I understood it then, but I don't think I really did at the time. Now, when I hit the ball, I can actually feel the toe moving and slinging the ball. Once again, like countless other examples, here's a case where I thought I understood an aspect of the swing but really didn't. This part of the learning process, now that I think about it, may be essential. Maybe the first time you work on an element of the swing and you think you have it is just a preliminary stage, one that sets you up for a later, full understanding. I haven't made a full inventory, but it does seem that I have to learn certain parts of the swing twice.

There is no new video, simply because my discoveries are so recent that I haven't had a chance to videotape them. I was going to do some swing practice today, Saturday, May 8th, but, once again, the Mistral is blowing—powerful, gusting winds of probably forty to fifty miles an hour at times. Instead of hitting with the driver, I went to the local public course and did some putting and chipping. The winds were enough to move putts as they rolled and nearly knock me off balance. When I realized that the winds were drying out my eyeballs, I decided it was time to go home and have some red wine and start getting dinner ready.

I'm very excited about my new understanding of the swing, though, and I can't wait until tomorrow to get out on the range and out on the course to try out a much-improved swing. Then, maybe, I'll have some good video to post. While my politics may continue to drift to the right, I'm expecting my shots to move toward the center.

The Mistral

2010-04-29T17:36:00.014-04:00

In the spring of 1889, continuous, strong winds almost drove Van Gogh mad and may have induced him to cut off part of his left ear. His antagonist was the great wind of southern France, the Mistral (in French, it means "Master"), which sometimes blows at 55 miles per hour.

My ears are still intact, but after two days of blustery, gusting, sometimes powerful winds, I could imagine the maddening effects of the Mistral. In my little practice area in my backyard, I could hardly tee up a plastic practice ball before it was blown across the flagstones. Comic relief defused my frustration whenever I hit a ball out far enough that the wind took it and swept it to one side. Hard as it was to assess how well I was hitting the ball, the Mistral didn't stop me; it did test my patience, though.

In other respects, including the blustery winds, Vincent would have loved this afternoon: an azure sky, completely clear of any clouds, intense sun, and intensely illuminated foliage. The light alone reminded me of the way the Impressionists taught us how light affects what we see. Brilliant light, brilliant shadows tune our perceptions to a fine pitch. On a day like today, our senses are hyperactive. We seem to see every distinct thing in our range of vision. This accentuated vision may be what enabled me to see the rotation in KJ Choi's swings on YouTube. In this Impressionist landscape, I had a very productive practice session.

Watching KJ carefully, and comparing it to the model golfer in the Arnold Palmer video, I noticed how the hips turn, but also how the left shoulder suddenly rotates to the top of an arc right at impact. I've noticed this before, and read before about getting the left shoulder up as quickly as you can. Now, in the receptive mode I found myself, I could see the logic. Moving the hips quickly and bringing that left shoulder up quickly both would combine to propel the swing of the clubhead through the ball. For me, this is a break-through understanding. Suddenly, I realized how the pros hit the ball so far.

As I worked out these swing subtleties, I wanted to go out and see how they would contribute to way I could actually hit a ball, on the range. So I wrapped up my practice, ignoring the Mistral, and headed for the range.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. The Mistral was blowing harder here than it was in my backyard. I quickly realized that this multiplied difference only made sense. I've noticed that all weather conditions are accentuated here on the range at Mohansic. It must have something to do with the elevation. The range is at a high point and faces a long expanse, stretching towards the Hudson River, with nothing to block any weather patterns moving from West to East. Today, the range seemed like some of the Adirondack outcroppings I've climbed to: cold, windy, and completely exposed. Now and then, the wind blew over one of my clubs (even though it was in a club stand) and blew a ball off the tee. The wind seemed, for the most part, to be blowing from right to left, rather than in my face. This seemed fine to me, since I thought I could hit right-to-left shots and use the wind as an aid.

As I think I've indicated, I was working on rotating my hips and lifting my left shoulder right at impact in order to get the most clubhead speed that I could. Naturally, many things went wrong. I was trying to do too many things at once. But now and then, I felt as though I was getting a good hit on the ball. And my goal here was to see how far I could hit the ball. That was my measure of success. Finally, on one stroke, probably using a real ball, not a range ball, I hit one that I hooked to the left, but deep, and when it landed, it flew through the tree branches at the far end of the range, at the 250 yard mark, flying through a branch and sending a few leaves fluttering to the ground. I've never hit a ball that far here. It was only one ball, but it gave me an indication that my swing was improving.

That shot was probably about 255 yards carry, slightly downhill, and compared well to a drive that I saw Villegas make on the Golf Channel where his carry was 264. His swing speed was 116, which means that mine is probably around 110 or so. That means I'm OK. And I'm really just beginning to swing the driver with thoughts of distance. The best is yet to come.

After this session at the range, I went out the tenth hole, thinking I would hit a drive or two or three, then hit a couple of approach shots, and then do my short game practice around the green. The first drive I left way out to the right, long gone. The second went right along the line I had planned, and the third followed the second, just a little bit right.

When I came up to me balls, I hit the first perfectly, with a 4-hybrid, just short of the green, and hit the second, over a short pine tree, right of the green, but long, into a greenside trap. Here's where the short game comes into play. When I chipped the first shot, I chunked it, hitting ground first. I had it hit a few practice balls afterwards in order to get the right feel. Then, on my second shot, which ended up in the bunker on the right, I hit a good shot and landed on the green, rolling toward the hole.

All this tells me that I can play this game in a reasonable manner. Shooting in the eighties is what I ought to expect. To break eighty, I need to play more and tighten up my game. The plan now is to continue working on the swing arc and to go out as much as I can to play a few holes, practice various shots, and practice the short game and situations around and on the green to build up my skills and confidence in chipping, pitching, bunker play, and putting. Future posts will describe my progress.

In the video below, you can see how my swing is improving, with more width, more turn on the backswing, more hips, and the right arm straighter and longer than before. I can tell by the way I'm hitting the ball that the swing arc is getting better. Tomorrow's practice will isolate the release of the left arm, training the arm to slow down while the left hand supinates and the right hand throws the clubhead past the hands. This very sophisticated combination of actions, which are measured in hundredths of a second, is the key to a good swing. This is where the clubface is squared up and where clubhead speed and power are generated, the most difficult and the most exciting part of the swing.

Sean of Arc

2010-04-28T20:07:00.004-04:00

With that appellation, I wonder if Jeanne d'Arc ever played golf. Maybe she became famous for the length and arc of her swing. If she wasn't, she still stands as a paragon of a good golf swing. And she stands as an aide mémoire for me. My first name, Sean, which is John in Gaelic, is also Jean in French, not a far cry from the feminine, Jeanne. So I—Sean, John, Jean, Jeanne-manqué— am striving, in my latest practice sessions, to lengthen my swing so that I can produce the beautiful arc that we all see in the Arnold Palmer Somaxperformance videos on YouTube. Yesterday, I wrote how difficult a swing like this is. Today, I have good news to report.

First, though, a disclaimer. Because of my body type and age and many other factors, I'll never have anything remotely resembling the swing of the anonymous golfer who can drive the ball 375 yards with "effortless power," and I am aware of my limitations. However, or (as the current jargon has it, a locution that is entirely regrettable) "That being said," I can improve my swing by trying my best to imitate the Somaxperformance swing. Yesterday, I thought it was impossible. Today, I can see some encouraging improvement.

Let's start with the backswing. By looking in my patio double-door glass, I've been checking out my backswing, and I can see that I can get into a fairly good position, with my left arm fully extended and straight and my right arm underneath. When I perform the backswing, I'm learning to use the right arm to help draw back the left and heft it into position. Through practice, I've learned that I'm in the correct position because there is some sharp stretching discomfort in my left shoulder. If it doesn't hurt a bit, then I'm not quite there. I've also learned to feel the left hand bowed a bit at the top, while the right hand is underneath, supporting.

After two days of practice, I've learned to feel my progress in the middle knuckle of my right hand. That's the key to creating clubhead speed. It's also a key indicator for chipping and pitching, but I'll talk more about that later. Once I get back, fully stretched out—and painfully aware of that—I practice several movements or swing thoughts. One, of course, is starting with my left knee and then rotating my hips. Next is letting my arms swing down, as a result of the rotation of my hips, into the hitting area. At this point, my weight should be on the left heel, or pretty close to it. Then I arrive at the "cast point," where I start to let the left hand release and the right hand starts to throw the clubhead. For me, this has been a deadend. For some time, I've felt that my swing really ended here. And in my latest practice, I've been determined to get beyond this wall and continue the swing all the way to its conclusion.

After many, many swings with plastic balls in my backyard, trying to get the feeling of extending my left arm straight to the top of the backswing and then coming through with the hips leading the way and finally the left wrist releasing and the right hand firing through, I started to get a new sensation. It was a feeling that both hands were acting as one. The left hand releasing and the right hand throwing felt as if they were happening together. Once I had this feeling of unity, it was easier to feel the two hands staying together to complete the swing arc over my left shoulder.

This was very exciting. And to test the efficacy of the swing, which I had been practicing with only the driver, I started hitting a few nine-irons now and then, just to see what would happen. To my surprise, the swings felt great. I could feel the left arm stay straight and then the right arm stay straight during the follow-through, just what anyone would want. I didn't even try for a full swing. A reasonable backswing and an abbreviated follow-through, where I could see my right arm fully extended, was all I wanted to achieve. The swing of an easy nine-iron to a green with a high degree of accuracy—that's all I was after.

Now the swing was starting to take on a completely new character. The hands were working more as a unit, the clubhead was starting to speed past the hands after impact, and I was beginning to feel as though I could finally control the clubhead speed. In the video below, you should see the left arm straighter than before, and the right arm straighter and longer after impact. As an added bonus, I've included a few chips with a nine-iron and a few full swings with a nine-iron. To me, these chips and swings are solid and repeatable. Of course, the true test is actual play. In the meantime, I can't wait to continue developing the swing arc.

The Swing Arc

2010-04-27T18:46:00.002-04:00

As I related in my previous post, I'm working on keeping the left arm straight through the backswing and downswing, and then, after reviewing Hogan's Five Lessons, keeping the right arm straight in the follow-through. These long arms, creating the radii of the swing arc, provide the width that everyone who talks about hitting for more distance will tell you. It looks easy in any examples you find on the Web or in books or magazines, but it's very hard to do.

I did all my practice today in the backyard, constantly viewing myself in the camcorder or in my reflection in a patio sliding door. I wanted to see what my left arm looked like at the top of the swing. Even after some practice extending that arm and using the right arm to support the left, I found that when the club hinged, the left arm broke at the elbow. More trial-and-error showed that if I relaxed in my wrists in order to let the club hinge, I could keep my left arm relatively straight. But I could feel the exertion this required. Frequently, I felt like sitting down and resting, just listening to the traffic go by.

At the same time I was working on a straight left arm, I was also working on turning my hips and sequencing my swing. As I moved in slow motion, I could see how the swing is supposed to work. I could also see how the right hand throws the clubhead and straightens out in the follow-through past impact and remains straight way up into the finish. I can do this (sort of) in slow motion, but I can't do it in a real swing. It's all too much to manage. Although I couldn't put it all together, there were parts that I felt were starting to become manageable, and they were enough to induce me to go the range and try out my swing.

The results were pretty good. I concentrated on the driver, but the nine-iron and a 3 hybrid both felt good, too. With the driver, I was hitting the ball fairly consistently, but not any farther than I was before, even though I was trying my best to relax, stay wide, and turn my hips. I must say, though, that the drives felt good. If, in the end, I can carry a drive only 230 yards or so, I'll be satisfied. It feels good to see the ball go flying out there straight and clear the tree with the yellow "200" yard marker next to it.

Obviously, it's going to take quite a while to develop a swing like the Arnold Palmer video advocates. It's so seductive. "Hip Speed = Effortless Power." Who could resist that? Just study the video and do what Arnie does. Sure. And study Mariano Rivera and then try to throw a cut fastball like he does.

On the positive side of this problem, I think I'm in fairly good shape behind the ball. That is, I think my backswing is OK and my downswing is OK. Not great, but passable. As I already mentioned, I could use some more sophisticated sequencing, using my legs and hips to generate more speed in my shoulders and arms. But, for an amateur, and a neophyte as well, I'm in relatively good shape.

My main problem, and the goal of my practice for the foreseeable future, is allowing the club to follow the swing arc. My right hand doesn't really fire out through the ball at impact, and the left hand doesn't really supinate enough. As a result, I generate speed only during half the swing. According to Hogan, the swing reaches top speed just after the ball. In my case, I think my top speed happens before the ball, and nothing of consequence happens after impact. This has been a problem I've been aware of for quite some time, now. Solving it, needless to say, is more elusive.

That Arnold Palmer video, especially the model swing of an anonymous golfer at the end of the video who produces "an effortless 375 yard drive," is now the image of the swing I want to have. I need to continue working on the swing so that it continues to build up speed past the ball. As I've said before in these posts, my swing speed is really expended before it reaches the ball, the problem of most golfers. Nonetheless, I now have success to build on. My two outings on the course have shown that I have the potential to score well. To me, that means that I can also learn a complete, full swing—with good sequencing and good hip speed—that will give me drives of at least 250 yards carry. Once I start hitting that mark, I'll know I finally have a complete swing.

In the next few days, let's see what kind of progress I make.

Late April Assessment

2010-04-26T18:13:00.005-04:00

Shakespeare's birthday has just passed. April 23rd is widely accepted, and that date provides circularity to his life, since he also died on the same date in 1616. The Bard was no golfer, but thinking of his tragedies, histories, and comedies provides us with a rich reference as we study the game. As a neophyte, I have no tragedies to relate, but history and comedy constantly accompany me as I develop my swing.

Foreknowledge disarms us of extreme reaction. After a long winter of solitary practice from a flat mat in my backyard and from an occasional bucket of balls on the range, I knew that hitting on a course would be an entirely different experience. And I was correct. When I went out on my local public course in the evenings to try hitting a few balls from the fairway, the slightest variation from absolutely flat produced exaggerated results. For example, on the most convenient fairway for practicing after hours, the land sloped to the right, and that gentle slope produced dramatic pushes and slices. It took me several days of assiduous practice to correct this tendency.

Then, when I actually played two rounds, I found that I couldn't reproduce my practice swing. Apparently, too many swing thoughts overloaded my mental circuits, and my muscles were confounded. Chips and pitches and bunker shots that should be routine turned out to be disasters. They made me look as though I hadn't done any practice at all. Despite my history of assiduous practice, my short game was a comedy. Fortunately, I expected this outcome. I knew that my game needed actual experience on the course. I endured the ignominy of these shots, knowing that soon I would overcome them as I became more familiar with actual play.

My first round matched my expectations. During the front nine, I flubbed every conceivable shot, except for drives, which, generally, I hit well. Actually, I was surprised that my score was as low as 54. It felt much worse. The back nine was a distinct improvement. Although I didn't finish, I was hitting the ball better, and more confidently, and was playing basically bogey golf. On one hole, which I've always dreaded, a 181-yard par three over a valley, with a steep hill on the right of the green and greenside bunkers on the right and left, I hit a 4-iron to within a foot of the pin, located at the rear of the green. A tap-in gave me an easy birdie. The six holes I was able to finish made me think that I needed just more experience with the short game and I would be OK.

Two days later, I played another round. This one happened one short notice. My playing partner from the first round called me up and wanted to play right away, and we were able to get a tee time forty-five minutes after my call to the pro shop. That meant that I had no time to warm up. And it showed in the front nine, where I shot 53, finishing with a 10 on the last hole. I hit some good shots, but a triple, a quad, and the last hole obscured two pars. Then my playing partners left me, and I joined the twosome behind me to finish the round. One of the players was a relative beginner, like me, and the other, a long-time player with a good game.

D., the good player, seemed to be a long hitter, but as time went on, I discovered that I could hit at least as far as he could and generally could hit more accurately. On the tenth hole, he hit a beautiful drive about 290 and made the green with his second shot, while Joe and I hit off to the left of the dogleg left and had long shots to the green. Mine followed a tree line on the right, but I had a nice wedge onto the green, and two-putted for a bogey. D., who was on the green in two, three putted. Realizing that I could drive as far as he could, I suddenly thought that with a good drive, I could reach this green in two also. This was a thought that never would have occurred to me last year, a measure of how far I have come.

During the rest of the back nine, I generally had the honors, getting four pars and a birdie on a par 4, for a total of 41. This was the kind of evidence I was looking for, proof that I could not only break 90, but also reasonably think about breaking 80. Experience was the only thing I was lacking.

This back nine also reminded me about the importance of the short game. I hit some really good chips and pitches, and I designed my practice, after that, to work on the game around the green. Each evening, I went out to the tenth green and hit chips, pitches, putts, and bunker shots. Over and over, hitting from different lies, including the most difficult ones I could imagine. That short game is getting better, but that repeated practice also taught me how difficult it is to achieve consistency. I can see that I'll be taking my shag bag out there many evenings.

In addition to this practice on the course, I've also been studying my basic swing. Initially, I was looking for more distance. Then I came across this Arnold Palmer video on YouTube. It showed me several aspects of the swing that I haven't appreciated enough until now. One is the hip turn. After watching this video, I realized that I never really understood the role of the "lower body," as Hogan puts it, in another YouTube video. The other aspect of the swing that I have misunderstood is the role of a straight left arm. All along, I've been bending mine in my effort to emulate the image of the pro golfers who have the club parallel to the ground at the top of the backswing. What I didn't understand was how important a straight left arm is to achieving maximum clubhead speed during the downswing. The Palmer video made me think of the Iron Byron videos I've seen on YouTube and how the straight left arm is crucial to the maximum release of the clubhead at impact. Now, I've started working on changing my swing in two fundamental ways. First, I want to move my hips to start the downswing. That will allow me to clear the left side and bring my arms into the hitting position. The second is to keep the left arm straight during the backswing. This is difficult, and requires the support of the right hand. But after studying this Palmer video, I'm sure it's the right way to go. So far, I've just practiced the swing without hitting a ball. These changes require so much practice and concentration that it will be a while before I can actually hit a ball this way. The next post will describe the results.

Rhythm and Release

2010-04-18T21:16:00.004-04:00

Realizing that I was making important progress on the swing, I went right back to practicing, studying some YouTube videos to help me out. One video in particular helped me with the rhythm of the swing, which you'll see in the video below.

As I practiced that drill, I came to understand a new subtlety of the release: how the follow-through traces the same plane as the downswing. I know this sounds obvious, but all along, I thought that the follow-through would take care of itself. As I practiced the rhythm drill and felt the relaxation in my arms, I started to sense how the club wants to return inside the target line during the follow-through. For some reason, I had never paid much attention to this before. But as I practiced the swing in slow-mo and thought about what probably happens, I began to think that when the left hand releases, the clubhead naturally wants to follow the arc that has already been established during the downswing. That arc takes the clubhead inside the target line. However, that's not all that happens. What also happens is that as the left arm snaps the clubhead through the hitting zone, the right hand, after throwing the clubhead, finishes on top of the left and both hands finally swing through, away from the target, and swing around the head, or top of the spine, as the swing concludes.

This is what I was seeing in the side-by-side video of Ernie Els and Michelle Wie. Finally, I started to understand how their beautiful follow-throughs happened. The left hand actually snaps the club through the hitting zone, quickly moving from a pronated position to a supinated position. Now, I have known about pronation and supination ever since I first cracked open Hogan's Five Lessons book, but until now, I never understood what he meant. The movement is so fast that deliberate control is impossible. The best I can do is think about where in the swing I want this snap to happen and then try to do it at some visual point in my swing. It's pure guesswork. If I get it right, then the shot is perfect. If I miss by a little, then either I block the shot right or I pull it left. So that release point is crucial. And I think it's the same problem for every golfer, even the pros. It's all about timing. Sometimes you're right on, but other times, you miss by a little. And that's why the pros find themselves in the rough or in a greenside bunker. This release point isn't the only fine point that my practice today revealed.

I also started to see how the left arm supinates from impact into the follow-through. It's an instantaneous kind of movement. At one milli-second, the left hand is pronated, but in the next, it's supinated, with the right hand seeming to ride on top of the left. I spent the rest of the day working on this feeling. At the range, I felt great. I could shape shots and hit with reasonable consistency. Now and then, I could feel my left arm working properly and whipping the clubhead around the swing arc. But I had too many swing thoughts: a relaxed swing rhythm, bowing my left wrist, letting the clubhead lag, coming through and throwing with the right hand, supinating the left hand and letting it go freely into the follow-through—all this was too much for me. But I know that I'm on the right path. More practice in the next few days will give me the results I'm looking for: a rhythmical swing with accuracy and distance.

The Release Revealed

2010-04-16T18:43:00.009-04:00

The hiatus between my last post and this is easy to explain. My swing continued to improve daily. That meant that any video or daily narrative would be rendered "History" by the next day's revelation. As days went by, I thought about this blog, but I was moving along with no defining moment to talk about. Now there is.

Basically, over the last month or so, I've been working on the final piece of my swing: the follow-through. What happens after impact has become my focus. Until I arrived at this point, my swing thoughts ended at impact. All my thoughts, all my practice were grounded in one outcome: a relatively powerful propulsion of the golf ball down the fairway towards a target. After impact, my swing really looked like a spring flower wilting in strong sunshine.

I knew it was a problem. My first strategy was to treat the problem as a lack of momentum. I started doing gravity swing drills and trying to use my left arm to whip up speed. That wasn't the answer, but it did serve a purpose. It did show me how fast a swing can be. Generally, the pace of my swing is fairly safe. As my son once told me, my swing looked good, but "it's slow." In the last few days, I worked on that left arm—trying to swing it as fast as I could and finishing high over my head and letting the club come down over my back. That helped, and I felt as though I was getting more distance. The mental image of swinging up high like that also reminded me of the way some of the seniors swing, Nicklaus in particular, and that similarity encouraged me.

When I went to the range, however, I could see that I had a problem. Too often, I was pushing the ball right, blocking it. If I got the timing exactly right with my hands, I could hit the ball where I wanted to, but this effort was unreliable. I had noticed this tendency out on the course, where I practice hitting off the turf in the evenings. Lately, I've been practicing the second shot on one fairway where the ball is slightly below my feet, usually producing a push or slice. I thought it was that kind of lie that was my problem. I thought that once I learned how to hit that shot, my troubles would be over. But pushing the ball at the range, too, showed me that I was wrong. The problem was with my swing.

I found the solution the other day after hitting two hundred balls. My analysis was that during the release, my hands continued to move forward, even though I felt I was throwing the clubhead with my right hand. The result was that I never gave the clubhead a chance to square up at impact. I finally got the feel of slowing down the left hand to give the right a chance to throw the clubhead and get ahead of the left hand into the follow-through. This worked beautifully, adding a key missing piece to my swing. Naturally, I couldn't wait until the next day to do some more practice. That night, I dreamed about the right hand crossing over the left.

At the range the next day, my shots were perfect. Right out there straight, time after time. Having established that kind of consistency, I started experimenting with shaping shots, hitting slight draws and fades using the advice from the very helpful Johnny Miller video on YouTube. His advice worked perfectly. Now I felt as though I had made a significant advance in my accuracy. I could see that the next challenge would be to add more distance.

When I catch it well, I can carry a 5-iron about 175 yards, and a good drive flies about 230 or 240. To me, this is fine, but I feel as though I ought to be able to hit even farther with my new understanding of how the swing works at impact and in the release. I also realize that I'm swinging too hard to get these distances. Often, after a long drive, I'll lose my balance. In my next post, I'll probably be describing my attempts to develop better tempo to get both distance and accuracy. As much as my swing has improved, there is a world of difference when I look at a really good swing. It's way out in front, like the favorite in a horse race, and I'm like the young Seabiscuit, way back in the pack, but gaining.

In the video below, you'll see me rehearsing with my driver, working on a good coil and turning level left during the downswing and on my new release. I've been studying Els on YouTube and the video showing Michelle Wie and Ernie side by side. My full swing is an attempt to emulate what I see them doing. I'm also going through the motions of the release where the club whips through from parallel behind the ball to parallel in front of it.

New Swing at the Range

2010-03-19T18:05:00.007-04:00

With the spectacular weather the last few days—temperatures in the mid-60s and above, and clear, sunny skies—the golf courses around here opened long before the daffodils will. The courses may be jumping the gun a little, but, suddenly, I felt a decision was necessary. Knowing several improvements I wanted to work on, I thought I could very well continue hitting my plastic practice balls in my backyard and videotape my progress. On the other hand, I also knew that my swing was good enough to take out on the course. Or, at least, I was pretty sure it was good enough. After some dialogue with self, I decided it was time to play.

Then the question became, Do I go directly to the course and see what's going on with tee times? Or should I go to the range first and see how my swing works with real golf balls? Since I already have, in my shoulder bag, several early-bird tokens saved from the fall, I decided that I might as well go to the range and see if I could get a mat.

Since I arrived at the range early in the afternoon, around one o'clock or so, it really wasn't bad: half a dozen cars in the parking lot. So I got my bucket of a hundred balls and started hitting.

Starting out with a 9-iron, which is what I've been practicing with in my backyard with the plactic balls, I could hardly believe how well I hit the ball. I went through the bag and felt good about each club. I did have some questions about distance, and I did pull a few balls left, but, overall, I couldn't have been more gratified.

The driver required a few adjustments, but there, too, I was happy, hitting straight drives out there, about a 230 carry. Very satisfying, considering I haven't been hitting that club at all during the winter practice.

The results were so good that I started modifications as I went along. Mainly, I wanted to delay the release and lengthen the follow-through, which (to me) means throwing the right hand, fully releasing the left, and finishing with both hands far out toward the target and resolving somewhere around my back.

The more I worked on these points, the better the shots became. I hit the pitching wedge for accuracy and found it was going around 120 and, within reason, around the flag. The nine (here I keep in mind the Johnny Miller video on YouTube, where he's hitting at that island green at Sawgrass, a 145-yard shot) was going straight out there, about 140 carry. How could I not be happy with that?

Recently, I read something that amateurs don't hit their irons with that much diffence. Where the pros can hit irons with around ten yards or so of difference between each one, the distances amateurs hit their irons are more clustered together. That's what I found with my own swings. The distances I was getting, however, told me that my swing was in good shape. My six-iron was going over the green where the flag is supposedly 155, and my five-iron was going out there about 175 or 180 carry. All my distances are measured as carry. I don't know what difference that makes, but that's my yardstick.

The more I hit, the better the results. With the club control I have now, I can make adjustments and actually make a swing. After dozens of swings, I started to feel the lag and the way the release brings the club down into the ball, with the left arm squaring up the clubface and the right hand supplying the propulsive forward momentum.

As I say, the distances I got today were very gratifying, but I know that I can hit still farther. One of the aspects of greater distance is a quicker tempo. In the video below, you'll see me swinging in the backyard at a 27/9 tempo. If I can speed that up to to 24/8 or 21/7, I'll get commensurately greater distance. See the Tour Tempo book for a detailed explanation of the 3-to-1 ratio of the golf swing. Let the movie load completely and then play it to see how the audio syncs up with the video.

New Opening Day, New Swing

2010-03-18T19:25:00.006-04:00

This afternoon, I stopped by my local course, Mohansic, to see what was going on, and, to my great surprise, the flags were on the greens, the markers lined the fairways, and the place seemed fully open for business. So I'll try to get out tomorrow and see how my swing performs.

Today, another beautiful day of sunny skies and temperatures in the mid sixties, I spent hitting my plastic practice balls. I thought of going to a nearby range, but thought better of it. The last time I was there, it was packed in the afternoon, full of local high school and college golf teams and eager duffers. With the great weather, I assumed that the facility would be insane and that staying home and using the time I would otherwise have spent waiting for a mat to get in some quality practice at home. That turned out to be a "capital idea," as my father was fond of saying.

My swing feels very good right now, ready to take out on the course. My focal points have been mainly my follow-through and my posture and knee-flex at address and during the backswing. In the video below, you'll see a closeup of my knees, and I think it shows that I'm OK here. My right knee stays flexed throughout. Weeks ago, my pro, Jeremiah, pointed out that my right leg was straightening during the backswing and cautioned me to correct that. I think that's done, or at least under control.

In general, I think my flexibility is limited, both during the backswing and during the follow-through, but it's the best I can do. And, for me, I think it's sufficient. I gauge my swing in the way that I hit the ball. If my distance isn't the greatest, well, that's the best I can do.

But today, I felt I was really getting the feeling of both hands working together, the left hand squaring up the clubface and the right hand providing that down-the-line power push. Suddenly, I understood why people, like Hogan, said that the swing actually is faster past the ball than before. The reason, I think, is that the release initiates a powerful physical force that begins before the ball and continues to gather incredible speed at the ball and past it. The result, if performed with both hands coordinated, is a nice, loose follow-through where the club is at least at your back, or, in an ideal swing, past your back and swinging toward the target.

As I worked on using both hands, I understood the function of each. The left hand performs the release, from any lag that you can preserve, and the right hand gives the club a push (like pushing a child in a swing). The problem is that all this happens so quickly near the ball that you have to try to feel your hands, and the positions they occupy, long after impact, way up in the follow-through, when your hands are up in front of your head. For me, I like to visualize the left hand snapping the clubhead down to the ball and through it (remembering the L-drill), and the right hand driving through the ball with the right wrist bending ever left, bending the left wrist back, and both hands continuing to somewhere behind your head (if you're flexible!).

So I did some practice swinging, right arm alone, to give me the feel of what the right arm and hand actually did. That's when I started to visualize the right wristbone bowing out after it threw the clubhead through the swing arc. In response, the left wrist supinates, as Hogan describes it, and finally is bent back as far as possible by the force of the swing. After a swing, if I felt this left wrist bent back, with the right wrist on top of it, I knew I had just hit a good shot.

As any golfer who has done any practicing knows, these little things are absolutely confounding for a neophyte. I can hit several perfect shots in succession. Then, with one little mental change, everything falls apart, and I shank the ball way off to the right. A good golf swing, it seems, demands perfect execution. Anything less and you have either a mediocre shot or disaster.

Last, in addition to all these fine points, the factor that continues to grow on me is the importance of relaxation during the swing. As my first pro, Mark, told me, "Tension kills a golf swing." More and more, day by day, practice bucket by practice bucket, I'm gaining more understanding of what he meant. With all the fine points in place, with complete relaxation, you'll have a good swing.

In the video, I've left in several consecutive real-time swings so that you can see how I practice and what can go wrong, and I've included shots from face-on and from behind, with that special close-up of my legs. You'll also see that sometimes my follow-through is complete, and abbreviated in others. I can feel this difference during the swing. That's the good news. Correcting it and establishing a swing with a complete, relaxed follow-through is another. But I'm hot on the trail!

Saint Patrick's Day

2010-03-17T20:20:00.007-04:00

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.

Throwing with the Right Hand

2010-02-22T19:13:00.006-05:00

I seem to be on a roll, here in the Northeast, deep in February, with snow covering the yard and wind blowing plastic balls off the mat. Even to go out, I have to put on several layers, then a fleece coat, a scarf, a knit hat, gloves, and my Sorrel boots. That's all OK with me because the results have been very gratifying. From my last day at the range, I can see that I've come a long way. I've learned to relax and swing with confidence, and I'm seeing greater distance and accuracy than before.

And every day that I go out to practice, I know I'm going to learn or feel something new. During the session, my swing is going to change in some subtle way. I can never predict what that change will be, but whatever it is, it will make my swing better. I couldn't ask for more. The golf paradigm seems to be this: keep putting in the practice and the golf swing will gradually reveal itself. There's no magic here, no shortcuts.

And you have to be ready and receptive. When the revelations come to me, they trigger aspects I read about or saw on video or heard from a pro. And, all of a sudden, something makes sense in a way that it never did before. As I've said, several times before in these blogs, you think you know, but you really don't. Not until you have the concept working in your nerve synapses and muscle fiber. When the concept gets down to the anatomical and physiological, then you can say to yourself that you understand.

Now, to recapitulate a bit. On Saturday, two days ago, I went, with some measure of trepidation, to the range to see if I could hit real balls with my practice swing. On previous attempts, my practice swing served me well for the first go-around through the irons, but when I started to try for more distance, the swing fell apart, and I could hardly hit the ball.

This time, the practice swing prevailed. I remembered to stay loose, and through all the irons and hybrids—even the driver—I was relaxed. As a result, I hit the ball very well. I didn't get the distances I wanted, but I didn't worry. That will come later.

When I returned to my backyard to start hitting plastic practice balls, it was with a renewed sense of confidence. Yesterday, my swing was the best it has ever been. I could hit ball after ball right at my target, the tall Norway Maple.

Today, the difference was that I got the feel of throwing the right hand. Maybe it was something I saw while watching Paul Casey and Ian Poulter in the Accenture Match Play. Somehow, I got into my head, and into my imagination, the right hand turning over and finishing into a long follow-through. With my pink practice balls, I tried to emulate that look. And very quickly, the sense of what the right hand does became clear. It's what Hogan means when he talks about the second baseman's throw, with the right arm down low and the forearm hanging back, ready to sling the ball to first.

From my experience at the range, day before last, I was primed for this new aspect of the swing. Hitting real balls, I found myself, without consciously trying to accomplish this, turning over the right hand and finding my forearms crossed on the follow-through, just as all the online instruction advocates. Particularly with the driver, I found that if I could replicate this feeling, I could hit a good ball.

At some early point in today's practice, I remembered that feel of the right hand swinging through and over the left. Mentally, I coupled that with what I remembered of Hogan and began to sweep the club through with my right hand. Instantly, it made all the difference—in both the swing and in the result. The swing started popping the ball out there, towards my target, time after time. Direction was almost no problem. Neither was distance. When everything flowed, the results were sublime.

Realizing that I had stumbled upon a great secret of the swing, I started concentrating on maximizing the benefits of this new swing. You'll see the results in the video below. No longer did I worry about the club being parallel to the ground at the top of the swing. And no longer did I think primarily about the shoulders turning sharply, with the left shoulder coming away from the target line and enabling the snap of the wrists. All I attempted to do was to swing back normally, keeping behind the ball, and then to swing forward and to swing with both the left hand and the right.

This is not easy. Sometimes, the left hand would dominate. Other times, the right. But if I took a practice swing and mentally laid out a plan for the real swing, invariably, I would hit a good ball.

Naturally, this kind of success excited me, and I hit bucket after bucket. I took some time out to film my swing using the Callaway balls and the Almost Golf balls, a real test of how well the swing was working. By the end, as the sun was setting, I felt as though I could hit ball after ball towards an imaginary target in my driveway. Accuracy and distance were all taken care of by the way I executed the swing. I really didn't have to think about the ball—or about impact—as long as I carried out my swing plan.

Take a look at the video and see what you think. I show some swings today, and one in slow motion. At the end, I compare today's swing with one taken about a week ago. To me, I see the longer finish in today's swing. What I take away from this video is that I need to practice a full release and follow-through. I can see that I'm not really releasing the club fully. After impact, at some point, my muscles call a halt to the proceedings, whereas they should just let everything go, right up to the conclusion. Still, in the side-by-side last part of the video, I think you'll see that today's swing improves upon the one from a week ago.

Tensions

2010-02-16T16:43:00.013-05:00

When my children were little and learning to use a Mac Plus, I remember how they watched it boot up. As icons started to fill the little screen, they would say the "tensions" were appearing, meaning all the Mac extensions. In the way that parents do, we started mimicking the delightful language. Mac "extensions" became, forever, Mac "tensions."

I've tipped my hand already, but at least I've introduced the theme of this post, which describes my latest discovery about the golf swing: no "tensions"; complete relaxation is the key. Now, you're saying to yourself, "That's SO OBVIOUS!" But stop for a minute. We all have similar memories of people telling us—our pros, our friends, magazine articles, videos, and so on—how easy the efficient golf swing is. But we all have the same trouble. We're all laboring under a set of misconceptions. And beyond that, we are all trying to understand a "letting go" that is impossible to convey in words or by example. As my first pro, Mark, told me, "You have to feel it."

Readers of this blog will remember my reaction to that advice. I thought, "That's ridiculous! You have to be able to teach someone what you're talking about!" But here I am, going into my fourth year of learning a good swing, and I'm just starting to get the "feel" of it, and I've read books on the subject, I've seen countless instructional videos on the Web, I've taken numerous lessons, and I've paid close attention to every little piece of potentially helpful advice or teaching that I've come across.

If I were correct—that you can teach the elements of the swing—then I would have mastered it long before this. The fact that I haven't is proof enough for me that I was completely mistaken. Mark, with all his experience as a player and as a teaching pro, knew far better than I did: in its essence, the swing is ineffable.

No one taught me how to relax and just swing. No one could. That I'm finally getting that feeling of release is a product of several years of practice, and, specifically, a few months of the one-arm drill. That's what really brought me to this point. With this drill, you can't muscle the club, and you can't consciously guide it. All you can do is to start the backswing, pause at the top, and then turn and let the club come through into the release and impact and, finally, follow-through.

Practicing the drill over and over, I set certain positions for myself: on the takeaway, at the top of the backswing, and at the release. The flight of the plastic practice ball tells me how well I did. I don't worry about bad hits. Those will happen, and happen every time you make the slightest change to your swing thought. I understand that. And it's OK. I'll work on it and refine the feel of it and correct what's wrong with it until the swing works. The one-arm drill is all about fine-tuning your musculature and nervous system to perform highly-stylized movements, measured in milliseconds.

Now, when I finish the one-arm drill and go to the full swing, I feel this sense of relaxation, of looseness. I feel as though I'm turning and whipping the club, and it's going through paths determined by all my time up until now practicing discrete aspects of the swing. But, most of all, I feel absence. That sounds like a conundrum or a paradox, but I am conscious that I have given over control of movement to the swing. I am no longer "making it happen." It is happening because I am letting it happen. Allowing it to happen.

And the results are encouraging. I can hit ball after ball right at a target I've chosen. The accuracy varies, naturally, and so does the distance, but there is a real sense of control. With my Callaway Hx Soft Flight Practice Balls and the "Almost Golf" balls, I'm aiming just to miss the side of my house and hit shots way up in the Norway Maple in my backyard. Most of the time, I can do that. And I have no doubt, that with really serious practice, I could do it without fail.

Now I have the sense of losing the "tensions." I can make a full swing and feel as though it is effortless. See what you think, in the video below. The shots feel so good. I don't think I'm mistaken in looking at my swing on video and seeing that I'm in good shape. We all continue to improve our swings, and my next post will take a look at the role of the left shoulder in the golfer's attempt to rotate around his spine.

K.J. Choi Gave Me My Latest Swing Tip

2010-02-03T20:47:00.007-05:00

The weather in the thirties, snow on the ground, gloves on my hands, Sorrels on my feet, I'm still out there practicing every day, two hundred or so swings each time. I can feel the cumulative effect. I'm getting the feeling of a swing, rather than a hit. And, as a result, I can see a longer follow-through, rather than an after-thought.

I've also continued to study online videos, lately the one on YouTube of K.J. Choi, particularly the Swing Vision one when he's hitting a six-iron, but also the one where he appears with Jack Nicklaus at the Memorial for a clinic (Paul Casey appears at this clinic, too, and this video is just as important as the Choi video).

In the Memorial clinic, I was really taken by the loose, relaxed way K.J. swings. It seems so easy, and everything falls readily into place. The same with the Casey video. He's hitting a 5-iron there, and it's no sweat for him to hit it 195 yards. But let's focus on the K.J. Swing Vision with the 6-iron. I've seen this so many times, I can't tell you. And I've heard Bob Kostis, the narrator, tell us how K.J. keeps his head down "to ensure that he releases his hands and arms through the hit." I've listened to this over and over again, but I didn't really start to understand what Bob was saying until today, when I hit a couple of hundred practice balls, working on the role of the right hand.

Finally, I started to see how the right hand throws the club. I'm also reminded of the great Ernie Els video where Bob talks about Ernie pulling down with his left arm but throwing with his right hand. Today, for really the first time, I began to have this feeling. I wanted to feel a good hinge and lag at the top of the swing, and I wanted to feel that I was going (as Els says) "deep into the shot" before releasing. Then, at release, I wanted to feel the right hand—the index finger—throwing the club through. Once I felt relaxed enough, I started to do that and the results showed it.

Time after time, I was able to swing and send the ball right at the tallest part of the Norway Maple in my back yard, my target. As I was developing this subtlety, I was filming my swing, and, at one point, I filmed myself saying, as I walked away from the hitting mat toward the camera to stop recording, "This is getting scary." What I meant was that I was hitting ball after ball right at my target, and with plenty of distance.

In the video below, you'll see the results of this practice session. You'll also see a little test I did to check my tempo. Using the audio files from my book Tour Tempo, I measured my swing against a 21/7, 1 24/8, and a 27/9 tempo. You'll see how I'm slow on the first tempo, but almost right on with the last.

Last, I've included a side-by-side clip of my swing from yesterday and one from today. While they're both very similar, I think you'll see that today's swing is more assured. It's a little quicker, and watch the follow-through. I want to see the right hand going all the way through—up and around. Like K.J.

From Sawgrass to Sixteen Degrees

2010-01-29T17:58:00.027-05:00

That's how cold it was today, with a bitter wind to bring the chill factor down to around zero. I couldn't last long outside, but just long enough to hit a bucket of 50 balls and pick them all up in the fresh snow, probably two inches or so, that fell yesterday when Boreas, the Greek god of winter (his name meant "North Wind" or "Devouring One"), shocked, no doubt, by a few warm days and thawing soil and sod, decided to put an end to all ideas of spring and sent this sunny hillside back into the frozen caverns of deep January. This modern mythology serves as an object lesson to all avid golfers in the Northeast. Take a club out on your lawn in January, especially when all the snow and ice have melted away, and you will anger the gods!

Foolish mortal, I ignored the gods and took my trusty 9-iron out into the teeth of the gale. My plastic balls too light to stand still on the hitting mat, with my Callaway Soft-Flite balls and my Almost Golf" balls, I hit my two buckets in the course of the afternoon. That was all I could manage. I knew that if I tried for more, I could definitely count myself among the certifiably insane. When it comes right down to it, I don't know why that thought even occurred to me. The idea of hitting outside today at all was completely insane. Even in extreme circumstances, like these, there is humor, if you can ignore the sore throbbing of your nearly frozen fingers long enough to think about it. At the end of my second bucket, as I was wandering around the backyard with the shag bag in one hand, I thought that if I fell down for some reason and couldn't get up, I would be frozen solid by the time anybody found me, a solid statue to the mindlessness of my preoccupation. Thankfully, the outside ordeal was worth it.

The reason that I was willing to confront the elements for a few swings was that, since my practice two days ago, I had a new realization, and I wanted to try out my swing to see if I could do what I imagined I should do. And that thing was a full swing. A completely relaxed swing around a full arc, just like Bobby Jones. No muscular control that would prevent me from a complete follow-through.

You're saying to yourself something like, "Well, what do you think you've been trying to do these three years?" But that's where I now know more than you do. This thing—this golf swing—is so subtle and recondite and elusive that we amateurs can hardly reach the end of our exploration of it. As my wife often says to me after a practice, "That's what you always say! 'I've got it!'" She's right, and by now, I know that all I have, after the last practice, is the latest revelation and that there are many more revelations to come.

This one happens to be about the weight of the club and being able to swing it around an arc without interposing oneself. In other words, I'm starting to feel the sensations associated with actually swinging the club, instead of controlling it. Now, if you've been reading my posts, you'll know that this idea has been growing on me. Even lately, with all the help of the left-arm alone drill, I tend to think about the swing as ending at the ball. If you look at my videos, including the one below, you'll see how I characteristically take a slow motion practice swing that ends at the ball, not one inch farther.

So my idea, which came to me, I think, yesterday, when it snowed all day, courtesy of Boreas, was that I needed to loosen up even more and let the swing go all the way to the follow-through. By now, I think my left arm knows about the release. What I needed to teach it was to continue right on through without interruption or hindrance. As Mark, my first teaching pro, said, you swing "and the ball is in the way." Such a simple thought, but how difficult to do.

So today, I concentrated on being loose and relaxed. I wanted to feel the club hinge at the top of the swing. I wanted to feel the clubhead lag behind the swing. I wanted to feel the club go flying through the release and continue into the follow-through and finish up over my shoulders, the way the pros do. And I wanted to be able to still hit the ball where I wanted to! That's a big condition. As you know, if you change the slightest thing in your swing, that change has major ramifications, all of them bad.

In my layers of warm clothing and my too-thin gloves, I worked on feeling loose. On keeping my left arm as straight as I could. On keeping my right knee flexed. On keeping the lag deep into the swing. On letting the club go and feeling a complete follow-through. As you'll see in the video, I succeeded to an extent. I made progress. And that's what we want from a practice session. Especially at sixteen degrees.

Playing #17 at TPC Sawgrass

2010-01-26T09:36:00.005-05:00

Bad things lead to good. At least that's what happened today. After the awful experience at the range this morning, I had a very rewarding practice back home in my yard, on a glorious January afternoon, about forty degrees and blue skies and bright sunshine.

By now, you know my proclivities. I went back to the basics: the one-arm drill. At first, I was terrible, swinging just as I had at the range. Then I started to make a few adjustments, and by my second bucket (60 plastic balls), I was hitting the ball pretty well again. And what made the difference was my recollection of something I had come across several times in the past when the concept was over my head.

It's the idea that at impact, the hands slow down, and the clubhead goes flying ahead. Now, it's seems so obvious. But, until this moment, I never understood this part of the whipping action of the swing. This is how good golfers generate their clubhead speed. It's not the swinging of the arms, or a rush anywhere in the swing. It's what makes a swing like Els has look so effortless. It's an accelerating motion from the top down to impact. At that exact point, where the hands are ahead of the ball, the hands slow down and Hogan's supination takes place.

Once I got this concept, I could hardly believe how effortless the swing became. It was just as Johnny Miller said. You bring the club back steeply, with that early hinge, and then you don't have to do anything until the release. You turn to a certain point (don't ask me where, right now) and then you stop the forward movement of your hands, and you turn the club, leading with a bowed left wrist. Nothing could be simpler. Right? Right! Sure! It's taken me over three years to get to this point!

With greater confidence, I was able to start thinking about accuracy with my 9-iron and the one-arm swing. This is when I started playing #17 at Sawgrass, just for practice.

You know that hole. It's the one that's an island. If you miss, you're in the drink— stroke and distance. Try again. There's nowhere to drop. And this is the hole that Johnny Miller hit to when I described his teaching lesson on pressure in a recent post. For me, this hole has lost much of its terror. With my new understanding of the release—stopping the hands and letting the club go flying ahead—I had a new consistency that I have never felt before. More and more often, it seems, the parts of the swing come together, the coincidence enabling me to dial it in and go for birdie.

The other day, keeping count as I hit 60 balls, I hit roughly a third for possible pars, another third for birdie, and the last third went in the drink. That didn't really bother me because I was able to pick them all up with my shag bag, #17 being my imaginary practice hole in my driveway, where I had put down the empty bucket and hit to it from a flagstone path about thirty yards away. The lawn is too soft to hit to, and I leave footprints when I walk around picking up balls. So this offered a good alternative. I really liked Johnny Miller's video, and getting used to the idea of hitting to a difficult target and avoiding real trouble seemed like a good way to practice.

Me on #17 at Sawgrass

Discouragement

2010-01-23T11:47:00.010-05:00

After a couple of weeks of practice in my yard, the one-arm drill and hitting Callaway Hx Soft Flight Practice Balls and "Almost Golf" balls with a full swing, I went to the range early this morning, eager to try out my improving swing.

At first, I hit the ball well, starting with the 9-iron, which I've been using exclusively in my yard. Nice and easy and smooth, hitting balls real high and around 120 yards. Looked good. Then I went down through my irons, all pretty good. Not great, but good for not hitting them in a long time.

Trouble began with the utility 4 and 3. I hit a couple of decent shots, but, for the rest, I topped them or shanked them, all kinds of bad swings. Then, in a display of utter perversity, I tried the driver, too. How bad could it be? I thought. Really bad. As Lily Tomlin says, things are going to get worse before they get worse. Couldn't hit it to save my life. Anticipating that it would be a disaster, I took only four balls with me to the next mat with a driver tee in it. So bad, I had to laugh. Black humor.

Then, trying to regroup, I went back to the nine, which was awful, even worse than before. So bad I took a few one-arm swings to try to get my tempo and path and bowed wrist back again. I was able to hit a couple of balls OK, pulled hooks left, but at least they were airborne, vaguely resembling a golf shot. I couldn't wait to get to the last of the 100 balls in my bucket.

On the way home, I surveyed the debacle, the wreckage of my swing. No more forecasting breaking 80. I'll be lucky to break 100, or worse. I may spend another season going to the course only occasionally and spending my time practicing instead. I'm not panicking, since the same thing happened the last time I visited the range. From that experience, I knew that transferring a swing with practice balls to a swing with real balls is hardly automatic. With real balls, the desire to get the distances you think you should have destroys your relaxed, smooth swing with lightweight balls.

Back home now and ready to go outside and begin the one-arm drill again, I'm hoping that, at some point, I'll be able to maintain my swing, first at the range, and then on the course. But the greatest lesson is that a golf swing is like Mt. Everest. If you want to learn the swing or climb the mountain, you cannot expect to do it on your terms. Just as you have to cling to the mountain take the right path and make the right steps, you have to let yourself go and immerse yourself in the swing. You must become the swing. As an old Russian piano teacher once adjured me (and I didn't know what she was talking about), "The music is in you!" It's a hard thing to get over the concept of yourself as an individual, as a being or entity, and give yourself over to something else—a belief, music, motion and transcend the self. But that is what golf demands. Probably all sports do. Become the music, become the tennis serve, become the baseball swing, become the Zen archer, become the golf swing. Just think of those lines from Yeats' "Among School Children."

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Or the familiar image from Zen in the Art of Archery.

"(...) The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art (...)"

At some point, you have to lose yourself. When you're making a golf swing, you're not you any more.

Great Golf Swings: Johnny Miller

2010-01-21T07:21:00.011-05:00

After thinking about the Jeremiah's comments (in my last post), I did some online research and came across a great article from Jim McLean about Johnny Miller's iron play. I haven't come across Jim before, but he's been a pro for decades and actually played some rounds with Miller when Johnny was at his peak. He's insightful and appreciates the greatness in Miller's swing, giving us a good chance to revisit a good model for those of us who are starting to learn a swing.

Talking about Johnny practicing with one arm, Jim got my attention right away. As you know from reading recent posts, I really like that drill and knew Miller used it, but I got the idea from another source on the Web. Jim filled in with some interesting background information.

The first thing I think about when I look at Johnny Miller's swing is that he's left-handed. And that's quite different. Most left-handers, I believe, should play left-handed. But Phil Mickelson is a right-handed player that plays great left-handed golf. Well, Johnny was a left-handed person who played right-handed golf.

One of the things that Miller can do that's really great to watch is hit balls just with his left arm and really hit the ball tremendous. He can hit a 6-iron 160-yards with one arm, quite incredible and something that he practiced quite a bit.

Johnny Miller (on hitting shots with one arm): "And what happens is when you're tall and you can play the ball close in, you get a very upright swing and the club doesn't rotate quite so much. Combined with a reverse-C, a lot of people "poo-poo" the reverse-C, but I had a reverse-C and it keeps the clubface square. It doesn't turn it over. But the thing that set my swing apart probably the most was that I was the first guy to have an early-set, and I got that from hitting balls one-handed. When you hit balls one-handed left-handed, you always set the club gradually. By halfway up, you're already at 90 degrees with the forearm and so you don't have to do anything until you're way down here and then release it."

Being a neophyte, I found confirmation that my recognition of the value of the one-arm drill actually has merit. It's one way of practicing that will help me hit consistently straight.

Then, Jim talks about Miller's grip, which he learned from looking at pictures with his dad.

Now, when we look at Johnny's grip, we really see the Hogan influence. In the evenings when he was a young kid, Johnny's dad would bring him downstairs and they would look at pictures of Hogan and Nelson and Snead. And I know he studied the Hogan book and that's the grip that Johnny put on, which was a very weak left hand grip.

That meant his left hand was turned toward the target, the "V" on the top of the left hand pointing directly up to the chin. So that's an anti-hook grip. But being left-handed and being a little stronger here, that might have something to do with being able to play so well with this grip.
A weak left hand grip tends to lead to an open clubface at the top for most people, and it did with Johnny Miller as well. Now that open clubface pretty much takes the hook out of the game. And I'll tell you one thing about Miller—nobody hit the ball straighter than this man! Now if he did miss it, he would tend to miss off to the right. And as his game went off a bit, he would miss a little too much out to right field and partially because of that weak left hand. But when he was on, he could hit that golf ball as hard as he wanted to and hit it dead straight.

A Hogan devotee myself, I use a similar grip, but Jim's commentary sheds some light on its pros and cons. It'll help you avoid hooking, which was Hogan's main problem, but you have to watch out for losing balls right.

Then I was interested in where Miller learned the steep backswing that was characteristic of his swing. Partly, it came from the one-arm drill, butalso from a coach named John Geersten.

Mr. Geersten also believed in certain swing positions. So that went right along with what John had already done in his career. And he was developing into a fine player.

One of the first positions was the Halfway Back position. Mr. Geersten liked an early wrist set and that's something that Johnny had in his swing the rest of his life. Setting the wrists early put the golf club really out in front of him. And that's a term that we hear nowadays all the time—keeping the club in front of you. Well, Miller really did that as well.

He had that club outside his hands going back, and he also had the toe up. Now to do that, he almost felt the left hand pushing down as you go back or the clubhead getting up. That gets the club pretty vertical going back, almost standing the club straight up and down. That's also a balance position where the club is very light. A lot of amateurs will get the club off to the side and it's very heavy and moves slow. But when that club gets up here, you have a lot of leverage.

You can see a good example of this swing on YouTube in the video "How to Handle Pressure - #17 at the TPC Sawgrass."

Jim goes on to describe Miller's swing at impact, with the left wrist bowed, just as Hogan advocates. From all my one-arm practice, I have begun to feel how important this position is, one that can't be repeated too often or emphasized enough. In my own study, I've read Hogan on this, and I always keep in mind that Hogan uses Jimmy Demaret as a great example of an accentuated left wrist. I also think of something I read somewhere about Camilo Villegas, who also stresses this bowed position.

And as he came into impact, that left wrist kind of bowed and went into the golf ball, I would say, almost exactly like Ben Hogan. Talking with Johnny, I know he felt that that golf ball compressed against the clubface and stayed there for a while as he went through.

He felt that wrist stayed in that position through impact without having the right hand flipping over at all. And that is probably one reason why he drove the ball so straight off his target line with every club. It was a great, great move, but a very advanced move.

When Jim says, "advanced move," he reminds me of the pro who introduced me to Hogan's book, calling it "advanced," too. Now, here we are, more than half a century after it was first published, and we're still calling this bowed left wrist an "advanced" swing thought. We must conclude that not enough people are reading

Five Lessons.

Jim ends with some astute observations, ones which, I happy to say, coincide with aspects of my own practice, one being the importance of visual models. For me, these are videos on the Web and the video analysis I do every time I practice.

What can you learn from Johnny Miller? Well, if you have young children, one thing you can learn is what Johnny's Dad did for him, and that was to show him pictures of great players. Have them visualize those players and copy some of their positions. It's a tremendous thing to do.

Then, what Jim says about getting the club up on the backswing reminds me of what Don Trahan teaches with his Peak Performance golf, the idea of swinging back into the catcher's mitt and then swinging "up the tree." It seems to be the same concept.

Now as we look at the golf swing, there are two things that I'd like you to look at or remember from this Johnny Miller lesson. Number one, when he took the golf club back, he really got that golf club up in his backswing.

So when you do that, you don't have to do it quite as much as John, but really try to get the clubhead up at the ceiling, up at the sky here, and that makes the club light. And when the club's light you can move it a lot faster.

One of the major problems that I see at all of our golf schools is the player who takes the club around his body which gets his swing too flat. That puts the weight out on the end of a fulcrum where gravity is pulling down on it. So it makes the club very heavy and throws the club way off balance. So that's a tremendous thing you can learn from watching Johnny Miller.

And when he talks about the angle of the shoulders during the turn, he echoes what my pro, Jeremiah, pointed out in my swing.

The other thing I would say, and this is especially true for tall players, is make sure that you get some angle or tilt on your shoulders when you go back. Again, I do see players who tilt too much straight down.

That's something I'm working on right now, that and keeping the flex in the right leg and continuing to focus on keeping the club lag "deep into the shot," in the fashion of Els, and then at impact feeling the bowed left wrist. In the last day or so, the results look pretty encouraging. I'm hitting fairly consistently and with a good degree of accuracy. And after watching that Miller video on #17 at Sawgrass, I'm mentally hitting for that island green. It's a good thing that I'm on dry land, though, or I'd be out of practice balls by now.

Swing Tempo

2010-01-17T19:48:00.005-05:00

At this point in my swing development, the most successful period ever, is a good time to look forward and plan what I should focus on next in my practice.

To get some ideas, I contacted a pro who worked with me two summers ago and whom I frequently see at a local range. Jeremiah looked at one of my latest videos and had some good comments.

First, he wrote

Your right leg is too straight at the beginning and throughout the swing, so straight it almost causes you to pivot towards your target(not good). First, try and bend both knees together the same amount and hold during the swing allowing the upper body to coil around the restricting of the hips. Usually, when the the right leg stays straight or unbent at the knee, then the right hip side will tend to follow the turn instead of resisting the turn, producing an effective coil.

No doubt about it. He's right. I haven't thought about my right leg being straight in so long, I can't even remember. I know it was a problem when I first started building a swing three years ago, but somehow, it got lost among all the other details I was trying to think about.

Then, he said,

I'm not certain, but it does appear that you left arm is bending too soon on the follow through. Do your best to keep it straight as long as you can. When the left arm collapses slightly too soon on the forward swing, it sometimes causes the swing path to go from right to left or an in to out swing path. Just keep an eye on that.

Now, this is something that I do keep an eye on. Lately, since I've been hitting the ball so well, I've been concluding that a straight arm isn't causing major problems for me. When I do think about a straight left arm, I think about it in the context of a wide swing, and when my swing is wider, I can see that I hit the ball farther. Definitely, this is something to work on.

Next, he questioned the ball position at address.

What club were you hitting? If it was anything like a 8-sw, I would say nothing, but it really appears that your ball position is way too far back. Remember the general rule of thumb. Four balls........
6-iron dead center of stance
one ball back of that 7-sw
one ball ahead of center 5-iron through 3-wood
driver farthest most ball. two balls ahead of dead center closest to left front foot

In my practice, I'm actually playing the ball in the center of my stance, hitting with a nine-iron. It's the camera angle that makes the ball look so far back in the stance, since the mat is angled diagonally across my backyard, not perpendicular to the camera. Still, I started thinking some more about the ball position. That's why I went back to Hogan's book so that I could see the illustration he uses.

Last, the pro said,

Here's a big one.......your shoulders at impact are almost vertical. Left shoulder is the highest and the right being the lowest. Your shoulders at impact should be generally speaking at a 45 degree angle. Yours are like 180 degrees. The right shoulder should be lowest and the left the highest at impact but no more than 45 degrees. Please do not make this mistake. Correct ASAP.

Wow! I looked at myself, and I could hardly believe how steep my shoulder angle is. I don't know where that came into my swing, but in the next few days, I need to correct that

Then, one other aspect of my swing could use some attention. And that's the tempo. As I said earlier, I've liked to watch real-time pro swings lately so that I can get a sense of their tempo. In my hitting, I feel as though I have a good, relaxed tempo that results in balls hit with good distance and accuracy. As a test, in the video below, I put my latest swing up against the 21/7 swing tempo from the book, Tour Tempo. As you can see, I'm way behind. That's OK, however. I'm very happy with where I am right now. As I work on a dependable swing, and work out the problems that my pro commented on, I can work on tempo, too. That should maximize the efficiency of the swing, a phrase I couldn't have imagined writing more than a few days ago. I would have written something more along the lines of, "My swing, when I get one!"

It's Getting Better All the Time

2010-01-17T14:13:00.011-05:00

Early this afternoon, I hit a bucket of practice balls (45 swings), in the yard, just ahead of some rain and before a slight lower-back twinge could become something worse. The results were extremely gratifying and reassuring. I didn't hit one bad ball, which made me think that I finally have a repeatable, efficient swing—the good golf swing I've been working toward.

As I focused on staying in the shot, I began to see how the release snaps the clubhead through the hitting area. The physics of it suddenly seemed so obvious, just like snapping the end of a wet towel. I picture the swing arc and mentally time the release at the point where my hands are just past dead bottom center. At this point in the swing, a delay measured in milliseconds will add significant power and distance. This is the part of the swing that people must be referring to when they talk about holding the release as long as possible. What seems so clear to me now, almost a childish concept, has taken me only three years to discover, but when the time came (which was yesterday), the discovery happened very quickly—within 24 hours or so. Now that my swing is consistent and reliable, I can work on greater accuracy, distance, and control. This understanding has put me on a whole new level of development.

The split-screen below shows my swing yesterday with my swing the day before that. No glaring differences here, which goes to show how subtle and invisible this release point of the swing is, hard to see and hard to learn. Looking back on the way I've learned the swing, I see that Swing Vision, though it's certainly helpful in some ways, is of no help in showing how the release works. For that reason, I stopped looking at Swing Vision videos on YouTube, for the most part, and searched more often for real-time swing videos, which would show me something useful about tempo.

In addition to the invisibility of this crucial point in the swing, there's another impediment to learning more readily. That's is the power that we see in all the PGA pros on TV. To us amateurs, that power implies muscle and the leverage of pure strength. Even when we watch some pros who are in questionable physical condition, the opposite of Villegas and Woods and some others who are in great shape, we still think that strength has to be responsible for the tremendous distances these pros can hit. Getting beyond this conception of the swing and understanding what the clichés mean ("Let the club do the work," "Swing easy, hit hard," and all the others we've all heard forever) takes patience and diligence and dedication.

I just went back to look at the end of Hogan's book and had to laugh when I re-read the last page.

The golfer-reader who has applied himself with some diligence to these lessons, spending at least a week on each, should already be well on his way to developing a correct, repeating swing. However, you cannot expect to acquire a real control of the correct movements in a month's time. You must continue to work on the fundamentals throughout the golf season, both on the course and on the practice tee. Through this steady familiarization you will gradually come to execute the movements of the swing more easily and efficiently. Within six months—as soon as that—an average golfer who has applied himself intelligently should be coming close to breaking 80 or actually break 80.

Six months? How about three years! I guess I must be a remedial case, a slow learner.

Big Day

2010-01-16T17:15:00.010-05:00

Three years. That's about how long I've been working on learning a good golf swing. And the last year has been consecutive months of intense practice and video analysis. Today, for the first time, January 16, I felt that I had a real golf swing. I was hitting the ball exactly the way I wanted to, and I was hitting it with accuracy. The backswing felt in place, my left wrist felt flat, the tempo felt good, there was lag in the downswing, the release was easy and relaxed, and the follow-through was a natural conclusion of an efficient swing. Behind this sudden emergence of the swing was the way two aspects of my recent practice (described in earlier posts) coincided: the left arm along drill and the Els idea of staying in the shot.

For the last several days, I've been concentrating on the left arm alone drill. It seemed a good idea to get back to this basic kind of practice after my last visit to the range, where my hitting made it clear that I didn't succeed in transferring my swing with practice balls to the swing with real balls. And the drill felt so good. I was able to isolate certain basics of the swing and work on repeating those. After a day or two of nothing but the drill, I started hitting a few full swings at the end of each bucket, maybe five balls, just to see if the full swing could change. And as I practiced the drill, I was able to think of staying in the shot, holding the release until the last nano-second, and getting comfortable with staying in the shot—turning around my spine, keeping my head centered, and finally, with my hands in front of the ball, releasing the clubhead and feeling the clubface perfectly squared up precisely at the moment of impact.

The arrival of a couple of packages of practice balls and a new mat made all the hitting feel better than ever. I got some more of the Callaway practice balls that I like so much and a new mat (I finally banged out the last remaining patches of usable turf on the mat from New York Golf that I've been using for the past three years). Another propitious sign was the return of some temperate weather. The temperature rose into the high thirties and then into the forties, the snow started melting away, and I was able to go out and hit without warm layers and winter gloves. Today, I actually wore my golf glove, the first time I've been able to do that in about a month.

As you'll see in the video below, my swing is very clean. I'm not banging the mat, the way I used to (and that's why I destroyed that old mat). You can hear a clean, brisk swing right through the ball over the surface of the mat (which is not a turf-like surface, like the previous mat, but more like an indoor-outdoor carpet kind of material). From the results of the swing, I could tell that I had the radius of the swing under some kind of control. It wasn't perfect, but almost all the forty ball I hit from the bucket went right toward the big maple tree, my target. I really felt that I was "dialling in," as my golfing friends like to say (and as I used to think was a prospect way off in the future).

Today, as I was swinging, and could tell that my swing was on a new level, I thought of the Els swing and of the Jan Stephanson swing (from my Tour Tempo videos). My mental picture showed my shoulders turning and the club hanging back and finally whipping through to a high, full finish. With each shot, when I was able to do all this, I was amazed at how far and how high the ball would go, and I wasn't even thinking of height or distance. As long as the swing was good, the results were unbelievable. I started lining up my Callaway balls and aiming for the V on the cover.

Now, with my recent visit to the range in mind (where I couldn't replicate the swing I used with my practice balls), I know that the next challenge will be to transfer my backyard swing, with Callaway and Almost Golf balls, to real balls. First, at the range, and then, on the course. Trusting Hogan, as I have, from the beginning, I don't see why I can't shoot in the mid-70's this coming season.

For the rest of this winter, I'm going to continue with my practice plan. I'm going to keep the left arm alone drill going, but I'm also going to do more full swing practice where I can work on consistency and accuracy. Feeling as confident as I do right now, I also want to go out to the range when I can and see how I hit the ball there. I also keep in mind that in my backyard practice, I'm using a nine-iron. I'll need to work on the same swing with the other clubs in the bag. And then, there's the driver. I'll be very interested to discover how far, and how accurately, I can hit drives with this efficient swing.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Working It into the Swing

2010-01-10T18:02:00.011-05:00

Every day now, I can feel progress. In the state of my swing, I feel as though I can hit the ball far and relatively accurately. I'm feeling the lag from the top of the swing on down to impact, and, most gratifying, I'm feeling the full release. All of these aspects are benefits of the left arm alone drill. I'd still be trying to hit the ball, instead of swinging through the ball, without this drill. I'll have to find the link where I found this and include it in a post.

Yesterday, as I was tinkering with my developing swing, I really whacked what's left of my hitting mat, and during my breaks, where I went inside to warm my hands and look at video, I also went online to find another mat. After looking at the usual places, The Golf Warehouse, Amazon, and so on, I settled on the Callaway FT Launch Zone Hitting Mat from The Golf Warehouse for $29.95. The spec that persuaded me was that it was "Highly resistant to wear from heavy use." After what I did to two mats, I needed one that could take a real pounding. Of course, my swing is much better now, but still....

Hitting off the few remaining patches of turf on my patchy mat, I also felt a difference in my practice balls. As I've been saying, I really like the Callaway Hx Soft Flight Practice Balls.

But I also have five "Almost Golf" balls, that I like to use at the end of bucket as a "reality test." They made of some kind of hard rubber, where the Callaways are soft, and I can feel the clubhead hitting these balls and feel the clubhead squared up, where I don't have that feeling using the Callaways. So I've come to like hitting the "Almost Golf" balls better because they're giving me the kind of feeling and feedback I'd get from hitting a real golf ball. I'm still going to hit a lot of Callaways—I just ordered a couple of dozen more from The Golf Warehouse—but I also went over to my local mall to Olympia Sports, which had a package of 36 (list price $30.00) on sale for $20. With them, I'm all set to hit balls that will get me ready to go back to the range. As soon as the temperature around here gets above 30 degrees!

The Release: Split-Screen

2010-01-09T10:21:00.006-05:00

This video shows what a difference a day makes. I've taken a clip of my swing yesterday, when I was just starting to understand opening up the left arm at release and compared it to a swing from today. Both days, I felt I was hitting the ball really well, much farther than ever before and with reasonable accuracy, peppering the high branches of that maple tree.

In the split-screen, you'll see a visible difference between the two swings. Yesterday's is quicker and shorter and more muscular. Today's is more relaxed, unhurried, and longer. It's starting to look like an efficient swing that I can repeat (we'll see about that tomorrow) and that gives me the distance and accuracy that I want.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Deep into the Shot 2

2010-01-08T18:37:00.009-05:00

In my last post, I laid out my next practice goals: a more relaxed swing, like D. J. Trahan or Ernie Els, and a more complete follow-through. This practice was a revelation. A light snow had fallen early in the morning, frosting the landscape around me, and snow flurries continued during the day. By the time I went out to practice, at around two forty-five, I saw that the temperature must have been right around thirty-two or thirty-three because the snow wasn't sticking. That meant that I could have decent footing on my flagstone walkway for hitting off the mat. And the way this practice went, the flurries were like a benediction, a sign that—like that great scene in Fellini's Amarcord when snow starts falling out of a clear blue, sunny sky—something miraculous was possible.

The revelation didn't take long. After all my practice and preparation, I was, like an acolyte, ready for the annunciation. I practiced a few swings, feeling the transition and then the lag before descending to the ball. For this practice, I had decided that I didn't care about distance. The only important improvement was that I wanted my swing to look more like D. J. Trahan or Ernie Els. I wanted it to look slow and smooth&emdash;effortless. I had confidence that I was very close because my recent videos showed some good fundamentals. I was just missing the middle part of the swing, the most crucial part, I think, where the downswing goes into the release, and the release goes into the follow-through.

At this point, a digression is in order. This moment of epiphany (how many of those do we have?), took me back to my first lessons, a couple of years ago, with a driving range pro. My swing was terrible at that time, but I can remember him telling me about the swing, "You just have to feel it." That concept made no sense to me. It sounded like an admission that he couldn't teach the swing. I tried a few other pros, with similar results. I always learned something useful from the lessons, just not the key to the swing that I was looking for. Lately, since the left arm alone drill has been teaching me about the action of the club during the swing, I've started to "feel" the swing—feel the weight of the club in my hand, feel it lag behind my hand on the downswing, and feel it release at exactly the right split-second, without any conscious action on my part.

Three years later, I now understand that the range pro was absolutely right. Learning a good swing involves numerous epistemological moments like this one. You think you know, but you really don't. Then, after a long period of practice, suddenly, a truth is revealed. As long as you are receptive and ready, you will make progress in this fashion. Hogan is right when he says that the average golfer can break 80 if he learns the fundamentals of the Five Lessons.

With fresh snow on the ground and more flurries in the air, I suddenly felt one essence of the golf swing. I glimpsed it the day before, when I began to talk to myself about "opening up" the left arm. It was the idea that Tom Bertrand gave me, months ago, in his YouTube video about "'The "Missing Link' to Ben Hogan's Secret." I knew it was important then, and I've thought, ever since, that I understood what Tom meant. But I didn't. Not really. I didn't understand the speed involved.

I thought that at some point, after impact, your left elbow would turn out towards your target. What I didn't understand, and what is crucial to this key move in the golf swing, is that the turning out of the left elbow is part of the release and that it happens in a millisecond. When you watch Tom demonstrate it, it looks very muscular and deliberate. He never talks about the duration of the turning. Never mentions milliseconds. That would have helped a lot. As a matter of fact, this is a huge problem with most of golf instruction.

When you watch Swing Vision on YouTube or listen to a pro describe the swing, you have absolutely no idea about the timing that is involved. Speaking from where I am, in my development of a good swing, this seems to me to be the single most important problem in teaching a good golf swing. That's why my range pro told me, "You have to feel it." He was talking about a part of the swing that the naked eye can't see. It's basically invisible. When you watch a tour pro swing on TV, you see the backswing and you see the follow-through. You do not see what happens in between. And that's where all the magic happens, I think (remember, I'm a beginner, not an expert). Angel Cabrera does something in that area that few other players can match. As a result, he can green drives on holes that are around 330 yards. This is the imperceptible action that weeks of assiduous practice revealed.

You're relaxed during the swing. Or you try to be. You're not a pro, and this doesn't come easily. But you start off with that swing thought. You get to the top of your swing—the transition—you're loose, your fingers are relaxed, the club is balanced, you can feel that it's resting on top of your forefinger (as Shawn Clements suggests, in one of his videos), and then you start the down swing, and you have one swing thought in mind. You want to come down in a relaxed way, and you want the clubhead to lag behind. There's no rush here. But, at a certain point (we hope and think that this point will be where your hands are somewhere near or over or just past the ball), you have to think—"Release!" And it has to be "NOW!" This thought does not mean, however, that you are controlling the release. The left arm drill teaches you that the release happens naturally at a certain point in the arc of the swing. Instead of controlling the release, you are making yourself ready to let it happen. Basically, you're getting out of the way and enabling your body to cooperate with the club. In this millisecond, the club is in control. Not you.

If you don't have a Swing Vision camera, you cannot see what happens here. Instead, you have to "feel it." And that's what happened for me. I started to feel that I had to turn my left arm, the inside of the elbow, towards the target, during the milliseconds of the release. My thought at impact was to "open up." And once I started to do that, the swing became ridiculous. It seemed easy and effortless, and all I really had to think about was the "opening up" of my left elbow. With each shot, I was catapulting the ball out there towards Route 6 and into the topmost branches of that maple tree, and I could direct the ball with this release. The last few balls I hit were those "almost golf balls," those hard rubber yellow ones, and my swing sent them up into the highest part of my favorite maple tree.

I haven't planned it yet, but I think that my next practoce will be a continuation of that "opening up" of the left arm, the way Tom Bertrand describes it, and see how accurate and consistent and long I can get it.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Deep into the Shot

2010-01-08T17:37:00.004-05:00

This title comes from that Ernie Els video on YouTube that I've mentioned several times in these posts, and I've been able to reach this point in the evolution of a good swing by assiduously practicing the left arm alone drill, which I learned from an online instructional video, in which, according to the pro giving the instruction, a great exemplar was Johnny Miller. "Back in the day," the pro said.

The pro said these words a couple of times, and each time, I pictured Miller, in his TV commentator's chair at PGA events wincing at being relegated to golf's ancient history. In my case, as the eager pupil, my mind skipped back three decades or so to the period when Miller was playing, and I was watching him on TV. The pro could hardly have picked a better exemplar for me. The pro also mentioned that when Miller practiced this drill, he was hitting his seven-iron about 170 yards, a distance that seems incredible to me. I tried it the range once or twice and couldn't hit the ball more than probably sixty or seventy yards, tops. In my backyard, with practice balls, distance didn't matter, anyway. I just wanted to uncover more secrets behind an efficient swing.

After about a month of constantly working this drill into my daily practice, I'm no more closer to hitting a real ball 170 yards, but that doesn't deter me or discourage me at all. My left arm alone swing has become much, much better. I can consistently hit the ball straight, with nice trajectory, and with some nice control of the release to get a little drawing action on the ball. I hasten to add that this is in my backyard, with plastic or Callaway soft rubber practice balls. I have no idea whether I would feel as competent, yet, with real balls, Next time I'm at the range, however, would be a good time to test the left arm alone swing.

In my backyard, though, it feels great. And in the video below, I wanted to see what kind of difference the drill was making in my full swing. To check the plane of the swing, I like to video from behind, as you'll see at the beginning of the video. Everything looks pretty good here. As Don Trahan likes to teach the takeaway and backswing, you want to feel as though you're taking the club back into the mitt of a baseball catcher behind you, and then you want to continue bringing the club "up the tree." So the takeaway and backswing look OK to me. From this camera placement, you can't really see "deep into the shot." For that, you need the camera shooting from in front of you.

During this practice session off the mat, I was using a nine-iron and the Callaway soft rubber balls, hitting from a flagstone walk in the front of my property, which gave me about sixty-eight yards straight ahead of me to hit into (I paced it off). The reason I'm using a nine-iron, instead of my heretofore usual seven, is that I'm starting to hit the ball farther. From this spot on my walkway, I'd be hitting some seven-irons out into the main road. You can see from the swing my concern for distance. My arm speed is too fast, and there's not much follow-through. It's a familiar sight to me. As a neophyte, I've always been too concerned with hitting the ball. Until recently, my swing was basically over at impact. I've advanced beyond that, I think, but I really haven't yet discovered the end of the swing. That happens tomorrow.

Today, however, I must say that I feel as though I'm killing the ball. I can feel the clubhead at impact and making a really good, solid, "Whack!" And then the ball goes sailing off, generally hooking, way up into that maple tree. If that tree weren't in the way, my nine irons would be flying around fifty to sixty yards. Translated, that means that, if these balls go about a third of the way a real ball does (which, I think, I read about these Callaway balls when I first got them), then I'd be hitting a nine-iron about 150-180 yards. The thought of that kind of distance elated me. That would me, I told myself, that my eight-iron could go around 180-190, seven 190, six 200, five 210, and so on. These are great distances for an amateur, and distance is one of the ways I calculated the efficiency of my swing. For a long time, I've thought that if I can't hit a seven-iron at least 170, then something is wrong with the swing. Now, I seemed to have solved my problem with distance.

The swing still is too rushed, as you can see. After viewing the video, the goal of my next practice session is simply to calm down. Swing in a more relaxed way, and follow through all the way. With this in mind I looked up D. J. Trahan on YouTube and saw a good example of how easy the pros seem to swing. Els is my other prime model of a fluid, yet powerful, swing. After watching my video today, I knew what I needed to work on tomorrow. And the hook.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Transfer to the Full Swing 2

2010-01-06T21:34:00.015-05:00

Starting with the left arm alone drill, I worked on several aspects of the swing. First, I wanted the plane to be correct. Next, I wanted to bow my left wrist on the backswing and at the top of the swing. Third, I wanted to bring down my left arm, following my hip and shoulder turn, and, last, I wanted to release with the left wrist deep into the swing and then continue all the way through the follow-through.

As you can see in the video, in the left arm alone drill, I have a good swing plane. Along with the bowed wrist at impact, the swing (when it works) snaps right at the bottom of the swing arc and continues all the way through and around over my shoulders.

It's getting better. Better all the time. And that's a good thing!

Several golf influences are shaping my swing and my swing thoughts. One is Shawn Clement, whose videos on YouTube are among the best instruction you will find there. His relaxed, rhythmical swing is a good one to try to emulate, and that's what I've been doing the last few days. Then, I signed up for Don Trahan's free 10 emails, and that turned out to yield some good information, two tips in particular. The first was about the takeaway. Don encourages his students to imagine a baseball catcher behind them and to swing the club back into the catcher's mitt. From there, Don says, "Swing up the tree," again, calling on our visual imagination to help us with the swing plane on the way to the top of the swing. The second tip was really more of a revelation to me. It's his email video with the topic of "Kinetics," and in it he says,

When we look at the motion of efficient golfers on 3 D motion capture systems or videotape, it appears that they are “holding” the club shaft in a cocked position deep into the downswing. Many amateurs, in an attempt to create more power, try to emulate this action. What you have to understand is that efficient golfers do not manufacture or try to hold this cocked position. The arms accelerating around the axis of the trunk on the downswing create this club lag or cocked position. When the arms decelerate before impact, speed is transferred to the club. The club accelerates and the angle between the arms and club shaft increases rapidly into impact.

If I had ever thought about the relationship between arm speed and clubhead speed, or the teaching tips I've come across often about hand speed compared to clubhead speed, I've definitely lost them. When I read Don's paragraph, I literally stopped in my mental tracks. What an idea! Of course, that's how it must work, I thought to myself. And for the last few days, that's become a practice goal: to start to get the feel of the clubhead lagging behind until my hands get in the hitting zone, and then letting my hands slow down and using the release to throw the clubhead around the swing arc at an incredible speed. My efforts to do this will be the subject of the next post.

And the last influence is that Ernie Els video where he talks about letting the club lag deep into the shot. He shows how, when you start to cock your wrists on the backswing, on the way to the top, a box-like shape forms among the upper arm, forearm, and club shaft. He shows how he likes to keep that shape to the top of the swing and then deep into the downswing. He says that it "Keeps you in the shot."

In the next post, I'll describe (with video) my attempts to get "deep into the shot."

Left Arm Alone Drill -- Transfer to the Full Swing

2010-01-05T18:57:00.007-05:00

After all these days of practicing the left arm alone drill, I found that whatever I have learned from that doesn't automatically transfer to the full swing. It took some thinking and some practice and some videotaping. And beyond that, going back to the full swing also reminded me of how much I still have to learn, even though I consider myself very near my goal of learning a good golf swing.

First of all, during the left arm alone drill, I started out hitting a mixture of good and bad shots. As I started to get warmed up, the shots started to become more predictable, more of what I wanted. But, as I always do, I tinkered with the swing and found that when I felt as though I were leading with my left wrist, the shot would invariably pop off the club with a nice, solid feel, and it would go exactly where I was aiming. Once I realized this, I started concentrating on adding that to the swing, and immediately, I was hitting balls—all of them, one after another—right at my target. It was so consistent and dependable and good that it made me laugh to myself.

Really, it was just "lag and lead," as I've said before in these posts. But when you're learning, there are things you remember and things you forget. Then you have to re-learn the things that you forgot. Fortunately, that's easier than learning them the first time. The second time around, you recognize the problem earlier, and you know what the solution is. This time, I just remembered what I heard Camilo Villegas say in some YouTube video.

Gathering up my Callaway balls in the snow suddenly made me realize that this snow, in this very cold, consistently dry weather, looks and feels just like kosher salt. It's as if Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind and of winter, had dumped a box all over my yard. I can walk back and forth across it and it doesn't change. It doesn't melt, it doesn't change color, it doesn't pack down. It's definitely mythical.

Then came another "Aha!" moment. As I was examining the way I approach the ball— after turning my shoulders and then dropping my arms, trying not to rush, and finally releasing through impact and into the follow-through—I suddenly remembered a video of Ernie Els talking about the swing while he's practicing on a turf hitting range. That changed the course of the practice session. I wanted to see if I could do that, and finished the session trying to swing the way Els recommends. As I started to get used to it, I could see the superior results. I was hitting the ball higher and farther, though I have some work to do on accuracy (I was pulling the ball left a bit too much and with too much hook), but by the end of practice, as the afternoon was approaching 4:30PM and the sun was setting, I was feeling pretty good. I was hitting the ball solid and it was going right at my target, that big Norway Maple in the backyard.

When I came inside to capture the video, I had a Don Trahan video in my email inbox, with the topic of "Kinetics," and in it he says,

When we look at the motion of efficient golfers on 3 D motion capture systems or videotape, it appears that they are “holding” the club shaft in a cocked position deep into the downswing. Many amateurs, in an attempt to create more power, try to emulate this action. What you have to understand is that efficient golfers do not manufacture or try to hold this cocked position. The arms accelerating around the axis of the trunk on the downswing create this club lag or cocked position. When the arms decelerate before impact, speed is transferred to the club. The club accelerates and the angle between the arms and club shaft increases rapidly into impact.

I thought, "That is so good!" And I made a mental to note that this deceleration of the arms at impact and through the ball will be one of my focal points tomorrow. Another will be turning through around my spine a bit longer, instead of popping up to see where my beautiful shot went. At the same time, I want to extend the follow-through. It looks as if it quits a little too soon. However, on the plus side, everything looks pretty good compared to the way I was swinging at the range just a few weeks ago.

Left Arm Alone Drill -- What It Really Looks Like

2010-01-04T21:05:00.005-05:00

I've been writing about how valuable the left arm alone drill is, adding a few illustrative videos, in order to encourage you to try it. The video here will help you realize what a tough drill this is. Maybe in previous videos, you've gotten the impression that this drill is a piece of cake, and if you can't do it, then there's something wrong with you. Well, this post is meant to correct that mistaken impression.

First of all, I hope it is abundantly clear by now that I fall into that over-populated category of golfers who have zero aptitude for the game. What they have, instead, is an obsession. There's quite a difference. Rather than describing what that chasm looks like, let's focus, instead, on how golfers like me, who struggle more than others with the game, can hope to play well and score in the seventies.

The obvious answer is that we have to practice more than the gifted golfers with whom we are often paired. And not only that, but we have to practice with a plan. As a semi-accomplished pianist, I know how carefully planned practice can produce more immediate results. It's not how many hours you put in. It's how you spend those hours. Anyone who has accomplished anything in their chosen field will tell you the same thing.

In this video, you'll see me start out hitting the first ball perfectly. Right away, as in Greek tragedy, you know that I'm set up for a fall. I think I hit another one almost perfectly, suggesting that I really know what I'm doing. But in the rest of the video, you'll see that my percentages are not that good. And, in addition, I hit some terrible balls.

Remember that I've been practicing this drill for probably a month by now, and I feel really good about it. When you start, I'm telling you right now that you're going to be really awful! If there is any drill that will discourage the casual golfer, this is it! You're going to have to break down your one-arm swing to the barest essentials, and you're going to have to put up with the worst swings of your life! If you're like me, you're going to wonder if you should consider going into your living room and reading a good book instead.

But if you're a fighter, if you are persistent, if you are determined to get a grip on this game, then you will ignore all the negative messages that this drill will send you, and you will focus, instead, on the distant goal of developing a great swing. It's way off in the distance, as we know. As a matter of fact, you can't even see it from where you are. But you know that somewhere, way out there in the hazy, blue future, your ideal swing is waiting for you. This would be a good time to review your memory of music and recall what Ringo tells us about singing the blues:

You know it don't come easy.

This post is intended to give you confidence that you, too, can learn a good golf swing. I know I say "you, too," gratuitously, since I haven't really accomplished it yet, but I feel I'm right on the cusp, and I know that with all the hard and consistent practice I've put into learning the swing, it's going to come to me. At this point, I'm not concerned with how much ultimate distance or how much ultimate accuracy I'm going to have. As we all know, the pros are different from the rest of us. We can use their examples as models to shoot for, but they're just general guidelines. As long as I'm relatively close, I'll be satisfied. If K.J. Choi can hit a seven-iron around 175 yards with accuracy, and I can approach that, in some acceptable way, then I know I'm on the right track, and my swing is where it should be.

Split Screen Video

2010-01-02T11:46:00.005-05:00

In my last post I wrote, "If I can do it with my video software, I'll try to do a side-by-side video soon that shows my swing as it was not too long ago compared to what it looks like now." In the last two days, I learned how to do split-screen video editing, which you can see in the video below. I took two clips from that New Year's Eve Reality Check video and two clips from the videos I posted in early December. Seeing my swing at a three-week interval is instructive.

First, it confirmed some thoughts I already had after viewing my swing video two days ago: the backswing plane had dropped, the top of the swing crossed over the target line, the downswing is a bit too rushed, and I come out of the swing too early. All of this is pretty obvious in the split-screen view. Another thing that I wouldn't have noticed is the difference in swing tempo, but I attribute that to the different kind of hitting I'm doing in the clips. The other day I was hitting those Callaway balls that I like so much, while in early December, when there wasn't any snow on the ground, I was hitting my solid white plastic Wilson practice balls.

Because the plastic balls are so light (and many are cracked and misshapen after months and months of hitting), I was swinging in a very relaxed and unselfconscious way, not thinking about distance at all, just trying to feel a good swing. With the Callaway balls, which are made of some kind of soft rubber and which will take spin like a real golf ball, I was definitely thinking about distance and direction, too. You can see it in my swing—the downswing is definitely quicker and more aggressive.

In addition to highlighting these physical aspects of the swing, the split-screen also suggests a subtler realization, namely that learning a golf swing does not take a linear path; it is not a series of positive steps, each one representing an improvement. In the split-screen, you can see that I'm certainly developing a better swing, but you can also see that I need to go back and revisit certain parts of it that actually looked better in early December. It's good to recognize this recursive nature of developing a good swing. While the general trend is toward improvement, there are going to be times when the swing lapses back to some bad habits that you thought you had put behind you.

Now that I think of it, I've often felt reversals of this kind. Some days the swing feels good and what I'm working on seems to represent continued progress. There are other days, as we all know, when I make some little change, try something a little bit different, and then it seems as though the whole swing has been ruined. That's the way I often felt a few weeks ago, back in late November and early December, when I talked about shanking the ball all the time. That was really frustrating. We all know days and periods like that. But we keep coming out to practice day after day, and we look for answers, and we go back to fundamentals, and we search out instruction videos on YouTube, and we read articles.

Finally, learning a golf swing is like sailing directly into a stiff breeze. You expect that some waves will knock you off your course, but, with patience rather than panic, you waggle the tiller, you give the wind some time to fill your sails, you wait for your craft to regain her composure, and then, with gratitude, you watch as she slowly starts coming around and once again her bow is pointing right at your landmark on the horizon. Eventually, you'll reach your destination. Borne by wind and wave, you've chosen to travel with Zephyrus, not Evinrude. In golf and sailing, you can't be in a rush.

New Year's Eve Reality Check

2009-12-31T23:06:00.008-05:00

After so much practice with the left arm alone swing and after feeling so good at the range the other day, I had to try out the swing today, despite the weather.

Starting at about eight in the morning, snow came down in a hurry. It was cold out, probably in the upper twenties, and the snow was sticking. By afternoon, after I had shoveled the driveway, I was wondering if it were possible to hit practice balls without losing most of them in the snow, which was about three inches deep. The prospect of hitting balls over the snow quickly won out over the propect of losing most of them until the snow melted, and I threw down my practice mat on the front walkway. The obvious choice was to use my Callaway practice balls, since they are orange and might be easier to find, once I hit them.

So I set up and started hitting balls with the left arm alone drill. Out of the first dozen or so, I yanked several over the stone wall that marks the left boundary of my property (I found all of them later), but it didn't take long to get warmed up and get in a groove where I could hit almost every ball straight ahead and with a good, clean hit. With this encouragement, I collected the balls, finding all of them in the snow, and decided to try hitting with a full swing.

Hitting thirty balls was all the encouragement I needed. I found that I was hitting the balls out towards my target and almost every swing was a clean hit. When I finished, I thought, maybe I should film my swing at this point, as a kind of reality check, and see what it looks like. Amazingly, I found all the balls in the snow again and set up some on the mat to hit in front of the camcorder.

In the video below, you'll see that I'm wearing my Sorrels, the boots I typically wear when I know I'm going to be walking around the backyard in bad conditions looking for the practice balls that I've hit. You'll also notice that I'm dressed pretty lightly. That's because I know I'm going to be outside hitting balls only for a few minutes, just long enough to get a little video footage.

In the video, I've added some lines to highlight my swing plane and the club position at various points in the swing. You'll also hear my stamping my feet to get some snow off my Sorrels before I start hitting with the camcorder behind me. In all these shots, I'm using my typical practice club, my seven-iron.

As you can see, I've got a reasonably rhythmical swing on a fairly good plane and with a good follow-through, very different from what it was a few months ago. If I can do it with my video software, I'll try to do a side-by-side video soon that shows my swing as it was not too long ago compared to what it looks like now. The improvement that you'll see is the result of daily practice and almost daily videotaping and review. Then, of course, there's the left arm alone drill. It is just fantastic!

In the slo-mo section (from behind) of the video, you can see some good aspects of the swing and several that need some work and readjustment. For example, on the backswing, the plane is a little too flat. In an earlier video, the plane was more vertical and on plane throughout the swing. Now it's dropped a bit, and I want to fix that. I added some graphics to highlight the target line and other lines in the swing that I like to pay attention to. Another problem that I see is at the top of the swing, where I go past parallel to the target line and past parallel to the ground. On the plus side, the downswing looks pretty good -- on plane again and maintaining the spine angle and a right angle between the swing plane and the spine angle. And the end of the follow-through is almost parallel to the original swing plane, and my balance is good, most of my weight on my left heel.

Now on New Year's Day, I'll go out with the Callaways again and work on the plane of the backswing. I also want to get over my excitement at how good the swing feels and pay closer attention to staying in the shot longer and really delaying the release, getting over my eagerness to hit another great shot and work on a smooth, unhurried approach to the ball.

Left Arm Alone Drill: Frigid Fun

2009-12-29T13:50:00.006-05:00

The next day, the weather was so delightful, I couldn't pass up an opportunity to go to the range and hit a bucket. Driving my daughter to her varsity basketball practice at nine in the morning in my Matrix, which gives the outside temperature among the dashboard instruments, I saw that it was eighteen degrees out and with wind chill (advisories out for the whole day), it probably felt around ten degrees, at most. But the range I was going to had good heaters above the mats, and I thought I might be able to hit a hundred balls before losing all sensation in my hands.

First of all, the heaters didn't come on right away. For some reason, they really didn't start making noise and producing real heat for about fifteen minutes, maybe more. Even so, I was doing OK. I was dressed warmly in layers and was gripping the clubs with my winter gloves, not ideal, but that's how I've been swinging in the backyard the last couple of weeks when outside temperatures have been consistently in the thirties. My ears were getting pretty cold, though, and I took off my baseball hat and snuggled on a knit hat that, fortunately, I had brought along.

Once the heat kicked in, I decided to take off the gloves and swing normally, with a golf glove and one bare hand. Hitting that way, I had to stop every five to ten minutes and warm up my fingers. At first, I just put them under my layers and grabbed some material and tried to surround my fingers with warmth. Walking back and forth across the mat while I waited for my fingers to thaw, I realized that my head was staying pretty warm from the heat reflecting down from the overhead heaters. Tentatively, I put one cold hand up on my head and felt the warmth of my hat, which felt warmer than under my layers.

So, one at a time, I put one hand and then the other on top of my head, burying my fingers as deeply as I could into the heated polyester, walking back and forth, and waiting for the cold stinging in my fingers to ease up. Pacing back and forth across my mat, with one hand on top of my head and the other grabbing a handful of clothing right on top of my stomach, I must have looked like I was doing that stunt we all did when we were children of trying to pat your head and rub circles around your stomach at the same time.

I didn't have to worry about being seen acting like a third-grader, however, since there was only one other person outside with me, and he was down near the other end of the range, and with all the mats separated by plastic partitions, there's no way he could have seen me. The circumstances, in a case like this, are crucial to any attempt at interpretation. Observed, I would have looked ridiculous, but isolated and by myself, I was simply practical. In any case, it was the best I could do. Once my fingers started to get cold, there wasn't much I could do about it. And, in the end, it didn't really matter. I hit the ball well.

At the beginning, when I tried out the seven-iron that I use every day in the back yard, I tried to duplicate the loose, relaxed swing I had been practicing, and it worked, from the very first swing. Holding the handle loosely in my fingers, letting in hinge at the top and lag and then coming down and whipping the clubhead through the ball, I could feel that the swing was good. The ball was going straight out there, about 150 or a little more, which looked good to me, considering that I couldn't really warm up in this weather and that the wind was blowing steadily across the range.

Then I tried my hybrids, which have become my favorite clubs. The results were even better. In the course of hitting the whole bucket (100 balls, early-bird special), I found I could hit the hybrid 4 about 190-200 yards and the three about 200-210. On really good swings, I was conscious of seeing the ball really well (I like to pick out a dimple and focus on that) and feeling the club handle loose in my fingers and rotating my shoulders and releasing my left wrist late into the swing and feeling the clubhead really compress the ball with a great, cracking sound. And when all this happened, I knew where the ball would be flying when I looked up during the follow-through.

With frozen fingers, I went through the eight-iron and the five and the six. With all the clubs, now, I'm hitting straighter and farther than before and getting closer to hitting distances that I know are decent for an amateur ( I did laugh to myself at one point, however, when I hit a 4 hybrid about 180 and remembered writing down at my desk at home that some pro in a recent tournament hit his 8-iron 183! How do they do that?).

I also hit a few with the driver, just enough to satisfy myself that I could swing that with my practice swing, too. I ended the session with some fives, just to prove to myself that I'm making progress with that club and getting nearer to my goal of hitting the five somewhere over 180. Today, I probably was hitting it around 160-170, and it felt really good. The last few balls I hit with the 4 hybrid, and by this time, I knew they were going out there about 190 and right around my target. After the last ball, I was completely satisfied. The results confirmed that the left arm alone drill is, indeed, a valuable way to improve the swing. I'll keep on practicing that way all winter.

On my way out of the range, as I was walking past the front desk inside the heated main part of the building with the pro shop and the cafeteria, a couple of men were standing in a group talking (none of them dressed for golf outdoors and none had clubs with them) and one of them looked directly at me as I approached, in my layers, my winter gloves, my knit hat, and my golf bag slung over one shoulder and said, "And here's a die-hard...," but before he could finish his sentence, I interjected, "Frigid Fun!" Obviously, he liked the alliteration because he stopped what he was saying and smiled more broadly at me and repeated, "Yeah, Frigid Fun!"

As I drove up the hill toward the highway, I noticed that the wind had been so strong there that it had lifted up a whole section of the turf carpet and thrown it right through the netting alongside the road. How to deal with this must have been what those men inside the range were discussing as I passed them. "Frigid Fun!"

Left Arm Alone Drill: Payoffs

2009-12-28T20:53:00.004-05:00

Because I can feel such fine variations leading to obviously good results, I've been devoted to the left arm alone drill for several weeks now. Of course, I can't resist the temptation to swing with both arms when I want to assess where the drill is leading me, but aside from that, the drill feels so good that I continue with it every day, even now, in late December in the Northeast with temperatures in the thirties and snow on the ground. As you'll see on this video, the temperature is in the low thirties with a windchill in the high twenties. On this day, I went out for a series of separate hitting sessions in the backyard. Chilled, I would go back inside, do some computer work, warm up, and then come out again later.

Typically, when I start the left arm alone drill, I can hardly hit the ball. For quite a few strokes, the ball squirts out to the right, just a glancing blow with the club face wide open, or it's a weak slice right, and sometimes, I even miss the ball entirely. But once I get the backswing lined up and loosen my left wrist for a snappy, unconscious release,I gradually get to a point where I can whip the ball out there right in front of me, with good arc and good distance.

I think of what Nicklaus said about Tom Watson during last summer's British Open, "He always gets to the top of the backswing." And that's become a key checkpoint as I practice the left arm alone drill. If I can get to the top of the backswing on plane and let the club hinge and lag before beginning the downswing, almost invariably I know I'm going to pop the ball out there just where I want to. It's such a great feeling. When everything is in place, the results are perfect. And I'm at the point now where I can go through a few balls in a row with perfect, or nearly perfect, results. That string of successes will usually end with a thump of a fat swing deep into the hitting mat, producing a short ball or one sliced off to the right. You'll see all the bad results on the video below. But you'll also see how sometimes, when everything is in place, the swing and the ball flight are just what you'd want.

Now that I have the sense of the swing, the goal over the remaining winter months is to work this into a dependable, repeatable, accurate swing, and this is something that I'm quite sure I can do. Hitting at the range is the "reality check," and that will be the subject of the next post.

Left Arm Alone Drill: Lag and Lead

2009-12-16T18:26:00.005-05:00

The left arm alone drill has given me the feeling that I'm in the final stage of building a competent swing. Like all golfers, I'll be working on the swing itself forever, that much goes without saying. However, for the first time since I started trying to build a swing -- it's been three years now -- I feel as though I can see the finish line. Even with a flawed swing, I persuaded myself that I could shoot in the eighties this fall (I didn't actually do that, but I came very close the couple of times I played a course, and I felt so competent that I was certain that with some more on-course experience, shooting in the eighties was not a problem).

Now, with the learning that's coming from this drill, I can see that I should be able to break 80 next season. There's no reason not to. I'm a good putter, and I read greens well. My short game is very good, and I think I've learned how to get out of a bunker. With a solid, repeatable swing, that gives me reasonable distance and control, I'm expecting to shoot in the seventies next season, once I start playing regularly. That will be a significant change for me, since practice, not playing, has been my priority until now. And I have really enjoyed practicing. Submitting myself to a practice regimen that will lead to progress toward long-term goals makes sense to me. And looking back over the last three years, I see a gratifying record of progress and improvement. There have been horrendous patches, of course. Learning golf is a great test of one's character. And in learning a golf swing, one has to be able to learn from failure. In that respect, I suppose a golf swing is like a baseball swing, only baseball is much worse. Now, three years into this building project, the left arm alone drill is illuminating some key concepts.

First, the swing has to be on plane. This sounds so obvious. Yet how do you know whether your swing is on plane or not? One way is to videotape yourself constantly, as I have done. Another is to do this drill. It's absolutely unforgiving. If you're not on plane, you have no idea where the ball is going to go, or even if you're actually going to hit it! I've had numerous swings where I didn't even hit the ball! How could that happen? Easy! When the backswing is out of order -- off plane, for one thing -- you may not hit the ball, even though it's only a couple of feet away from your hand. Hitting around 500 plastic practice balls a day has given me a good feeling for what the swing should be, or could be. You always have to remember that whatever your most recent discovery about the swing is, it's not the last. You never get to that point. The golf swing is "the vanishing point" in art. You have no idea where the end point is or, even, if there ever is an end point. It is an eschatological question. I guess the pro golfers have figured it out, but for the rest of us, it will always remain mostly a mystery.

The title of this post comes from an understanding that the last two days of practicing in my back yard have taught me. Today, especially. The temperature was below thirty, and I was wearing my Sorrel boots. But in the course of hitting about 500 balls, I got a feeling for a swing that worked. It involved swing back pretty steeply, with my wrist bowed, then letting the club lag, then coming though leading with my left wrist and snapping my hand through at the instant of contact with the ball. To simplify it for myself as a practiced, I started saying to myself, "Lag and lead," by which I meant, let the club lag at the top of the backswing and then, on the downswing, lead with the left wrist.

As I approached the ball, I could feel my left wrist in front, and then I could feel the clubhead trapping the ball against the hitting mat and then the wrist releasing and turning the clubhead over. This is, I'm sure, what Hogan means, in his book,

, when he says that he felt as though he was capturing the ball and then slinging it down the fairway. I've written about this in earlier posts, but back then, I don't think I really understood how this works. Now I think I do.

When I get the various parts of the swing in place, I can pop the plastic ball out there, right where I want to. I have to get the backswing path just right (it feels unright, but really, I think, it's not going past my body), and then I have to let the club lag. On the way down, I have to lead with my left wrist, and, last, I release my left wrist, feeling the toe of the club come around and fling the ball toward my target. Being able to do this time after time was quite an amazing feeling. I actually knew that I could hit the ball straight in front of me. I could feel that solid "Click!" and the full follow-through and then see the ball high in the air floating right where I wanted it to go.

Not every time, however. This succession of movements is so subtle and so fragile that the slightest error results in a variety of results. Sometimes, it would be hooks or slices. In the worst cases, the clubface would never close, and I would just shank the ball off to the right somewhere. But the practice was generally encouraging. When I was in a groove, I could hit balls cleanly and accurately. Getting in that groove is my next goal.

P.S. I went out again the day after this post to practice in twenty-five degree weather (at least there wasn't much wind). Yesterday, I had started to feel a groove, and today I felt under control, too. The drill feels quite amazing. When I hit the right slot on the backswing, let the club lag, then swing through, feeling my left wrist lead before releasing the left hand, I can hit balls right out there, straight in front of me, at my imaginary target. It feels so good, this incipient feeling of having a dependable swing that produces th similar fine, accurate shot time after time.

Good Swing, Bad Swing

2009-12-14T17:07:00.003-05:00

Today, two days after my last practice at the range (took the day off yesterday because of an ice storm), I had one of those days I've become used to. It started out well, with good swings, good contact, and good distance. But it deteriorated. Out of the two hundred balls I hit (Early Bird Special -- half price), the last 150 or so were, for the most part, really bad.

The problem, or the cause of the problem, was, I think, trying to get too much distance. When I first started the practice, I thought I was in great shape. I was hitting my utility 3 and 4 out there around 180 to 190 and feeling really good. Then I went through the other irons. No problem. I hit the 5 and 6 out there a respectable distance, and contact with the ball felt good. The 7 and 8 also felt good. Somehow, though (and I can't remember the sequence that led me to this point), my swing suddenly deserted me. For days now, I've felt that the swing was right where I wanted it to be and that, by spring, I'd be poised to break 80. With today's swing, I'd be lucky to break 120!

I'm pretty sure that I lost the swing after hitting a few 7-irons and thinking that they were way too short. Once I started trying for more distance, that's when I lost track of the swing. I started shanking the ball again, something I haven't done much since I started the left arm alone drill, blading it, hitting thin, and topping the ball. It was an awful experience! It started somewhere in my first bucket of 100 balls and continued until I hit the last ball. Then I stopped and thought, "Do I want to hit another bucket?" I answered myself, "Of course, you do! You'll understand the problem and find the solution and be better off than ever!" So I went and bought another Early Bird.

A whole new bucket of balls didn't solve my problems. I started talking to myself. On many swings, hitting the ball felt as though I were hitting a rock. There was absolutely no sensation of compressing the ball and getting that great "Click!" when you hit the ball just right. The ball felt dead. It felt like lead. This utter incompetence being impossible for me to accept, I tried a new swing thought each time I teed up a new ball. Most of the time, the result was dismal. I couldn't hit the ball any better than a beginner. I really had a hard time with this. If you look at the video, you'll see that these swings aren't bad. They could be better, but they're not too bad. And the results were gratifying, too. These were my early swings. once I got into trouble, I couldn't stand the idea of videotaping myself.

Hitting so many balls gave me multiple opportunities to try out different swing thoughts. I thought about swinging along an arc. I thought about releasing with my hands way in front of the ball. I thought about relaxing. I thought about turning my shoulders and rotating around my spine. I thought about swinging like Ernie Els. I thought about swinging slow and relaxed. All were excellent ideas. None of them worked.

Feeling pretty despondent and defeated, I packed up, and as I started to leave my heated hitting station, I made plans for my next practice. The only thing to do was to go home and go into the backyard and start hitting balls -- left arm only -- into the snow. By now, I trust that drill completely. It's going to be my ticket to shooting in the 70s, I'm sure. Of course, that's assuming that today is just a temporary nightmare!

Once I got home, I checked my email -- no new job offers -- and headed out to the backyard, the humble origin of my future golf greatness, and started doing the left arm only drill. It felt so good! Not all the time, but enough so that I reassured myself that I really could hit a golf ball well, if I relaxed. The first fifty plastic balls were a gallimaufry (a hodgepodge), but I quickly identified one ingredient of a good swing. By now, I'm used to bowing the left wrist slightly during the backswing. But suddenly, I discovered -- or rediscovered -- the feeling of dragging the club, with fingers 3,4 and 5 of the left hand down through the hitting zone. That was huge.

The next fifty balls, I hit 75% OK (I counted). The final fifty (it was now four o'clock and the light dying), I hit all but four in an acceptable way, with this feeling of letting the club hinge at the top of the backswing and then feeling as though I were dragging the club to the ball and finally releasing -- with a Snap!-- when my hands were in front of the ball. It felt so great! And I was able to do it over and over again!

After the last fifty balls, while I was picking them up in the gathering darkness with my shag bag, I was thinking to myself that more of this one-arm practice is what I need.

Working on the Release 1

2009-12-12T19:31:00.005-05:00

The video below shows my practice at the range two days later. As you can see, I'm the only person there. I wonder why. The temperature is about thirty-three degrees, and it's shopping time for the holiday season. Where is everybody? You can also hear the ticking of the gas-heat igniters up above me. The heat here is not very efficient. At times, I actually stretched my hands out above me toward the heaters, hanging from the ceiling, to get warm. I also put the grip of the club I wanted to use up there, hoping it would get a little warmer.

You're not going to see anything dramatically different from the previous video. However, I thought it would be instructive to show you that the swing takes some time to develop, even at this point, where I feel I'm very close to a very good golf swing. You can see that I'm still swinging much too fast from the top of the swing, instead of sequencing and building up momentum. The question we must all ask ourselves, at this point, is "Why isn't my practice swing the same swing I use when I actually hit the ball? Great question!

This whole practice session is my attempt at an answer. In my first bucket of balls (100), I didn't get it, but somewhere in the middle on the second bucket, I started to feel as though I was getting closer to my practice swing. This would be my ideal swing where I delayed and delayed until my hands were in front of the ball (that's what I would like to think). But, as you can see, I'm still speeding up way too early, and the short follow-through shows that I still am not close to developing maximum clubhead speed at impact. There's a very helpful video on YouTube of Ernie Els talking about his swing and demonstrating how he likes "to stay in the shot longer," which I now understand means holding the release until the hands are, or feel as thought they are, out in front of the ball and even out in front of the left side.

But what I noticed continually during this session is that I really wasn't waiting until my hands were in the hitting zone. I was thinking about hitting the ball a long time before that.

Still, I know I'm getting there. I know that I'm starting the downswing way too early. On the other hand, I'm more aware than ever that I need to rotate my shoulders around my spine and let the release take care of itself.

When all is said and done after this session, I'm hitting three- and four- hybrids around 180 or beyond, which is what I want to be doing. I hit a few drivers, too, and that swing also feels more powerful. When everything worked well, it looked as though I was carrying a drive somewhere around 230 or 240. So I can tell from the greater distances that I'm getting with all the clubs that the swing is, indeed, building in the right way. And the keys to my practice, at this stage, are doing the left arm alone drill and videotaping every practice session, either in the backyard or at the range.

I also keep in mind that practice should be fun and that improvement is constant and gradual. To keep the fun in my practice at the range, I always hit a variety of clubs and try hitting for accuracy and distance. Sometimes I play a virtual hole, hitting a driver and then an iron or two, finishing with a wedge to the imaginary green. Playing the game this way, I always shoot close to par. There's nothing like shooting par to keep your interest in the game sharp!

Making Progress - Swing Tips 6

2009-12-10T15:51:00.004-05:00

Two days after my last visit to the range, I hit at another range near me, and I made palpable progress toward retarding the release. Again, in this video, you'll see the same symptoms as in the previous video: I'm starting too fast from the top of the swing. I don't know if the improvement I feel is actually visible, but each day over the past couple of weeks, since I started that left arm alone drill, I can see exciting and satisfying evidence that my swing is approaching the limits of my ability.

Conscious of that habit, I focussed on relaxed fingers and releasing later. With my left arm alone drill in mind, I started to see that I was still losing power potential by rushing through the swing, instead of building up momentum. Slowly, very slowly and tentatively, I started to feel that my hands should feel that they are out ahead of the ball when I release the swing. The improvement was immediate and dramatic.

Practicing with 3- and 4-hybrids, I started to hit farther and straighter. I could tell that the reason I have been hooking the ball is because I've been releasing too early. Now, when I got the feel of releasing later, of waiting, I suddenly had more power and more control. With this later release, I was hitting both clubs somewhere between 180 and 200 yards, probably a gain of at least ten or twenty yards in distance. And the hook disappeared. I began to feel the sense of power that friends of mine had when they talked about "crushing" the ball. Impact felt so good!

I hit a dozen or so balls with the driver, too, just to see what would happen. With the delayed release, I felt I was hitting with more power than before, with drives carrying somewhere around 230 or 240 slightly uphill. And they were straight!

In the last two weeks or so, my progress has been steady. It seems that every day a new swing subtlety reveals itself to me. Now the swing depends on the shoulders turning, the club handle in relaxed fingers, a gradual increase in momentum through the downswing, culminating, when the left shoulder is rising, in an incredibly fast release. From this vantage point, I can see myself maximizing the distances I can get out of various clubs. To test this thought, I hit one of the last balls with a 5-iron. Typically, I hit this about 160 to 170. I actually think that I hit the 7-iron better and farther. But with this new sense of the delayed release, I hit a perfect shot about 175 or 180 on the fly. That's got to be close to my maximum with that club. If I can hit it 180 or a little bit more, I'll feel I'm getting just about everything out of my swing. It was a gratifying end to the session, and I can't wait to go back and push that release point to the limit.

Making Progress - Swing Tips 5

2009-12-08T15:57:00.005-05:00

After going through some swing thoughts using plastic practice balls in the backyard, it was time for a "reality check" by seeing how the swing works at the range. The video shows rear views of a utility club and a side view of a couple of driver swings (I think that that background noise you hear is the overhead heaters; it's about 42 degrees).

You'll see almost immediately what I meant when I said earlier that I feel completely relaxed hitting plastic balls, but I can't stop from getting tight and rushing when I hit a real golf ball. You'll notice the quick start from the top of the swing, and you'll notice that the swing is basically over shortly after impact. Instead of swinging around in a nice arc, the clubhead jerks over to the side and slows down dramatically. You'll also see that with the utility club, I let it get behind me on the backswing, whereas I keep the seven-iron in a much more vertical plane in the videos showing my practice swing.

I videotaped myself and watched myself on the camcorder during this session, and you might notice some differences between the first swings and the last ones. They certainly felt different to me. The most important learning point was how loose and relaxed the fingers have to be, and the club has to rest in the fingers. Complete looseness and relaxation are prerequisites for clubhead speed at impact and for greater distance. And surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any sacrifice of accuracy. Near the end of the session, where I was concentrating on completely loose fingers, during the backswing and maintaining that looseness during the downswing, I was hitting a utility three around 180-190 yards and straight at my target. It was amazing! When I talked about holding the club in the fingers (in an earlier post), I didn't realize that the fingers should stay loose throughout the swing, especially on the downswing and through impact. That looseness is what allows the club to whip at tremendous speed. It is a mistake, I now realize, to think about consciously manipulating the club at impact. There is no way to do that. Instead, the correct approach is to let the club fly. Just let it go and snap at the bottom of the swing arc. And there is no rush getting there, either. I have to work on slowing myself down so that I build up speed gradually from the lag at the top of the backswing and save the club's potential for speed until the last possible instant before impact. The video today clearly shows the work I have to do in my backyard practice.

Making Progress - Swing Tips 4

2009-12-06T20:15:00.003-05:00

In this fourth part in the series, you'll see the full swing from a rear view, with a slow-motion sequence for analysis. If I could repeat this swing at the proper tempo ( 21/7 or 24/8 from the book Tour Tempo), I'd be all set. As you'll see, though, from the other swings, this ideal swing happens only now and then. Grooving it will take some time, and who knows how long that will be? And then I end the segment with two ideas for increasing distance: sequencing and tempo.

The key to all this progress in creating a good swing is constantly videotaping myself. I take my camcorder with me outside, when I practice in the backyard, and to the range. Regularly, while I'm practicing, I tape myself and then take a look. What I see then determines the aspect of the swing that I work on next. The plane, for example, is attainable only through videotaping.

What I've learned about learning a golf swing is that while you're practicing, you think you're doing one thing, but, in reality, you're doing another. The only way to reveal that is to look at yourself. You don't need to go to a pro to see yourself on camera. Do it yourself. Then, on your computer, you can play your swing in one browser window and compare it to Ernie Els (or any other pro you can find on YouTube) in another browser window, side-by-side, and the work you have to do will be completely obvious. As you can see, after all this videotaping, I'm very close to a solid swing. I have to relax more and get rid of the tension in my swing, but already you can see the swing plane, the balance, and the follow-through. Once I groove those, I'll start to work on sequencing and tempo. That's the plan for next year.

The next post in this series will be at the range, where we can all see how the practice swing, with plastic golf balls, translates into hitting real balls for real distances. That prospect changes everything. From experience, I know that the practice swing does not travel well to the range, let along the course. At this point, it is important to juxtapose practice, the range, and the course. The results will give me a real-time sense of where I am in the long arc of developing a good golf swing.

Making Progress - Swing Tips 3

2009-12-06T16:15:00.003-05:00

This is the third in the series, showing a full swing from rear and side views.

Making Progress - Swing Tips 2

2009-12-06T15:53:00.003-05:00

This is a continuation of the previous post about the left arm alone drill, this time from a side view.

Making Progress - Swing Tips 1

2009-12-06T12:27:00.004-05:00

It's been quite a while since my last post, but I've been making good progress in developing a sound swing. I was talking with a brother the other day and wanted to show him my swing in its current state, and the video here is the first of several installments where I describe my practice goals. The first part is about the basics of a drill swinging with the left arm only. The next few videos will show the same drill from the side and then the full swing, using Wilson white plastic practice balls off a mat in my backyard.

The Potential for Power

2009-02-25T12:19:00.005-05:00

My dismal distance at the range, related in the previous post, turned out to be a catalyst of progress and change. When I resumed my practice in my backyard, I was re-reading Tom Bertrand’s The Secret of Hogan’s Swing more carefully and paying more attention to where or how in my swing I could develop the clubhead speed that I wanted.

The day after the blustery, frigid practice when I just made slow motion swings, I went out again, not intending to hit practice balls, but content just to make full swings and see if I could speed up the clubhead. The answer I found came pretty quickly and was one that I had discovered months earlier and then set aside to practice other swing thoughts.

My problem turned out to be a familiar one—relying on muscles and conscious control of the swing. Lately, in my shortened swing drills, I had been concentrating so much on the role of each hand and the timing of the release that I had completely obscured the necessity of “letting the club do the work.” I was consciously doing the work, consciously moving the club along its path, consciously turning my left elbow, consciously throwing the clubhead with my right hand at impact. No wonder I can’t hit the ball 200 yards. Instead of distance, I had deliberate control. As I practiced swings, I could feel the weight of the club and every position of my arms and hands during the swing.

That weight and muscular awareness reminded me to keep the grip in my fingers and to keep my fingers and hands and arms relaxed in that active way that Tom Bertrand talks about. That did it. Once I let go of everything I had been so careful to control before, I was able to really start swinging the club with some speed and some acceleration. I could hear the club ripping through the air, a sound I had become unaccustomed to listen for. I began to pay attention to the transition once again, to have a sense of lag, and to feel the gathering momentum of the clubhead on its downward arc toward the ball.

With a loose, relaxed swing, my left elbow and right hand automatically did what I had been teaching them to do for weeks. Near the ball, nearly at the bottom of the swing arc, the club snapped through, my forearms were crossed, right over left, and the club was finishing its semicircular path up over my left shoulder while my hips completed their turn and my right shoulder finished over my left toe, just as Tom describes the finish of the follow-through.

From the feel of it, I knew that this is what a good golf swing is supposed to feel like. Naturally, as excited as I was by my re-discovery, I couldn’t wait to hit some plastic balls to see what would happen. Even before I teed them up, I knew. The worst hits you could imagine. Off the toe of the club, wicked slices, shanks, and topped grounders. I knew this would happen because it always does, without fail, whenever I make the slightest change With a change as wide-open as this—giving complete freedom to the swing—I couldn’t reasonably expect to hit the ball. Not at first, anyway.

I went back to some more slow swings and some swings at a faster tempo. When I started hitting again, at least the balls started going out in the general direction of my target line. And before too long, they were actually looking pretty good. And a couple felt like bombs, straight and way out there, I’d guess another ten or twenty yards longer than I was hitting at the range a couple of days before. You can see the results in the video below. The swing now felt as though it had the potential for power.

Reality Bites!

2009-02-25T10:34:00.005-05:00

My previous post described the virtues of slow, patient practice and the rewards of working at a gradual, methodical pace toward building parts of the swing over time. It certainly makes sense on paper. Hitting my Callaway soft-flight practice balls across my backyard, I felt I was rounding into good shape for April 1, the beginning of the new season. Then I went to a range and hit real golf balls. That’s when I came back down to earth. Reality bites!

You’ll remember that for a couple of weeks, I had been practicing drills, shortened swing drills to learn the feeling of “slinging the ball,” like Hogan. Drills like that are the only practical ones I can hit in my yard, which is about 65-70 yards long corner to corner. A full swing with a driver would probably, if it was a good swing, send my Callaway balls out onto the main road.

At the range, my only goal was to hit the driver with a full swing and see how my short-swing practice was contributing to a better swing. I could see definite improvement. I was able to hit the ball more consistently and felt that my mechanics were more reliable and comfortable. On the other hand, I still had a problem with distance. Even when everything clicked and the ball went arcing across the range toward the yard markers, I could never hit 200 yards. Then I tried a seven-iron to see if I could hit it any farther than I did the last time at the range a few weeks before. Myabe it was because I hadn’t been swinging an iron at all lately, but I couldn’t hit it more than about 135 or 140 yards. The results with both clubs told me I needed to go back home and start thinking more about clubhead speed during my practice sessions.

Reality may be hard to face at times—most of the time—but my next practice session at home, the day after the frustrating visit to the range, put me back into a positive mood. Before I went out to practice, on a blustery, 24-degree day (wind chill made it feel like the teens), I re-read some of the last sections of Tom Bertrand’s The Secret of Hogan’s Swing. I’m constantly surprised, when I revisit my golf books, at how frequently certain details jump out at me, phrases that I have either forgotten or missed on earlier readings. This time, the detail that caught my attention came from the “Impact Zone Checklist” (p. 156) where the first item, in bold and bulleted, instructs “Left knee remains flexed.” How did I miss that before? As Tom explains, this tendency can lead to, among other problems, topping the ball, which, you may remember from earlier posts, I do with gruesome regularity, those hot infield grounders I hit in the backyard.

Despite the bitter weather, I went out to my practice area and set up the hitting mat and tee, but with no plans to hit balls. Even if I’d wanted to, the wind was too stiff to allow teeing up. Instead, I wanted just to go through the motions, the slow motions that Tom advocates, and full-swing motions rather than abbreviated swings. Somewhere in the full swing, good players generate clubhead speed, and I wanted to start finding out how to do that myself. Twenty minutes out in that gale was about all I could take, but at least I did get some swinging in. And those slow motion swings must have helped because the next day, I started to understand why I had such slow clubhead speed.

Slow Slinging: Slow, Patient Practice

2009-02-20T10:57:00.009-05:00

In my last post, I said that the swing felt good enough to take out on the course, that is, when spring arrives. Practice the next day, however, brought me back to the reality of a long swing development process. Hitting for distance, a major concern in the last few posts, had dropped in my priority list, replaced by my effort to work on a clean, repeatable swing. By clean, I mean that I wanted to get over scuffing the practice mat. This is a nagging problem, and I am reminded of some sage advice I’ve come across, “You want to hit the ball, not the tee.”

Even with the latest improvements, my first few swings flew right into the side of the house or bounced across the yard with topspin, like hot infield grounders. This is how golf tests your resolve. The thought occurred to me that I was bringing the club up too severely and imparting this tennis-like topspin. I could see that clearly when I videotaped myself. The obvious answer was to practice level-left. This is what Tom Bertrand advocates. And, theoretically, I could understand the efficacy of this approach.

With a slowed-down swing, I tried just to hit the ball solidly with a relatively flat swing plane, using a very shortened swing—not even the nine o’clock drill. All I wanted to do was to control the clubhead and the path of the swing so that I wasn’t hitting below the tee. I wanted to see low shots driven out there straight ahead of me. After hitting a few practice shots, I thought it would probably be a good idea to go inside and take another look at Tom Bertrand’s chapter on “The Legendary Golf System,” just to make sure that I knew what I was doing.

Reviewing that chapter gave me the mental images I needed to continue practicing and also impressed on me two other points. The first is that the wrist of the left hand has to be bowed out toward the target. I didn’t think I was emphasizing that enough in my practice. The second is that you need to delay that left elbow turn as long as possible and then turn it very quickly in order to “sling the ball.”

Outside again on the practice mat, balls were glancing off the house and hopping across the ground as they always do when I make swing modifications. Gradually, however, with a slowed-down swing, I started to get control and hit balls solidly out toward my target, the big Norway maple that you can see in the videos. My method is to do some slow-motion practice swings, as Tom Bertrand suggests, and then to do some slow hitting so that I can see what the ball actually does. This kind of practice reminds me of the way I used to practice the piano when I played classical music, following Daniel Barenboim’s advice to practice super-slowly as the best way to teach the muscles what to do. Tom argues for this approach, too.

To learn precise swing motions by going through them slowly until they become natural and comfortable. Most important, you condition your mind and muscles to execute these moves without consciously thinking. Learning your swing at a slower pace enables you to watch it take shape and feel the flow of energy as you move through each position. This will prove far easier and more effective than trying to adjust movements during your normal golf swing when you’re moving fast and a dozen thoughts are jumping through your mind.

Or take Harvey Penick’s word for it. In his classic Little Red Book, he said, “A slow motion swing develops the golf muscles, implants the correct club positions in your golfing brain—and doesn’t smash the chandelier.”

For optimum results, these motions should be practiced every day. Studies have shown that any habit—in this case, the correct movements that create a solid, repeatable golf swing—can be learned in less than thirty days if practiced regularly. In sixty days, with regular practice and play, they are close to becoming second nature.

I don’t know what studies Tom is referring to, but my first pro, Mark, told me something similar. He said that whenever you make a change in your swing, it takes nine hours to learn it. So if you practice something for twenty minutes a day, that works out to less than a month, just as Tom says. The video below shows my latest practice: a shortened, slower swing while I work out a level-left follow-through.

Slinging Swing Modifications

2009-02-17T20:38:00.009-05:00

My new “slinging” swing was hardly twenty-four hours old when I went out to start slinging again to make it repeatable. From the first plastic ball I teed up, the only consistency was that every swing was terrible, an ugly mixture of slices and topped balls. After a dozen or so of these swings, I stopped to take stock. The most obvious cause of the problems was my hands. Even yesterday, I suspected that, although I was seeing an improvement, I had adopted a swing that is too “handsy,” to use Tom Bertrand’s term. Taking a good look at my grip, I carefully pressed the pad “at the inside heel of the palm” against the handle and wrapped my fingers, just as Hogan teaches in Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. I also made sure to overlap the right-hand pinkie on top, rather that beside, the left index finger and keep both hands tightly together.

With these corrections, I started some slow-motion swings, watching what my wrists did, and what I saw also needed some correction. Instead of maintaining wristcock, I was dropping my wrists and virtually dragging the club to the ball. That probably accounted for all my mishits, the skulled balls and sharp slices. Keeping the angle between my wrists and the club, I started to feel what Tom Bertrand means when he describes Hogan’s Secret, the turning of the left elbow “level left” toward the left hip. There is no hand action at all, just a very controlled clubhead arc out to the ball and then around the left leg, exactly what you want.

This new movement made sense to me. I could still get the slinging swing and, in addition, a much more accurate clubhead path to the ball; Already, I had the sense that the mass of the clubhead was hitting the ball squarely. The greater swing path accuracy would take care of the skulling balls and scuffing the mat that were plaguing me. With these new swing ideas in mind, I started hitting practice balls again, very deliberately and with moderate clubhead speed.

I could see the improvement right away. After a couple dozen swings and the growing sense of hitting the ball really solidly, it was time to try out my modified slinging swing on the Callaway practice balls. By the way, these have worked out extremely well. The true flight path they give is very helpful in diagnosing a swing, and they are safe to use in your yard. I’ve hit both cars several times, as well as screens, windows, and siding on the house (numerous times—it’s a big target), with absolutely no damage. They’re that soft.

This Callaway session was very gratifying. The swing modifications seemed solid. I hit the ball consistently well, skulling only a couple and no disastrous slices. My wrists firmly cocked, the club handle in the firm Hogan grip, I was able to hit toward my target again and again (see video below). Many times, I hit straight out, but I learned what to do in order to draw the ball. The practice went so well that, near the end, I decided to try a controlled fade. Addressing the ball as I remembered how to make this shot—stance slightly open, but still aiming at the target—I hit a shot, a beauty, high and fading just right. I couldn’t have asked for more. Just to make sure, I tried three more. All were acceptable. Then, to seal the deal, I tried three draws. All fine—right at the target, pulling right to left. I couldn’t have been more gratified. I felt as though I could go out on the course right then and there.

Slinging the Ball

2009-02-17T12:48:00.014-05:00

Dreaming that I finally had the answer that would give me a good swing and all the distance I wanted, I woke up the next morning to misgivings. This swing really wasn’t what I saw the pros doing in the Swing Vision videos on YouTube, and it wasn’t what my books described. Confirming my suspicions, the YouTube video comparing the swings of Ernie Els and Michelle Wie provided me with the hint I needed. Watching them in slow motion, I noticed how quickly their right hands came through the hitting zone. At impact, the right palm is square to the ball, but immediately after that, you can see how quickly the hands are pronating. So my idea of a long arc where the hands supinate and pronate was erroneous. No surprise there.

Then I wanted to see what the pros do with their arms. The day before, I thought I had discovered that reaching out toward the ball, like Moe Norman, worked best. It felt good and reliable, but I remembered my first pro, Mark, telling me how close to the thighs players like Furyk swing the arms, and I also had a mental picture of pros, in a down-the-line shot, swinging the hands through a spot vertically underneath the chin. And that’s what Adam Scott does in the video I watched next. His swing reminded of a passage I had read months earlier in Swing Like a Pro, which I found and read again.

As important as the act of producing power is the ability to direct it properly. By driving the lower body toward the target, you move the hips out of the way so that the arms can swing on an inside path toward ball contact. Our research has shown that the clearance between the arms and the body is so small that, if the lower body is not moved out of the way, the path the arms and club are supposed to follow becomes blocked. (p. 153)

When I went out to practice, I had two swing thoughts (usually, that’s one too many and leads to ugly results)—quick supination and pronation of the hands and keeping the hands under my chin. I thought of Tom Bertrand’s “secret” again, and how it related to the quick hands I saw in Ernie Els and Michelle Wie and realized that far from being a slow, methodical, and long turn toward the left hip, the movement was actually the quickest part of the swing, almost instantaneous. Suddenly, I realized that this was where clubhead speed must be generated. Whatever the speed before, it is no more than highway speed compared to the mach-1 acceleration that happens at impact. This is the speed that Hogan talks about in Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf.

IN THE CHAIN ACTION OF THE SWING, THE SHOULDERS AND UPPER PART OF THE BODY CONDUCT THIS MULTIPLYING POWER INTO THE ARMS…THE ARMS MULTIPLY IT AGAIN AND PASS IT ON TO THE HANDS…THE HANDS MULTIPLY IT IN TURN…AND, AS A RESULT, THE CLUBHEAD IS SIMPLY TEARING THOUGH THE AIR AT AN INCREDIBLE SPEED AS IT DRIVES THROUGH THE BALL. ALL THIS HAPPENS SO QUICKLY, OF COURSE, THAT YOU CAN’T SEE IT TO APPRECIATE IT. BUTTHIS IS WHAT HAPPENS. (p. 92)

Until now, I never understood how this multiplying effect happens. I certainly never had the remotest feeling that my clubhead was “tearing through the air.” As I continued to practice this new discovery, using a shortened swing drill (see video), I saw that it also cured the problem I had of grounding the clubhead in front of the ball.

The reason for that, I now guessed, was that I was trying to make a long arc as I turned my elbow “level left,” instead of this quick, lightning-flash turn I was developing now. Two other aspects of the swing became clear, too. One was the aim of delaying the release until the last possible instant. All this time, I thought the release began way back in front of the right hip and followed a long arc around the body. Now, I had the sense that I could let the release happen much later, at a point where my hands felt very close to the ball, much later that I had ever thought possible. Months before, I had tried a release like this but couldn’t make it work then, probably because of other problems earlier in my swing, such as casting or coming over the top or swinging outside to in. At this “Eureka!” moment, I realized what “slinging the ball” meant. Tom Bertrand refers to this in The Secret of Hogan's Swing when he describes “Capturing the Ball.”

When Hogan began to understand the workings of a repeatable golf swing, he realized that all his energy should not be directed toward a violent encounter with the ball. Instead, he envisioned his clubface capturing the ball and slinging it to the target. Thus the downswing energy is released toward the target and not at the ball. I believe this is what created a unique sound to Hogan’s golf shots as he connected with the ball.

“Slinging the ball” is exactly what I felt I was doing now. Finally seeing what had been so hard to imagine for all these months, I laughed to myself. I knew I was on solid ground now. Starting to make my new “slinging” swing repeatable and consistent is the subject of the next post.

Practicing Long Distance

2009-02-15T17:11:00.005-05:00

I’ve made progress in developing my swing, and I’m continuing to make progress. Every day when I go out to practice, I gain new insights. My muscles and reflexes find new paths. Each day, I have a definite practice plan, something specific I want to implement or review. Since I’m a beginner just learning the swing, I never go out to my practice mat just to swing the club. Even if the question of the hour relates to distance.

As I have admitted in my previous posts, I haven’t been able to hit the ball far enough. When my friends ask how my swing is coming along, I say, “Great! I’m crushing my driver out there about 180!” Because this is so anemic, when I go out each day, I may have a specific thought to work on—such as extending my arms in the follow-through or staying behind the ball during the downswing—but at some point during the practice session, I’m going to focus on clubhead speed, which I know is the key to power and distance. Having watched, with envy, the LPGA players blast the ball distances far beyond what I can even dream of (at this point), I know that the answer has nothing to do with physical strength and everything to do with technique and timing.

The other day, in trying to solve the problem of an erratic swing that often grounded the club on the mat behind the ball or that skulled the ball, producing a hyperactive, topspin crazy shot that hopped across my frozen backyard, I thought I found an answer. It grew out of my attempt to lengthen my swing and keep my left arm straight. In trying to find a swing path that would take the clubhead directly to the back of the ball without hitting the mat, I started swinging as if I were doing a modified hammer-throw, you know, that Olympic event where the athlete swings a ball fastened at the end of a short length of chain around and around him as he spins before he reaches a maximum speed and lets the chain go. If his timing is good, the ball will go flying out across the field with the greatest distance possible. To me, it seemed perfect physics: centrifugal force, mass times speed, and acceleration all combining to move a dead weight an incredible number of yards.

As I was finishing this practice session, with good results, I might add, I remembered videos I had seen of Moe Norman, the great Canadian pro, who famously swung on a single plane and reputedly always hit the ball straight. Not bad company, I thought. I went to sleep that night thinking that I had made another step higher up the ladder toward the ideal swing. After a good night’s sleep, morning clarified that thought. Waking up to reality in the next post.

Distance Still Far Off

2009-02-13T14:38:00.013-05:00

In January, 2009, I was in pretty good shape, with clear progress to show for all my practice during the winter. The path of my swing was good, and I felt I was incorporating that right arm motion that Hogan talks about.

In its general character, the correct motion of the right arm and hand in the impact area resembles the motion an infielder makes when he throws half sidearm, half underhand to first after fielding a ground ball. As the right arm swings forward, the right elbow is very close to the right hip and “leads” the arm—it is the part of the arm nearest the target.

My right elbow was next to my right hip, my right wrist was cocked back with plenty of power to release, and I could feel that there was more power ready to unload from my right biceps. With everything in place like this, why couldn’t I hit the ball farther when I went to the range, I wondered. I must be missing something.

Getting the club handle in my fingers was one thing I knew I had been neglecting. The worn spot on my golf glove proved that. So I needed more whip from swinging with my fingers. Then there was the more frustrating problem of being unable to hit the ball cleanly. Many times, the clubhead would hit the mat behind the ball, or if I made an adjustment for that, I’d skull the ball, sending it across my yard bouncing with crazy topspin.

These inaccuracies made me go back to one of the first drills I learned, the nine o’clock drill. Actually, I modified that drill so that it was more of a seven o’clock drill, with my hands going back only to the spot where I wanted to start turning the left elbow during the downswing. After days of practice like this, I started to get the feeling of the clubhead swinging more freely as I took it back to that spot and then came forward again. Almost effortless, that feeling must mean that I’m on the right track.

Still, I was hitting the top of the ball far too often. The cause of that, I thought, must be that I was moving my hips laterally on the downswing and getting out in front of the ball. The cure for that, I knew, was to stay back. That reminded me of something I had read or seen on YouTube about getting added “leverage” by staying behind the ball. To help me to this, I started trying to focus on a dimple somewhere at the back of the ball during the swing. That helped. And always, I tried to relax and swing as easily as I could. Not exactly like Julius Boros, but not Frankenstein, either.

All this practice and all the mishits took a toll on my plastic practice balls. I prefer the solid white practice balls from Wilson because I can see how a shot takes the spin that a swing imparts, but the balls tend to crack along the seam at their circumference. Looking online, I came across the Callaway Golf HX Practice Soft-Flite Ball - 30 Pack. Made out of soft rubber, with dimples so that their flight is realistic, they travel about a third the distance of a regular golf ball. In my yard, I can hit them (if I don’t hit the house first) about sixty-five or seventy yards on the fly with a driver doing that seven o’clock drill. Any farther than that, and they’ll end up out on the highway. Ideally, I’d like a ball with a shorter flight, but aside from that, they’re perfect for my situation.

With these balls flying about sixty-five yards, the equivalent of 195 yards with a regular golf ball, I still haven’t solved my problem with distance. Continuing my search for an answer will be the subject of the next post.

Swing Shortcomings

2009-02-12T20:42:00.010-05:00

As you’ve probably noticed, at this point in the evolution of my swing, my primary influence lately has been Tom Bertrand and his synthesis of

Hogan’s book Five Lessons. For the past four to six weeks, I’ve been working with Tom—his YouTube videos and his book—figuratively speaking, my latest swing coach, and we’ve been working on the left elbow turn.

In his video, Tom tells you that you have to practice this movement rigorously and in slow motion, at least at first. I followed his advice and saw immediate results. My practice balls seemed to explode off the clubhead, their trajectories starting out dead straight and then curving, incredibly, right to left. All of a sudden, I was able to hit a draw. With all my research on the development of a golf swing behind me, I knew that I was on the verge of graduating from a Stage One golfer (one who slices) to a Stage Two golfer (who can draw the ball). I was so excited! I’m still excited about this progress! Finally, I thought, I’m learning a golf swing!

However, I quickly realized that I couldn’t do this regularly. And as all “Wannabes” do, I probably liked to remember my good shots and forget about the bad ones. When I hit a wicked slice or topped the ball (which happened way too often), I would make an adjustment—anything to get that sweet right to left trajectory back again. These adjustments included

turning my shoulders farther on the backswing
leaving the clubhead farther behind me as I started the downswing
keeping my left arm across my chest as I started to the downswing
staying behind the ball at impact
extending both arms into that desired “V” after impact
feeling my weight on the downswing transfer to the outside left heel
finishing the swing with a follow-through in the classic position, around my neck somewhere

As you can tell, this was too much to accomplish. Day-to-day, I would focus on one or two of these objectives, depending on how the practice balls flew. Then I spent two hours at the driving range. That was a turning point.

I started out hitting a seven-iron to a green about 150 yards out. I thought I was hitting the ball pretty well. Generally, I could hit ball first and watch the flight track right and come back left to hit somewhere on the green. Naturally, I hit many balls badly, too. I still felt that, for me, I was hitting the ball well, and accurately, too.

When it came to the driver, I saw the same kind of results. I could hit the ball out there where I wanted it to go. Sometimes straight ahead, sometimes slicing right, sometimes straight ahead and drawing left. I never knew what was going to happen. The track of the ball didn’t really matter to me, however. What mattered most was the distance. After all my practice, I still couldn’t hit the ball more than about 195 yards on the fly (and I was concerned only with the fly). To me, this meant that I might as well not play golf. I knew of holes on public courses that I’ve played near me where you had to carry the ball at least 210 yards. If I couldn’t do at least that, then I might as well take up chess. Recently, I saw Camilo Villegas hit an eight iron about 180 yards. That means that he can hit a

seven iron 190
six iron 200
five iron 210
four iron 220

Basically, he’s hitting clubs two and a-half times what I hit. This told me that I had a distance problem. And it determined what I would practice. Going for greater distance is the subject of the next post.

The "Missing Link"

2009-02-11T15:19:00.007-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I came across Tom Bertrand’s YouTube video “The ‘Missing Link’ to Ben Hogan’s Secret” while browsing golf videos. He has another one, “The SECRET to Ben Hogan’s ‘laying off the club’.” Experimenting with this tip made me feel uncomfortable, and I haven’t adopted it yet (you’ll see my comments to Tom on his video), but the “Missing Link” is very powerful. See it for yourself. Then go to his book—it’s interesting to read this side-by-side with Hogan’s book. When I started re-reading The Secret of Hogan's Swing, I happened to notice what Tom says about both arms.

In his chapter, “The Technology of Hogan’s Secret,” Tom describes the role of the arms this way.

The arms have the critical task of bringing the hands into the impact zone precisely every time. They must work together, and the only way they can work together is to actively set them up with the elbows turned inward toward each other.

Hogan dictates this more emphatically

The upper part of the arms should be pressed very tightly against the sides of the chest. In my own case, I consciously work to build up so strong an adhesion between the upper arms and the chest that a person would have to exert a really terrific amount of force to wedge them apart.

When I tried to swing with my arms tightly connected, I did feel that it could lead to more power, but so far I haven’t isolated this arm connection enough. I’ve been more concerned with the elbow turn. That seemed like such a crucial factor that I directed most of my attention to it.

For this, we have to depend on The Secret of Hogan's Swing, since, as Tom explains, “Hogan never mentioned it in his books.” Hogan did reveal this “secret” to John Schlee, who, in turn, taught it to Tom. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had come across Tom’s explanation earlier. Without it, I took Hogan’s talk about supination and pronation and thought that the hands do this. The result was that I had a “handsy” (to use Tom’s term) swing in the impact zone. Sometimes I hit the ball the way I wanted to, and sometimes I didn’t. I never knew what was going to happen, but I attributed this to lack of practice. I assumed the action of the hands was extremely difficult to learn and that years of practice would be required. That prospect was discouraging, yet I still drew hope from the occasional good swings I could make.

That’s why I instinctively knew that Tom had to be correct when I saw him demonstrate the left elbow turn in his YouTube video about the “Missing Link.” In the video, Tom concentrates on the hitting area “where the left elbow comes into play” and goes into greater detail here than he does in his book. You can read two sections in the book “The Left Elbow” (p. 121) and “The Missing Link to Hogan’s Secret” (pp. 148-151). However, to understand this fully, I recommend studying the video. As an aside, Tom believes in plenty of slow motion swing practice and plenty of practice in general, conclusions I come to share in my own swing development.

I also took encouragement from Tom’s introduction to the last section of his book, “The Legendary Golf System,” where he presents

a complete and final summation of all the key elements of Hogan’s golf swing, arranged in a simple format that the average golfer can understand, use, and enjoy.

This training program takes a bit of practice to work effectively, but it’s not so daunting when you realize that in a matter of weeks, you can learn and apply to your game the secrets that took Hogan at least forty years of steady digging to discover. As I [Bertrand] began to comprehend and apply the depth of Hogan’s hard-won wisdom to my own game, I felt as it someone had handed me a big bag of gold nuggets and said, “Here’s all you need to buy your ticket to golfer’s heaven.

I’m not so sure you can learn the secrets in “a matter of weeks,” but I am quite sure that Tom is correct in the rest of what he says. Without Hogan’s book and without Tom’s system, learning a good golf swing could easily take any of us at least forty years. Finally, I’ve found a complete teaching system that I understand and that can probably be achieved in a reasonable amount of time. How I practiced from this point on will be the subject of my next post.

Narrowing It Down

2009-02-10T14:06:00.019-05:00

Taking regular lessons with my swing coach, JJ, starting in July, 2008, I spent the rest of the summer just practicing. I decided that there was no point in going out on the course to play with my flawed swing. The boundary of my golf world became my backyard. Like Voltaire’s picaresque traveler, Candide, I had learned to tend my own garden and felt no compulsion to go any further.

On a small patio, I set up my practice tee, with a hitting mat, a couple of deck chairs, and two galvanized garbage cans. I set one deck chair inside another so that I could feel the top edge against my hip as I practiced my turn. I stacked the garbage cans one on top of the other about two strides out in front of the hitting mat. Then I practiced hitting practice balls just past the garbage cans on the right side. I wanted something wide and high enough so that I’d know when I hit to the right, the correct path I was after. If I missed and went left of my target, the ball would hit the cooler.

In this way, I spent the next few months, right up to the end of the golf season, hitting plastic balls in the backyard. Most of the time, I hit the white plastic balls with large holes in them. They don’t fly too far, and when one hit the garbage cans with a hollow, metallic tenor echo (reminiscent of the show "Stomp!"), it just bounced to the ground. If I felt I had made some progress, it was time to switch to the solid white dimpled plastic balls that I could hit about thirty yards or so and watch the flight of the ball.

Gradually, as I improved the path of my swing, I started hitting fewer and less severe slices. And when I was swinging well, I began to hit balls straight or with a gratifying right to left draw. This was such a novelty and such an encouraging development that even when I hit wicked duck hooks, I was delighted.

This was a period of patient, slow, and methodical practice. For quite some time, I’ve known that I can work on only about one thing at a time. More than that overloads my synapses. Even so, as I practiced, the slightest change in my swing usually produced terrible results. One minute, I would be hitting the ball fine. Then, if I make a slight modification, the ball would fly off right in a wicked slice or trip bouncing off the tee like a hot grounder during infield practice.

The hip turn, the weight shift, the swing path, staying behind the ball, rotating around the spine without too much head movement, keeping the left arm straight, relaxing the arms and wrists and hands, keeping the club in the fingers—all these basics I practiced basically one at a time. With the camcorder almost every day, I checked my progress and decided what needed more attention. This constant, daily practice taught me to use my time more wisely, too. Where I had been in the habit of videotaping myself for use after a practice session, and then working on a perceived weakness the next day, now I saw the wisdom of looking at the video during a practice session, while it was still fresh in my mind.

Speaking of wise practice, keeping a journal is a habit I’ve tried to maintain since the beginning, back in the spring of 2007. Looking back at my first entries, I can see that I took notes on research I was doing at the time, either by reading golf books or by watching YouTube videos. I see references to Shawn Clement (the great YouTube pro I mentioned in an early post), Hogan, Rory Sabbatini, Luke Donald, Kevin Na, K.J. Choi, Hale Irwin, Ernie Els, Sean O’Hair, Lee Scarbrow, David Toms, Aaron Baddeley, David Leadbetter, the golfcoastgolfschool.com posts on YouTube, Jim Flick’s book On Golf: Lessons from America's Master Teacher (listing his top ten drills), notes on the strength and flexibility drills on Roger Fredericks DVDs, and more among pages and pages of notes. I was very methodical back then and logged anything I though valuable in my journal. Maybe that was because I had read somewhere that Hogan a journal with him whenever he went out practicing. Though I still believe in the efficacy of this kind of note-taking, I do it only sporadically, the last three entries coming in September and November ’08 and then not again until a week ago.

I think that the reason for this is that, by now, I’ve narrowed down my biggest problems to a couple that aren’t hard to remember or keep track of, and these are mainly what Tom Bertrand illustrates in his YouTube video about the “Missing Link”, as well as in his book, The Secret of Hogan's Swing—turning the left elbow in towards the left hip during the downswing and at impact, keeping the arms close together as long as possible, and moving the left arm “directly across the chest and the right shoulder during the takeaway.”

At this point, I want to introduce you to Tom Bertrand’s wonderful video on YouTube, “The ‘Missing Link’ to Ben Hogan’s Secret.” I came across it, with impeccable timing, while browsing through other YouTube golf videos. After all my practice, I was receptive, and I didn’t miss Tom’s message. I had been trying to square up the clubface consciously, using my hands, and the second I heard Tom describe the role of the left elbow, I knew he was correct. This epiphany drove me back to his book, The Secret of Hogan's Swing. I was certain that there were other details I had missed or forgotten on my previous reading and study. For instance, I had forgotten the importance Hogan places on keeping the elbows close together on the backswing. Tom’s summary drove me back to the source. Hogan’s book, which I’ve had open ever since, next to Tom’s book and Swing Like a Pro) These three constitute my indispensable study guides.

In the next post, I’ll review what I’m trying to learn from them.

A Scent of the Secret

2009-02-09T11:37:00.009-05:00

Serious golfers all know what "Inside Out" means. We all want the clubhead to swing from inside the target line out to the ball, or square to that line, and then back inside on the follow-through. That much is clear. I've known that every since I started trying to learn a good swing, and that was over a year ago. In my last post, I recalled how my swing coach pointed out that my swing path was outside-to-in, which explained why most of my shots started out left of my intended target line before fading or slicing to the right. JJ gave me a drill to use (trying to hit just right of a target placed in front of me), and I went home to practice for as long as it would take to get this path problem fixed.

As I've said before in my posts, this is yet another example of my tendency to think I'm doing one thing when, really, I'm not. Part of the reason for this tendency, I think, is some kind of wishful thinking. I so eager to do the correct thing that I convince myself I've already learned it. Another explanation is simply that, as complex as the golf swing is, there is a limit to what I can absorb at any one time. A swing idea might go into my brain when I read some instruction in a book, but the thought tends to stay there for quite a while before it starts to show up in my swing. Perhaps each swing improvement needs some gestation period.

Eventually, good things will happen. “All in good time,” as Cervantes reminds us. Valuable lessons rarely come easily. Even if they did, it would be highly unlikely that a golf insight would be one of them. No, golf reveals its secrets grudgingly. Golf’s stubbornness requires patience and practice. Fortunately, I enjoy practicing and am content to keep on practicing as long as it takes for the next feature of the swing to kick in. Each time I sense an improvement, it feels like a revelation, a golf gift that we sometimes call an “epiphany.” I haven’t been counting, but by now, after more than a year of learning, I wonder how many epiphanies I’ve had. It’s certainly dozens at least.

At about this time, I came across another book that eventually made a huge difference in my understanding of the golf swing.

The Secret of Hogan’s Swing is a great book for anyone who is trying to learn golf. Not only is the author, Tom Bertrand, a great teacher in his own right, but he also operates with the unequaled advantage of having studied with one of the few people who actually learned from Ben Hogan himself. And that person was John Schlee. Bertrand and Schlee hooked up for a number of years, and Bertrand took note of everything that Hogan had taught Schlee.

The book falls into two main parts. First, Bertrand talks about his relationship with Schlee. For me, that was interesting because I remembered Schlee as a Tour player I used to watch on TV. After Bertrand goes through the etiology of what Hogan taught Schlee, he gets to the heart of the matter in two chapters that distill the essence of Hogan’s book. Condensed and targeted as Bertrand’s summary is, full of photographs and explanations, I was able to absorb only so much on this, my first exposure. I had to return to this book several other times, as I will relate in another post. This time through, I was able to concentrate on a couple of details.

One was that Bertrand took me back to Hogan’s emphasis on keeping the arms together as a unit. The second is the role of the left elbow in the downswing. I’ll go into more detail in a subsequent post, but for the moment, as the left elbow turns toward the left hip, that movement squares up the clubface at impact, obviating the need for a conscious, “handsy” attempt to get square. Be sure to view Bertrand’s video on YouTube where he discusses this move in detail. I found the video extremely helpful and important. According to Bertrand, the role of the left elbow is “the ‘missing link’ in the ongoing analysis of Hogan’s secret.” Without Bertrand—both his book and his video—I doubt that I ever would have understood this crucial feature of the downswing.

One of the great advantages of Bertrand’s book is that it drives you back to Ben Hogan's Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. Bertrand got me to start studying Hogan all over again, revisiting Hogan with a fresh eye for what he was trying to impart.

Now that I was improving the path of my swing and had a scent—a whiff— of Hogan’s Secret, I felt I was finally making real progress. Suddenly, it started to appear that I might actually have a swing good enough to take out on the course in the coming spring. Of course, there was plenty to do in the meantime. That will be the subject for the next post.