Big Day

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.