What If Practice Never Makes Perfect?

An unusual title? Sure. The rhetorical question begins a "Briefly Noted" in The New Yorker (Jul 30, 2012) of Leanne Shapton's  Swimming Studies, a memoir in which "Shapton, a writer, artist, and former contender for the Canadian Olympic team, grapples with the habits she leaned as a teen-age competitive swimmer. Taught to value exertion and hard work over talent and pleasure, Shapton remains preoccupied, even as an adult, with time, sequence, repetition, deprivation, and pain. The intensity of competition heightens and subverts everything from body image to early-morning light." The minute I read it, I knew it described my struggle with the golf swing. The magazine in one hand on the Lexington Avenue 4 express train, I hazarded my balance—and the safety of my fellow commuters—to grope blindly in an outside pocket of my large commuter bag for a green marker pen to highlight this passage, already looking ahead to the end of the working day when I'd be back in my backyard practice area again, repeating the swing, videotaping myself, working on tempo and sequencing. Like anyone else who's seriously tried to learn a good golf swing, I've accepted imperfection. We know the answer to the question the New Yorker poses. Practice never makes perfect in golf. But we continue to practice anyway—relentlessly, stubbornly, assiduously. Like ancient mariners, we're sailing toward a receding horizon.

You'll notice that I haven't posted in quite a while. The habit of regular posting just got away from me, at first because my swing was changing almost daily, and I didn't see the point of a post that would be old the next day. Then, I just found other things to do, like watching YouTube videos. In the last couple of months, though, I started to feel a legitimate swing coming my way. Tonight, exhilarated at solving (I'm pretty sure) a nasty shank, I felt the full swing was there, for the first time, without any major flaws, and the video looked  worth posting.

You'll see two swing thoughts I've been working on. One is posture, including bracing against the right leg on the backswing, and the other, making a relaxed, full swing , all the way through to a finish with my shoulders turned left of the target line. It's the swing of a neophyte, but it looks to me like one that's on the right track. The first shot shows some slow motion practice, an idea from a YouTube video of Ai Miyazato. The chair is helping me feel the right leg bracing instead of straightening during the backswing. Then, a full swing, looking pretty good until the follow-through, where you should see more extension in the hands as they come through and around. I also bang the mat a bit, which means I let the clubhead go too early.

In the background, on the stone wall, you'll notice this orange fireball. That's a New York sunset, a little after 7:00pm, like a huge laser from across the Hudson River. I took it as a good omen. "Red sun at night, sailor's delight." By this time, I was hitting the ball so well, I hit a few more shots and then called it a day. Maybe tomorrow, I'll take the swing out to Put Nash.