The Golf Lesson: 2

So I had my second golf lesson with Mike. To help me understand the importance of wrist hinge, he taught me a drill where I set up and take a backswing, making sure to keep my left arm straight as I let my wrist hinge back with the club. Then as I begin to unwind, I keep my wrist set in this hinged position, letting my arms “pump” up and down.

Here’s the video of the before and after my lesson:

As you can see in the “before” shot, I had reverted back to some of my old habits of “pushing” the ball. But I had performed the drill at least one time that was good enough for Mike to record it as the “after” shot.

Couldn’t wait to see if this would help my distances, so I headed straight to the range. It was cold and windy there, and the shadows were casting toward my stance. I tried to practice the drill, but all the balls kept flying to the right. I only hit one straight about 110 yards with my 7-iron and wasted the rest of the bucket of balls trying to replicate it.

Frustrated, tense, and tired, I threw my bag of clubs into the car trunk and slammed the lid. I really wanted to see if I could get the hang of this wrist hinge concept but I didn’t want to spend any more time at this windy, shadowy range.

Luckily, there is another driving range nearby.

There, I saw two Korean women practicing, and one of them called out “Hi, Donna,” as I walked by. Donna is not my name, but this woman did know me. My husband and I had once played with her and her husband, randomly matched up by the same tee time. I’ll say her name is Bea, but that is not her real name either. As I recall, she played from the yellow tees and still drove the ball farther than me. Her swing looked really smooth, like she was sweeping up bread crumbs off the floor. I told her I had just come from a golf lesson.

“Why? You’re so good!” she said.

“Oh, but I’m not,” I lamented. “I can’t hit very far. Only about 150 these days.”

Bea told me she used to hit 235 yards, but then she had a baby and stopped playing for 10 years. Now she’s trying to play again but her driver distance has fallen to about 210 yards.

“210!” I said. “You’ve got to teach me how to do that!” I ran to get some range balls and showed her the drill I learned during my golf lesson.

“Hmm, that looks like old school,” she joked. “How old is your golf teacher?”

She said she learned from a Korean guy who doesn’t teach anymore. He taught her that the swing is based on the tension created by the torso moving one way and the hips moving the other way. You wind up and release like a rubber band.

Then she taught me a drill where I fold my arms over my chest and she gets behind me and holds my hips still, while I try to rotate on the backswing. “Do you feel those muscles working?” she said. “Use those.”

Apparently I was rotating too much in the upper torso and I should be rotating more in the waist. Plus I was not keeping my left arm straight. And I should be taking the club back longer. She put a stick on the ground along my target line behind the ball, and a pebble a couple inches in front of the ball. She said I should take the club head back parallel to the stick and then aim for the pebble.

The swing thoughts were piling up in my head. Based on what I’d seen and read about golf, everything Bea said rang true. So did everything Mike said. I was beginning to feel like golf advice is like astrology. No matter what horoscope you read, it always sounds like it could apply to you. 

So I put both drills together and tried to hit some balls. The result was a lot of crazy, wild shots that had Bea and me cracking up in laughter. A bunch of my balls dribbled past the 150 yard marker, but I definitely wasn’t getting any style points.

After practicing Mike’s drill all day, I couldn’t help but pump my arms up and down on the backswing, hesitating before the downswing like a baseball player waving a bat in the air. It reminded me of a swing I’d seen before. I spent the last dozen balls trying to swing in a fluid motion, but I just couldn’t do it. Defeated, I trudged back to the car. Night was falling and the cold air had a bite to it.  

Driving away from the range, I remembered who my hitchy new drill swing reminded me of: Charles Barkley, a name that strikes fear into the hearts of aspiring golfers. Charles Barkley’s swing is known as the world’s ugliest golf swing. People say that looking directly at his swing may cause permanent psychological damage, but if you look at Tiger Woods impersonating Charles Barkley's golf swing, you’ll get the idea.

I am really hoping tomorrow will be a better day.