Swinger’s List

I have an awful memory, which is why I need to write things down. When I first learned golf, I used to carry around a piece of paper with a diagram of how the clubface should look when I looked down at set-up. I also had a bunch of little notes scrawled on it, a list of things that would help me remember how to swing.

Now that I am pretty much back to square one, and re-learning the golf swing, I need to carry around a list again. Some of these items are from my old list, but they serve as perennial reminders:

Relax grip

Left arm straight

Head down

Arms long

Don’t reach

Rotate in the trunk

Hinge wrist

Check swing plane

Right elbow

Get weight left

Feel the lag
Knees touch

Some of the items on the list are shorthand. “Head down” means I should keep my eye on the ball and not lift up too quickly. “Right elbow” means that my right elbow should not be too close at the top of my swing, but then should tuck close on the downswing. And “knees touch” is a reminder that my right knee should almost touch the left as I finish.

Before I drift off to sleep at night, I silently recite the list, picturing the perfect swing in my head, hoping that mental rehearsals will result in flawless execution the next time I find myself standing at the tee.

The reality is I can only keep one or two of these thoughts in my head as I am swinging. So it goes something like this: "Grip relaxed? Okay, take it back and keep the left arm straight. Head down… swing, swoosh, done!”

If the ball goes more or less where I wanted it to, then I sigh in relief. If it doesn’t, then I check the list and try, try, try again.

.38 Special’s Golf Tip

After the weekend’s terrible Saturday round, I went to the range on Sunday to try to see if I figure out what was wrong with my swing. But even at the range, all of my shots seemed to fall even shorter than usual. My husband said it was because of the cold weather.

But I knew it wasn’t. After practicing, I did notice that my fingers and left forearm were sore. That could only mean one thing: my grip was too tight. I had been so focused on trying to keep my left arm straight and my wrist hinged that I didn’t realize my fingers were squeezed around the club like a boa constrictor.

One of the first rules of golf is to keep a loose grip on the club, like you’re holding a live bird – tight enough so it doesn’t fly away but loose enough so you don’t squeeze it to death. I’ve never held a live bird, so I really have no idea what that’s supposed to feel like, but I’m pretty sure if I gripped a bird the way I gripped my golf clubs at the range, I’d have gotten bird guts all over my shoes.

Gross? Perhaps. But I think that’s a decent image to keep me from gripping my clubs too tight. That, and the lyrics of a certain classic rock band who once sang, “Hold on loosely… but don’t let go… If you cling too tightly…you’re gonna lose control…”

So true, Mr. Van Zant, so true…

Swing Moods

“Golf is like a love affair. If you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.” I didn’t write that. Some guy named Arthur Daley wrote it. It’s a famous golf saying posted on the stalls at the driving range.

Lately, golf has been crushing me.

On Saturday, hubby and I had a noon tee time. I probably should have taken the day off, but I was hopeful. It was sunny and in the 50s. The golf course was packed. I saw a couple of women checking in at the pro shop, and I thought, “Uh oh. Hope we don’t get paired with them.” It’s one thing to get paired with guys; since I play from different tees, it’s hard to compare my game to theirs. But if I play with women, who typically hit from the red tees like me, it can be a pissing contest. And yes, I am fully aware of the irony of that statement.

Over the summer, I had played with several women who landed drives a good 20-30 yards ahead of my ball, and every time it was like a bee sting to the heart. That pain is what motivates me to try to increase my driver distance.  

It turned out that we got paired with two older guys, and the women had the tee time after us. As I got up to tee off, I noticed that the noon sun was casting my shadow directly in front of my stance. Those who have been reading my blog know that I have a bad case of golf-related sciophobia -- fear of hitting over my own shadow. It’s not really a fear, but more like a psychological block. I don’t like the idea of hitting my own shadow because, well, it looks kind of like me.

Anyway, I teed off and drove the ball about 146 yards. Not bad for the first hole, with all the nerves jangling. I hoped things would improve.  

Wish I could say they did.

Hubby behaved himself all right. After I told him not to comment on my bad shots, he stayed pretty quiet. However, one of the guys we were playing with felt compelled to commentate like Nick Faldo, but only when it was my turn. He kept saying annoying things like “Okay, hole it in one stroke” when I was about to putt, or “That’s okay, you’ll do better next time,” after a bad shot, as if I needed someone to make me feel better.

To make matters worse, the other guy paired with us took forever to take a stroke. He hovered over his set-up like a marble statue. I felt like I could die waiting for the guy to hit the ball.

I like to play ready golf and keep things moving. I always walk, with my bag on a pull-cart, and I don’t like standing around waiting. I usually take only one practice swing before a stroke, and even less on a putt.  I like to play as if I am being chased.

Because of this slowpoke, however, we fell behind the pace of play. The women behind us would stand there, arms crossed, waiting for us to move along the fairway. My momentum dragged to a halt, and I just couldn’t get into the game. I hit three drives past my 150 benchmark to 162, 155, and 159 yards. But the rest were either short (in the 140s) or way short (around 100-120). I only made par on 2 holes and shot 110 for the round.

A pitiful performance. The only bright spot was when I hit 6-iron on a 110-yard par 3 and landed at the center of the green. The flag was front, so I had a long putt back, but this meant that I had hit my 6-iron a good 10 yards longer than usual.

Overall, I feel that my irons have improved, or stayed the same. But my woods are a stranger to me now. Like a mother whose babies are all grown up, I just don’t know how to hold them anymore.

That day, golf broke my heart. It has broken my heart many times before, but our relationship has always recovered. Sometimes a little time is all it takes to heal the wound. Maybe it’s time to step away and try to remember all the good things that brought us together in the first place.

Friday Night Twilight

It has been a warm winter. Mid-week the temps fell into the 30s but by the weekend it was back in the 50s. I really should be grateful that the weather has been cooperating with my plans to work on my golf swing.

On Friday, I had a twilight 3pm time, so I hit the range half an hour beforehand. About a minute after I set up at a stall, a father and son set up right behind me. The kid was about 6 years old and obviously had no idea how to swing a golf club. The father started in with some incessant instructional chatter, which I tried to tune out but could not, so I picked up my ball bucket and moved to the opposite end of the range.  

In the quiet, I tried to remember the fundamentals of Mike’s drill, focusing on keeping my left arm straight and making a full swing without unhinging my wrist too soon. It felt pretty good, but I was only hitting balls about 150, same as before.

I went to check in with the Friday night twilight crew, which is me and three other golfers who attend a weekly meet-up hosted by a local golf course. They are an affable bunch, and the vibe is focused, yet relaxed. I warned them that I had started taking lessons again, so my swing might be rather unpredictable.

On the first hole, my drive went pretty straight and landed in the fairway about the same distance as usual. The second hole was a 366-yard par 4, and my drive rolled to about 150 yards within the pin. This meant that my ball had traveled about 216 yards from the tee ground, but it was a downhill fairway, so I didn’t get too excited about it.

The next hole was a 339 yard par 4. I drove the ball and thought it looked like it went farther than usual, but I couldn’t tell until I walked up to it and found a distance marker that could help me estimate how far I had landed from the center of the green. My ball had come to rest at about 170 yards away from the pin. This means that I had hit a 169-yard drive. “Could this be happening?” I thought to myself. I did the math twice to make sure it was correct. That’s almost 20 yards farther than my usual drive.

The fourth hole was a par 3, where I shanked several times because I was so excited about my long drive. On hole 5, I hit another long drive that flew about 167 yards. “This is really happening,” I thought to myself. We played three more holes before dark set in. On two of those holes, I hit driver about 155 and 165 yards.

Hole 8 was a par 3, 122 yards over water. This is one of my favorite holes to play on this course, especially in deep twilight when the setting sun casts an orange glow into the blue of the sky, and we’re playing by the light of the moon. It was especially beautiful tonight.

I hit 9-wood and landed in the bunker, but knowing that I might have made some progress with my driver distance, I remained elated.

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.

My Unofficial Handicap Index

One of these days I will get an official handicap. In golf, a handicap is what enables golfers of various skill levels to compete on an equal basis. Most people think it’s the average number of strokes above par that you take to finish a round. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. It involves course ratings and slope ratings, as well as your scores on at least 5 of your past rounds.

To get an official USGA handicap, you can apply through a golf club or association licensed to give out handicap indexes.

To really level the playing field, though, I think other factors should come into play aside from getting an extra stroke allowance. For a match to be truly fair, my opponent would need to have some of these items on my "unofficial" handicap index:

- long hair that won’t stay put under a hat

- a bunion on at least one foot

- the kind of blood that mosquitoes like

- a bad case of hydrophobia (fear of hitting over water)

- a worse case of sciophobia (fear of hitting over my own shadow)

- golf shoes without cleats

and last but not least…

- a need to pee after every third hole

First Round of the New Year

To celebrate the arrival of the new year, I made a tee time on January 1, 2012, at 12:12pm. The weather forecast called for sunny skies with a high of 53 degrees, so I wasn’t surprised to find the parking lot half full at the golf course. Good thing there was a football game today, or it would have been packed.

Yesterday was warm too, but I forced myself to take a day off since my neck and hip were feeling a bit achy. Today I felt just fine but resolved to swing easy and not try to kill it on driver. Hubby had the idea to play a match, and he gave me a stroke a hole. So on a par 4, for example, if I took five strokes and he took four, we’d still be even. Just before we teed off, the starter said to me, “Don’t forget the rules: You’re not allowed to beat him!” I laughed and replied, “Don’t worry, that never happens!”

For the first few holes, things went pretty well, which for me means I was staying a stroke or two above par. I landed on the green on hole 5, which was the site of my hole-in-one back in October. I haven’t repeated it since, but that never stops me from trying. This time, I ended up three-putting for a respectable bogey.

Then along came hole 6. From the red tees, it’s 405 yards to the pin, half of which is a steep uphill. I botched my drive and plugged the ball into the rough on the far right, a pitiful 80 yards or so from the tee ground. From there I tried rescuing the ball with my 7-wood, but the rough was thick and the ball was stubborn. I kept hitting fat shots that sent the ball dribbling forward, clinging to the side of the fairway like a gutterball. It took me 11 strokes to get my ball in the hole. Needless to say, hubby won that hole.

Given that I blew up so hard, we had to come up with a new golf term for my terrible score. In golf lingo, there’s bogey and double-bogey for one or two strokes above par. Three strokes over par is triple-bogey, and if par happens to be 5, then you’d get a “snowman,” which is what the 8 looks like. But what about 9, 10, and 11, which are numbers that are known to appear on my score card? Well, I thought of “lollipop” for a 9. For 10, hubby thought “bacon and egg” was a good phrase. And for 11? “Chopsticks,” he said.

On the back nine, the wind picked up and some clouds rolled in, and then raindrops started falling. At the 14^th hole, we headed for shelter. We debated stopping for the day, but my husband surveyed the sky and looked at how fast the clouds were moving in the distance. “This should be over in about 20 minutes,” he predicted. So we loitered under the driving range hood till the rain subsided to a light drizzle.

Sometimes I play better in the rain. The grayness forms a cloak around me so I don’t get distracted by pretty blue skies, chirping birds, or shadows cast by the sun. On a wet fairway, balls don’t stray too far from where you land them, and a damp green is like putting on carpet. Perhaps because of this, I birdied the 16^th hole. I hit my 6-iron on the 110-yard par 3, and made the 8-foot putt to my utter surprise. 

I shot 103 for the round. Hubby shot an 86. In terms of the match, I won 7 holes, he won 6, and we came out even on the rest. So technically, despite the starter's reminder, I did beat my husband. But we both had fun. Even though there were some dark clouds and cold rain, we weathered it. We even managed not to curse or bicker much. All in all, it was a great start to the new year.