Last weekend, I gave my nephew his
first set of golf clubs. Not Ping, but Peanuts brand, featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
Toddler flex shafts made of featherweight non-toxic plastic. It was interesting
to watch the natural propensities of a human when encountering the problem of
how to swing a golf club for the first time. Communication was negligible,
since my nephew is just 22 months old and hasn’t started speaking in full
sentences yet.
The set I gave him has exactly 3
clubs, 3 plastic balls, and 2 plastic tees. My nephew made no distinction
between the driver and the iron, except he
called the iron “Elmo” since it has a red plastic head. The putter was of no
interest. (Takes after his aunt that way.) I showed him how to hold the club
with two hands, how to tee up the ball, and how to hit the ball. My emphasis
was not on form, since it was difficult to model proper form when I was stooped
over to accommodate the short length of the kiddie clubs. Rather, I just wanted
to demonstrate making contact with the ball, and attempt to imbue a sense of
joy in sending the ball some distance away.
If I can extrapolate from watching
my nephew, here are some general observations about attempting golf for the
very first time:
- When confronted with a ball set up on a tee, the first inclination seems to be to flip the club head toe-side down and use it like a hammer to pound at the ball like it was a nail. This is because, in this country, children are too readily exposed to the ubiquity of the hammer. I blame Bob the Builder.
- If you can’t hit the ball very far using a club, it works better if you just pick up the ball and throw it.
- It’s hard to hold the club with two hands when your arms are so short.
- Knee flex is a really natural tendency. All the big boys do it.
- Clubhead lag and weight transfer seem natural too. It’s years of doing other things, like sitting at a computer working, that seem to impede these skills from developing naturally.
- Small balls can hold a person’s attention just as well as big balls. (And by that I literally mean that the golf ball is quite small relative to the balls of other sports, such as basketball and soccer.)
- If you’re not good at something right off the bat, and you know it, it’s okay to let someone else do it till you get better at it (I am referring to my nephew’s inability to balance the ball on the tee on his own; I was really impressed that he could grasp the ball and set it on the tee, and that he didn’t whine when it fell off.)
Anyway, I don’t know if my nephew
will remember this first experience with golf, but I took pictures so that
later, after he becomes a golf pro, a deep-pocketed sponsor will pay me big
bucks to use them in an ad campaign. I do know that if I have anything to
do with it, my nephew will have many more fun times with the sport I love.
I believe he enjoyed our little outing. Once inside
the house, where my husband was watching the Golf Channel, my nephew pointed to the
little white ball on the television screen and exclaimed, “Ball!”
I think a golf star has been born.
