Hello There

It is tremendously difficult to play the game of golf when you can’t trust what you’re doing; it is equally difficult to trust what you’re doing when you’re playing the game of golf, because you’re seeing the results, and they’re likely not trending toward the good. Somehow, you have to develop the trust while enduring the bad.

One way to built trust is to be familiar with what you’re doing. For instance, although you might cut yourself from time to time, chances are you cut food the same way. Whatever your movements with the knife, you do them over and over and over. You cut onions, you cut carrots, you cut potatoes, you cut apples, and every time, you do the same things. That helps to build confidence and trust.

So to does doing the same thing when you swing. It can be different for different players of course. There isn’t a right routine. Rather, there is a routine out there that is most comfortable for you. I’d argue that the pursuit of simplicity – a complicated game requires simplicity whenever possible – suggests two routines for the swing: one for putting, one for swinging.

“But, chipping is different than flopping is different than fullshots, is different than…” Yes, yes, obviously. Having the same routine for everyshot doesn’t mean that you have to hit every shot the same. Rather, it means that your preparation for every shot occurs in the same for.

For example, before every putt, I do the following:

1. Look at the putt from behind.
2. Take two practice putts.
3. Address the ball, look at the line one more time.
4. Hit the putt.

This is applicable on good days and bad days. And there will be both. Routines won’t make the game’s highs and lows disappear. What the routine gives a player is a feeling of familiarity, the same as you feel when you’re chopping vegetable. The ability to say, “I’ve done this before, I’ll be okay,” is where confidence comes from.

The Golf Channel’s newest show is the promising Golf in America. It promises to cover the game’s outstanding stories, scouring the nation for the best of the game. There’s only one slight problem with the show so far: it’s unbelievably bad.

There are plenty of reasons for this, but the most obvious place to start are the shows “journalists” who are only called that out of tradition, and not because any of them ask any difficult questions of anybody they’re “covering.” Here there are, and if you’re thinking you’re not seeing any heavy hitters in that lineup, you’re correct. John Feinstein’s never said a critical word about anybody. Jim Gray, famous for his “aggressive” questioning of Pete Rose, manages what can at best be described as propaganda. (Even the controversial grilling of Rose was about protecting the sanctity of baseball, whatever the hell that means.) The others? Tilghman? Lerner? Walker? Stop wasting my time and yours.

The fundamental problem is that the show’s goal isn’t bringing the viewer compelling stories, but rather, its creating what can only be described as propaganda for the game. The stories in the the first two episodes have focused on: Justin Timberlake’s attempt to create a “green” golf course, four golfers who survived the Hudson River plane crash, Donald Trump’s ownership of golf courses, two child golfers in Canada (uh, guys, Golf in America), and the government bunker underneath the Greenbrier Hotel here in West Virginia. None of these stories are compelling, or even interesting, and they’re made even worse by reporters who don’t drive the story in interesting directions.

For example, does Jim Gray, famous for grilling his subjects, ask the overblown Trump about his willingness to calm his act down to get a major on one of his courses? Of course not. Does Scott Walker ask the father of two children if he worries that he’s driving his children too hard into the game? No, he only asks if he’d tolerate his children quitting. Does Todd Lewis bother to tell us why players would even consider quitting the game simply because they were in a plane wreck? Of course not, because to do so unravels the point of the story.

Sports journalism in general suffers from rampant fanboyism, the desire only to get as close to the action as possible. (See stories like this one about Mike Lupica at the U.S. Open). Telling a story that undermines the game and the pedestal it places itself upon is simply verboten for most sports journalists, and most certainly for those who participate on Golf in America.

It’s a definite miss, unless something radically changes. Like everything about it.

In my infinite brilliance earlier this season, I “fixed” my swing, happily coming in the house to tell Bobbi that I’d figured out the problem, and that I was now ready to fix it. The problem, in this case, was that I was taking the club away on far to inside a path to be effective. I was delofting the club on the takeaway, and hitting shorter shots than I should have been.

“How far should you have been hitting it?” would be a reasonable question to now ask me.

“I don’t know. Just farther.” Would be my unsatisfactory response.

So I “fixed” my swing. I even figured out how to, finally, hit a draw, meaning I figured out how to turn the ball from right to left, as opposed to what I’ve done my entire life, which involved moving the ball left to right. In fact, I actually arrived at the 18th hole of a local course, a par 3 that required a shot to wrap around a tree, from right to left. I announced to my playing partner, “Hey, I’m going to draw this ball around the tree and right at the pin.” And wouldn’t you know it, I did.

Do you know what else I managed to accomplish? A badly damaged swing. My (stupid, foolish, shortsighted, immature, unnecessary) pursuit of slightly more distance and the ability to hit a draw left my golf swing both uncomfortable and producing middling to poor results.

“But Sam! Swing changes take time! You have to give your new swing time to settle in, time to develop, time to become the comfortable swing that you made your old swing.” You might now be observing. And this, technically speaking, is true. If you’re going to make a colossal change in your game – like going from a fade to a draw – you’re going to need to give that change time, both by accepting the short term poor results and on the practice range.

I’m bad at accepting poor results, and I have absolutely no time to practice. As a result, implementing a significant swing change was neither the advisable nor smart thing to do. So I’ve abandoned the foolish change. I’ll go back to my old swing, doing my best simply to minimize the inside takeaway move that was causing me problems, instead of trying to eliminate it altogether while likely exacerbating a problematic outside-in move.

Later: Hank Haney’s battle with the yips, and his inexplicable advice to Charles Barkley.

Golf is fantastically complicated. Even if you ignore the need for equipment that ideally fits you, the access to a golf course that will let you play, the time necessary to spend more than four hours out in the sun, the game itself is fantastically difficult. This is primarily because the act of taking a small white ball from from the tee to the bottom of the hole more than a hundred yards a way, and often hundreds of yards away, is hard. Very, very hard.

So why make that more complicated than it has to be? Earlier, I wrote about the basic advice “Head Down/Swing Slow.” That ought to be the goal of all players: the creation of a simple, repeating swing that gets the clubface to the ball at square.

I mention this again so quickly after first broaching the topic because tonight, we had a birthday party for my one-year-old son, and various family members showed up, including a man who caddies at a local resort golf course. He was talking about various shots you can hit around a green, including a sort of bump-and-run shot, and another in which you visualize yourself putting, but with a seven-iron. He was arguing that this was a good shot at a particular distance, which is, of course, untrue. There’s no good shot at a particular distance. There are good shots for particular situations.

Part of the game’s complexity involves recognizing those situations. But because the game requires of the player the need to recognize those situations, the execution of what comes next (the actual shot), should be as easy as possible. Which means you don’t want to to be thinking about your elbow position, or your weight shift, or your grip, or anything else. You want simplicity.

1. You can grip a club however is comfortable for you. Interlocking, overlap, or baseball. Grip it split or reverse if it makes you happy, comfortable, and effective.

2. Your goal is to get the clubface to the ball in the square position. It doesn’t matter how you do that. It doesn’t matter what your playing partners say about it. It doesn’t matter how you look doing it. It matters that the clubface arrives at the ball in the square position. You figure out a way to do that, and nothing else matters.

3. The easiest way to club the clubface to square is a slow swing with your eye on the ball, which is functioning as your target. You’ll read people write that PGA players don’t keep their eye on the ball, and that it is practically impossible to. You’re not a PGA player. Neither am I. We needn’t worry ourselves with what they’re doing. Instead, keep staring at the ball, and the spot underneath it when the ball is gone.

The game will always be complicated. It will always be necessary to made tough analysis and then use the information gathered to make decisions. After the decision is made though – by saying, perhaps, “I want to hit the ball high to that tucked pin…” – then the execution of that goal ought to be as uncomplicated as possible.