Author: vet4golfing51

Yesterday we went to Beaver Valley Golf Club which is about a 35 to 40 minute drive. It was another unbelievable March day with plenty of sunshine and temperatures near 80. The course plays 6300 yards from the back tees to a par of 72. It is a very interesting golf course that has some very difficult and long par 4’s but the par 5’s are short and easy. They also have par 4’s that are almost driveable and the par 3’s are all solid golf holes. The greens were running a 5.2 and for early in the year were very smooth. The course is hilly and not very narrow but there is trouble to be found with enough trees and water. The fairways and rough were good. The only negative more for the course than for us, was despite the beautiful day they were not very busy. We got there at 9 am and left at about 1:40 and I don’t think there were more than a half dozen foursomes that went out during that time. Because the course was not busy there was no hot dog at the turn. I had played this golf course before about 6 years ago but I liked it a lot better this time. Is it worth the trip? I would say if you do not have to drive more than 50 minutes then yes. We had a threesome today. I had a bad front nine but settled down on the back and shot 80. Tony was in midseason form with a 72 and Pete shot 78. I am back to hitting the ball much better, but now I have to get my brain in order and hopefully the scores will come. A very enjoyable day for March 21st. Sixty four courses down and twenty six to go.  

Those that are expecting part 2 to practicing, will have to wait as we took advantage of this unusual March weather, to get in course no 63. We went to Cranberry Highlands Golf Course which is about a 35 to 40 minute drive. While it may be a little unfair to rate the condition of a golf course this time of year, we could not pass up the winter rate of 30 dollars with a cart. This golf course was built by the municipality of Cranberry, Pa., and they give their residents very reasonable  green fees. They charge a much higher than normal rate for non-residents. Under clear skies and temps in the 70’s it was a beautiful day for golf. This golf course  plays about 6500 yards from the tips to a par of 70. I have played this course in the regular golf season and it is usually in very good shape with greens that are good, but no spectacular. Today, early in the season, the fairways and roughs were very good and the greens were bumpy barely running a 5 on the stimp. This golf course has many interesting holes, and is designed very well. The course is not overly narrow but it has many good challenging holes. If you are a Cranberry resident, this is a great golf course to have near your home. For those of us not in Cranberry, then this golf course,although very enjoyable to play, is not worth the trip unless you are fortunate enough to get the winter rate like we did today on a nice day.The hot dog at the turn was just ok, as it was another one of those fat hot dogs that your not quite sure is cooked all the way through. The condiments were good with a very tasty mustard. We had a threesome today, with Pete and his nephew Matt. I took a backward step in ball striking today as this was my 3rd 18 hole round of the year and I just could not get it going. I was chipping and putting pretty well or my score of 84 would have been worse. Pete shot a nifty even 35 on the front but staggered in with a 43 for a 78 and Matt shot 95 getting the early season kinks out. Even though this was a discouraging day of ball striking, I still think I am on the right track with this latest swing thing so to speak. I think any time you are doing something that is so totally new even though you have some early success, you are going to have a setback. The practice blog will be coming soon. Maybe I should go out and practice. Anyway, 63 courses down and 27 to go.   

Today I am going to discuss practicing, that thing that we all do to improve our games. Everything I am going to talk about today, pertains to people that have played the game for awhile. Certainly, anybody who is just starting to play golf is going to have to hit balls and practice to learn the game. The biggest myth about practicing, is that there is a way to bring your range game to the golf course. In fact there are books and articles that say, let me show you how to bring your range game to the golf course. These same people, probably have some nice swamp land in Florida, that they would like to sell.  Let me just say, so everyone can end their frustration, that it is impossible to bring your practice range swing to the golf course.  What would you think of an article that would claim that it would show how to bring your interstate driving into the neighborhood. You would think that the author of that particular article had lost their mind. Thats the way to look at practice. On the range you are hitting shots every 40 to 60 seconds even if you are taking your time. On the golf course you are lucky if you are taking shots every 5 minutes and sometimes the time between shots will be even longer. There are so many differences between hitting balls at a range, and hitting them playing golf that there is not enough space in this blog  to go through them. Its just like driving your car on the interstate at 65 to 75 miles an hour in open or even somewhat conjested traffic and getting off the interstate and driving in your local neighborhood. If you even tried driving 65 to 70 miles an hour you would either get arrested or kill somebody before you got very far. This idea of practice not equating with results is not new. Even the pros will talk after a really low round that at the pactice tee they couldn’t seem to do anything right but then when they got to the first tee something just clicked and they started to hit the ball great. The reverse will be true when somebody else has a bad last round and talks about how great they were hitting it on the range and then when they got on the first tee everything just fell apart. Even in other sports you will hear the losing football coach talk about how his team seemed to have a great week of practice only to be blown out 31 to 7. Players get very frustrated when they have a really have a good session at the range the night before and then when they play, the game just gets worse as the day progresses. So forget it, practicing is not going to automatically make you into a better player and it is not surprising. You should play a least 3 times as much as you practice if you want to have any chance of improving. Its not that your practicing wrong or the wrong things, its that you can not fool your brain into thinking that the two things, playing and practicing have anything to do with each other. The brain knows that when you hit a bad shot on the practice tee that you are going to pick another ball up and make the adjustment right away without moving. On the golf course you are going to have to chase that errant shot and the next time you have exactly that same shot may be 24 holes from now. So should we practice at all. Of course we should and in the next blog I will tell you how to get the most out of it and what the true benefits of practicing are.

Now I am going to discuss the one thing I tried with my golf swing, that when I started doing this, I described as possibly real meat. I did this longer than the other things I described in the last blog. I ended up the last 5 rounds of 2010 and the first 9 rounds of 2011 trying this technique. Even though the golf swing is a fairly unique endeavor there are other sports that golf is compared. The first one that comes to mind is baseball. Hitting a baseball and even pitching with it’s wind up and follow through, is often compared to the backswing and downswing in golf. In both instances there is a shift of weight from a back foot to a forward foot. You could say the same thing in throwing a football, slapping a hockey puck and serving a tennis ball. In all of those examples anytime the weight is shifted from the back foot to the front foot the head moves with it. All except golf, where the head is held back, as you shift your weight to the forward foot. I thought why not try letting the head go forward the same amount as the forward shift of the hips that usually is the initiating start of the downswing. The hips slilde about 2 to 4 inches forward and then they start to turn, with everything else, the shoulders, arms and hands following. Traditional golf teaching says to keep your head back as the lower body is moving forward. This to me is a totally unnatural act,and I think is a big reason that people never really get off their right side. You are trying to get the lower part of your body to do one thing and your upper body to kind of hang back. I started letting my head come forward right along with my hips. The number one benefit of this move was that I really maintained my spine angle coming through the ball. The only thing I did to compensate for the move forward was to play the ball a little more forward in my stance, about 2 balls. When I first started to do this on the course the results were very good especially with the driver. Not only were my drives a little longer but the accuracy of my driver was amazing. However my iron play was rocky at best. I tried different ball positions and other things but the irons remained very inconsistant. Sometimes the transition got a little jerky and obviously as time when on the results were just not there and I stopped doing the moving the head forward with the swing. The only thing I will say about this technique it took a lot of strain off the back. I’m doing something right now, that seems to be working quite well, that is a little more traditional, but what I call the first true anchor of the golf swing. In other words to think of one thing that would control the entire golf swing.  Another end of season find that I have had to stew over all winter but play time is right around the corner so we will see what swing no. 312 brings. In the next 2 blogs I am going to talk about practice which seemed to stir a bit of interest. In the first blog I will tell why it is impossible to take your range swing to the golf course and then what’s the real purpose of practicing.           

Today I am going to discuss some of the things I have done with my golf swing, in trying to find the answer to this goofy game. This blog will only be the tip of the iceberg of all the things I have tried over the last 18 months. These are the ones that lasted more than one round and at times I thought they had some merit. One of the things that I have felt was misunderstood and taught improperly was wrist cock. Practically all instruction talks about wrist cock as a lifting motion. I think this ignores the fact that the wrists are going to roll over after impact. I tried to just let the wrists break in a back and forth motion like a slapping motion with no upward lifting of the club by the wrists. At the top of the swing this put the right palm pretty much facing the sky. My biggest problem with this is that my wrist always felt a little tight at the top of the swing. After about 2 weeks of doing this I gave up on it because it simply was not producing results. I still think the wrists are still the most misunderstood part of the golf swing and you see tremendous variations of wrist cock by the pros. You have swings like John Cook and Paul Azingers where their wrists seem very stiff and then John Daly and Phil Mickelson have big wrists cocks which makes the club go below horizontal. Another swing debate is whether the left heel should come off the ground during the backswing. Most players today keep their heel on the ground but lets face it, two of the greatest golfers of all time Bobby Jones and Jack Nicklaus raised their heels quite high at the top of their backswings. In fact, Jack Nicklaus said that the first move for him to start the downswing was to plant the left heel back on the ground. So I felt if this was a good swing thought for the great Nicklaus lets try this. Lets raise the left heel at address and keep it there doing the backswing, and plant the heel to start the downswing. By starting the left heel raised at address this solved the problem of how much to raise it during the backswing. I did this for about 6 weeks and had some great lower body action and the results seemed pretty good. But planting the left heel to start the downswing sometimes gave my swing a jarring motion and again the inconsistancy of ball striking especially on the short irons made me finally abandoned the left heel plant. Byron Nelson once said that you can not stand too close to ball. Jim Furyk may have already proved that, but I set out to see if that was really true. I played for awhile by resting the top of the grip on my left thigh at address. Then I would back off just about a quarter on an inch. I will admit I really felt cramped at address but I hit some pretty good shots with this method. Believe me you are close to the ball. I did this for about a month but again the lack of results and never getting really comfortable over the ball caused me to abandon the getting close to the ball experiment.. Things that I tried that came and went quickly, was the 10 finger grip, keeping the weight on the left heel through out the swing, keeping the right knee kicked in for the entire swing, and purposely coming over the top ala Sam Snead. In the next blog I will go into detail on the thing that I called real meat in the blog that I started doing it. This went against all golf teaching, and for awhile there I thought I was really on to something, but alas it was just swing number 287 biting the dust.

Today I am going to combine the final 2 truths about trying to  learn the game of golf. Number 3 is the only common denominator that  really effective golf swings have, is that on the downswing the belly button passes the ball before the arms and the hands. It sounds simple enough, but the problem is I wrote earlier the arms can go 70 miles per hour and the body can only turn about 15 miles an hour. Every shot that is pulled can be attributed to the arms passing the belly button before impact. This is why the release of the hands is always inhibited because with the arms passing the belly and a full release of the uncocking of the wrists, the ball will go at least 50 yards to the left of the target. There are lots of other bad shots that can be atttributed to this one problem. Sounds easy enough, belly button first then the arms. There are many ways that have been advocated for starting the downswing and any instructional book writtein by Leadbetter and Harmen will give you methods of doing this but it just is not that easy. The fourth fact in the learning process is that there is only 2 senses that come in to play. You can see what you are doing and you can feel what you are doing. Many times what you think you are doing is not actually happening. The order should be this. Either through video, mirrors, or a second set of eyes you need to see what you are doing then put a feel to what is going on. You can always on the practice tee, stop your swing at any time, and simply look and what you are doing and make sure it is correct and again put the feeling into play. On the next blog I will go through some of the strange and wacky things that I have done with my golf swing in searching for this elusive answer. The biggest problem with this blog will be trying to remember all of the things I have done because quite frankly I am trying to forget them.

The holidays are over, and its time to get back to this goofy game, and continue the quest for the answer. Today I am going to discuss the second of the four truths of this game. Eighty five to ninety per cent of all golf problems start before you take the club back. Let’s discuss the top three mentioned in an earlier blog. First the grip. The correct golf grip is  difficult describe, so I will refer you to instruction books that have some great pictures of the grip. Both Tiger’s and Annika’s books have great pictures of the proper grip. One older book that has great pictures of the grip is Sam Snead on Golf, written in 1961. Everyone talks about Snead’s great swing that his grip kind of gets lost, but I think he had the best grip in golf, and it is pictured perfectly in this book. Problem number 2 is standing too far away from the ball. Byron Nelson claimed you could not stand too close to the ball and I dont know about that, but his point is well taken. It is better to crowd the ball a little rather than feel you are reaching for the ball. Here is a very easy drill to get the right distance from the ball. Once you have establised your address position, just  take your right hand off the club and let your right arm just dangle straight down and relax. Now swing your right arm back to the club. If your right hand meets the club shaft where your left hand is, then you are too far away. If it meets the club shaft so now your grip is split, then you are too close too the ball. If your right hand comes back to where it was in the proper grip position, then you are the correct distance from the ball. What is great about this drill it works for every club in the bag and you can even use this on the course as your part of a pre shot routine until you get use to being the proper distance from the ball. The final big problem is most people will align themselves to the right of the target. There is no doubt in my mind the best way to get a proper aim at the target is with the Jack Nicklaus method of picking out something  in front of the ball that is line with the target. At the range a second set of eyes can be a big help. If you are not line up at the target properly, then your chances of consistantly hitting good shots are not good. If you saw someone aiming a gun 20 to 30 yards right of their target and they kept missing you would not be telling them to pull the trigger differently or having a rifle better placed in their shoulder. After you get by these three problems there are some other things that can cause problems at address. I think that the weight distribution on the bottom of the feet can cause some confusion if you read enough golf books. It use to be you would here about having the weight on the balls of your feet, but now on the The Golf Fix they say, that the weight should feel like it is in the arches of your feet. The reason you want the weight getting back towards the heels, is it is easier to turn the body. If your weight heads toward the toes at all, it will restrict your body turn,try it. I think another big problem is in knee flex. Your knees do need to be flexed but a line drawn from ground through the ankle to the knee needs to be close to perpendicular to the ground. Many people when they flex their knees allow them to go toward the ball. As Sam Snead said to President Eisenhower when he was doing this “Mr President stick your butt out” That will take care of the problem. So we have gone through fact number 2 and in the next blog we will cover numbers 3 and 4. together.

It will be very unlikely I will be adding any new courses to the list the rest of the golfing season which is getting extended by some nice late November and early December weather.  I am going to write about the first of what I call the four true facts about trying to hit the golf ball reasonalbly well. The swing is not the thing. There has been as much written about the golf swing as any subject known to man. There are different methods, different instructor philosophies and many ideas on the best way to learn this tough frustrating game.  If you have read only 1% of all books that have been written on the subject and then turn on your TV set to watch the greatest players in the world play this game you have to wonder, did any of these guys even take a lesson. Yes, there are some classic swings out there like Ernie Els, Luke Donald, and Adam Scott. But for everyone of them there are 10 Paul Goydoses, John Daleys, Jim Furyks and Lee Trevinos, just to name a few. What I like about all the TV commentators is they always talk about what all these guys are doing right. I think the golfing public would be better served if they showed what all these players are doing technically wrong. Just looking at the four players just mentioned here are some of the things you could list. They stand too close to the ball, they aim left, they overswing, they get shut faced at the top, they take the club back outside the line, they get real loose at the top of the swing, their clubhead points right of the target at the top of the swing, and their clubhead points left of the target at the top of the swing.  I am not being critical of these players. They are all great players that have had great careers through hard work and dedication. The point is, if these same players had 5 handicaps and came to you for a lesson you would probably change at least 3 or 4 things that they are doing from an instruction standpoint. If you look at the top 100 money winners on all 3 tours and I am willing to bet that you could find at least 4 technical flaws in at least 85% of those players. So what can the rest of us take from all of this. If you handicap is 15 or less don’t worry about your swing. Don’t worry if you get shut faced at the top, or your right knee is giving in, or you swing is too long or too short. The great players of past and present have gotten along quite fine with their swing flaws. One of the things you always hear is that one of the reasons professionals are able to get away with those swing flaws is how much time they spend on their games. That may be true but every pro spends a lot of time and effort on their swing. If there was one technically superior way to swing that golf club then that pro would be dominating the tour like no ever has before. So from Nicklaus’s flying right elbow to Palmer’s twisting finish the swing is not the thing.

Well the season is winding down and I don’t know if I am going to get another course in this year. I thought this would be a good time to discuss the golf swing and write about the true facts of trying to hit the golf ball. A couple of blogs ago I wrote about what not to waste your time on. After over 40 years of studying the golf swing, I am going to discuss the absolute truths about playing this game. In this blog I am going to list them with a brief comment and then in future blogs I will discuss each one in more detail. One “The swing is not the thing” If you don’t believe that one then I suggest you watch any PGA tour event. Some of the swings on tour could make your eyes water and yet these guys are carving out huge sums of money and having great careers. From Lee Trevino to Jim Furyk to Paul Goydos, and on and on, the exact way you swing the club can be very diverse. Two” 85 to 90% of all golf problems happen before you take your swing”.  The top 3 problems I see in teaching people to play this game is poor aiming, standing too far away from the ball and a poor grip. There are other ones but these are the top three. Briefly on aiming, when I ask 10 students to aim at a target about 100 yards away, 8 will be aimed 8 to 10 yards right of the target, one will be aimed left of the target and one will be aimed at the target. Now to the swing itself. There is only one thing you must do in order to have an efficient golf swing. All the strange swings on the tour do this. Three”On the downswing your belly buttom must pass the ball before your hands and arms do”. Sounds easy enough but here is the problem. Your belly button moves like it is in a school zone, 10 to 15 miles an hour. Your hands and arms move like they are on I 70, at 70 to 80 miles an hour. The golfer usually over uses his legs  and under uses his upper body on the backswing. The reverse is true on the downswing. He under uses his legs and over uses his upper body in “hitting” the ball. That is a big key to the answer. How do you keep the hands and arms from passing the belly button to soon? The fourth fact in trying to learn this game is, there are only 2 senses that you can use in the learning process. One can feel a golf swing and you can see a golf swing. You can not smell taste or hear a golf swing. Is there an answer out there, maybe. Is there one part of your body that can control the entire golf swing? I don’t know, we will see. My instructor put it the best way and I quote the Babe. “Control the body, control the clubhead and you will control golf ball.

Today we went to the Links at Spring Church in Apollo Pa which is about a 55 minute drive. This course is about 15 to 20 years old and is one of those courses that I put under the heading of fake links course. This is a design that removes most of the trees from the course, lets a lot of weeds grow up around various parts of the course, calls it heather and thinks this has something to do with being a links course. This course had delusions of grandeur when it first opened, charged as much as 55 dollars on the weekend, did not give much of a break during the week, and went the way most of these courses did, that tried to do this, into reorganization.  Today the course is a little more reasonable and with the fall rate we played for 25 with a cart. Today they had the tees up and it played about 6200 yards and from the tips will play about 6500 yards. From the blue tees they changed two par 5’s into longer par 4’s so from the blues the par is 70 and from the whites the par is 72. Essentially they changed two interesting par 5’s into 2 longer boring par 4’s. Go figure. The overall design of the course is good with many interesting holes but the greens have never been really that good and today they were plugged and half sanded and ran a 4 on the stimp. Needless to say this course is not worth the trip, at least until they become more rate friendly. The hot dog at the turn was fair and we did have a beautiful day to play. My swing thing as I will call it from  now on, is still working quite well. Even though I got off to a slow start I was able to shoot even on the back for a 76 and Pete shot a very nice 78 and would have done better on better greens. I don’t know how long the weather will hold up but maybe I will get a few more in before years end. Sixty two down with twenty eight to go.