Golf Thoughts
Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2010 5:24 pm
Even people who hate golf or think of it as a colossal waste of time and energy must concede that there is something compelling about the game. Despite the fact that it is expensive, time-consuming, and universally acknowledged to be extremely frustrating and aggravating, it seems to take hold in every country and culture where it is possible to be played. There are golf courses in deserts, on mountains, and by the sea. Golf courses are carved out of forests, created out of farmlands, and constructed in climates where the weather only permits play a couple months of the year. One of the cable TV networks recently aired a program showing golfers playing with red balls on a snow-capped glacier.
It crosses ethnic, cultural, religious, and national borders. You will find avid golfers among office workers, executives, mill hunkys, soccer moms and “the Idle Rich.” People who wouldn’t be caught dead together socially or professionally will often find themselves joking, encouraging each other, and generally acting like best buddies when they happen to be paired with one another on the golf course at an outing.
And once you get to like the game it becomes something that you will gladly do any time the opportunity arises. Any time a golfer goes on vacation or has some extra time off there is always a consideration, at least, of finding time to go out and play 18 holes. This is even true in the United States, were we have made a religion of watching other people do things, rather than doing them ourselves.
And even though golf is a compelling pastime, and even though golfers are often fanatical about playing and making the most of it, when you get right down to it, most golfers stink. The par (or standard) score on a typical golf course is 72, yet the average golf score for most golfers is over 100. And that’s even true with most golfers playing on courses with which they are thoroughly familiar. As with any other area of human endeavor, there is a bell-curve distribution of scores among amateur golfers, but most studies conclude that the average score is 100 or higher.
Which leads to two unavoidable questions: (1) Why are golfers so bad?, and (2) Why do they keep coming back? I’ll leave the second one for another day and just focus on why we are so bad.
A Martian coming to earth and observing us playing golf would be perplexed. The ball is perfectly round, it is sitting still, and the area between where play starts (the tee) and where it finishes (the flagstick) has generally been cleared out of all possibly-interfering obstacles. The ground is smooth, the grass is very short, and the laws of physics don’t change from one shot to the next. Because of the aerodynamics of the ball, the environmental conditions don’t make much difference, and the players have all the time they need to prepare for and execute every shot.
Furthermore, the players are using tools (clubs) that have been specially designed over more than a hundred years for one purpose and one purpose only – to hit a golf ball straight along a set trajectory for a predictable distance. We seem to have good enough vision (possibly with some correction), flexible and strong bodies, and enough hand-eye coordination to hit the ball squarely almost every time – even bad golfers generally hit the ball squarely, it’s the errant path of the club that produces the bad shots.
And yet as a group we humans stink at golf. We have all demonstrated time and again that we are capable of hitting good shots and capable of getting a par on just about every hole, but it simply doesn’t happen. And just as importantly, we golfers don’t get any better over time. Show me one lifetime golfer – one who started playing at age 12 or younger - who is better at 35 than he or she was at 25. There is almost no one who improves noticeably from year to year – least of all, professional golfers. Absent a major investment of time and effort (i.e., quit your job), you will never be a better golfer than you were at 21. Next year’s scores will be the same or higher than this year’s scores. (When someone takes up the game initially as an adult, there will be improvement for the first couple years as s/he figures out how to use all the clubs and how to read greens, but the early improvement levels off after 2-3 years and we reach our ultimate skill level).
Notice also that golfers on the “Champions Tour” are no more accurate with their shots, and amazingly no better putters than those on the PGA tour. Strength and flexibility have nothing to do with putting, and the seniors have decades more experience than their younger counterparts on the PGA tour, yet there is no indication whatsoever that older professional golfers are more accurate with the woods and irons, or better putters than 21-year-old tour rookies. Practice makes perfect? Not in golf.
To go off on a tangent for a moment, our most famous golfer of all, Tiger Woods, has made two or three “major” changes in his swing over the years in attempts to correct a flaw or improve some real or imaginary shortcoming, but statistically he is no better than he was 10 years ago. Better with age? Better with practice? Not really.
After many years of struggling to become a better golfer, I have come to the conclusion that we golfers stink because the standard, “ideal” golf swing is so complicated that for most normal humans it is impossible to execute correctly with any consistency. It is simply too complicated. Entire books have been written to try to explain the golf swing, but briefly the complexity can be shown by listing the different body parts that have to move in perfect coordination in order to produce a good golf swing: hips, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, wrists , and knees. And while executing the backswing, swing, and follow-through, the head must remain perfectly steady. Ironically, the baseball swing, in which you are hitting an object that is moving in three planes, is much simpler.
Golf instructors who are honest will admit that the one essential element of a consistent swing is “muscle memory.” That is to say, the knowledge of the swing must be so ingrained that it occurs without any thought. It is “natural.” Sadly, most exercise physiologists have concluded that development of muscle memory cannot take place past the age of 12.
The best illustration of muscle memory for most people is the “knowledge” of how to ride a bicycle. Riding a bike requires an extremely complex coordination of the actions of different muscles, which, working together, (1) propel the bike forward, (2) maintain balance, and (3) steer the bike on the intended path. If you learned to ride a bike as a child (i.e., developed the necessary muscle memory), then when you ride as an adult you don’t even think about how these complex activities occur. You simply jump on the bike to go where you want to go. If you DIDN’T learn to ride as a child, then you probably will never be comfortable riding in demanding situations (e.g., in car traffic, mountain biking) as an adult. The reason is because any time you ride as an adult you have to devote some of your attention to the basics of propelling, balancing, and steering the bike, which distracts you from the attention you must devote to not getting killed. The point is that an experienced bicyclist doesn’t even think about how to ride a bike when s/he is on the road; all s/he is thinking about is where s/he wants the bike to go. That’s how it is with muscle memory.
Accordingly (as the lawyers say), those who learned to play golf (properly) as children have an almost insurmountable advantage in playing as an adult, and conversely, if you did not learn how to hit a golf ball properly as a child it is almost impossible to reach the same level of “unconscious” performance as someone who did. Worst of all are those of us who played baseball extensively as a kid, because we have loads of muscle memory, but it is all wrong.
Most teaching golf professionals don’t even address the muscle memory issue – not that they could do anything about it - and devote their time to explaining and showing you the best way to swing a golf club, on the theory that if you know how to swing, you will be able to do it consistently. But there are so many variables in the swing that it is simply not possible to consciously control all the OTHER variables as you work on correcting the one that the Pro wants you to focus on.
What normally happens during a golf lesson is that the Pro watches you hit a few balls, then works with you to correct the few flaws that he observed while you were hitting those balls. By the end of the lesson – if all goes well – that flaw will have been addressed and you are hitting the ball properly. The trouble is, the flaws that manifested themselves for the Pro on that day are not your only flaws, they are simply the ones that showed up at that particular time. The following day something else will crop up, and there you are, proud that you are now swinging “inside-out” – thus getting rid of that nasty slice, but now your head is bobbing up and down during the backswing, so that you are topping the ball.
Because of the extreme difficulty of learning and internalizing the “perfect” golf swing – which many believe does not exist – many amateur golfers studiously avoid trying to “perfect” their golf swing. I would be inclined to say that at least half of all amateur golfers fit into this category. They never take a lesson, never read a book or an article, and when they practice they focus entirely on results, not giving a damn how it happens as long as the ball goes where they want it to go. For what it’s worth, they may look ridiculous out on the golf course, but they pointedly do not care.
There are even a few top professional golfers who have “lousy” swings (Jim Furyk and Kenny Perry come immediately to mind), and you can bet that they are not ever trying to “correct” their flaws; they just work on getting the best results with the swing they have.
I occasionally golf with a guy who swings the club cross-handed (he’s a little better than I am). As a kid, he was left-handed but couldn’t get his hands on any left-handed clubs, so he found that he could swing right-handed clubs that way with some success – a conventional right-handed grip was very uncomfortable for him. Over the years he got to be pretty good at it (10 handicap), and eventually reached the point where it felt more natural than actually using left-handed clubs “properly.” But when he goes into a slump, nobody can help him in any way, because his swing is his and his alone.
There is a huge industry that is geared to the golfers who are determined to “perfect” their golf swings and thereby improve their game. There are books, magazines, videos, television programs (a whole television network, believe it or not), and thousands of teaching professional golfers. There are countless training aids, exercise gadgets, corrective grips, special folding and weighted clubs, and painted rugs with the balls, your feet, and other stuff marked on them. There are programs designed to correct or improve literally every aspect of your golf game from before you step up to the first tee through the putting green and beyond.
On the other hand, there is a counter-industry of self-professed golf gurus who claim that the aforementioned “conventional” golf industry is full of beans. You don’t have to have a swing like Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus to be successful! If you just focus on this thing, or that technique, or stand in a different way, you can get great results in a very short time without going through the painful process of trying to learn and internalize the illusive Perfect Golf Swing. There is a mini-industry of gurus who worship at the feet of a deceased Canadian golfer named Moe Norman, who never took a golf lesson in his life, swung his club like a carpenter swings a hammer, and was reputed to be the best there ever was at simply hitting a golf ball straight and true.
This counter-industry could not survive if it were not for the difficulty of becoming a good golfer in the conventional way.
I am an impatient person and an impatient golfer. I have tried both the conventional and many of the unconventional methods, and have spent probably a couple thousand dollars over the past ten years (I took up golf at 50) on tapes, books, training gadgets, golf lessons, and most recently membership in a golf website. It is normal for me to discover some new twist or technique in my readings over the Winter, and try to implement it when I start golfing again in the Spring. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it is a mini-disaster, and sometimes it makes no difference.
Contrary to what I’ve written above, by exploring these new methods and techniques for the past ten years I have been able to make many little, almost immeasurable improvements in my game that have brought my handicap down from about 18 to about 12. More important, I now occasionally shoot a round in the 70’s.
My tee shots have been improved and lengthened by using a technique that I picked up from a “Stack & Tilt” video. My long irons have been improved by adopting a technique that is commonly called, the “single-plane swing” – and by discovering a brand of hybrid club that is perfect for that swing. My chipping is adapted from a technique developed by a guy named Dave Nevogt. My putting technique is entirely mine, and involves lining up my feet about 45 degrees open to the intended path of the putt.
All of this is contrary to conventional golf thinking, and I’m at a point now where any lesson with a golf professional would be counter-productive. And although I don’t enjoy every shot, every hole, or every round of golf I play, I usually have fun and I’m always thinking about the next chance I might have to go out and play.
It crosses ethnic, cultural, religious, and national borders. You will find avid golfers among office workers, executives, mill hunkys, soccer moms and “the Idle Rich.” People who wouldn’t be caught dead together socially or professionally will often find themselves joking, encouraging each other, and generally acting like best buddies when they happen to be paired with one another on the golf course at an outing.
And once you get to like the game it becomes something that you will gladly do any time the opportunity arises. Any time a golfer goes on vacation or has some extra time off there is always a consideration, at least, of finding time to go out and play 18 holes. This is even true in the United States, were we have made a religion of watching other people do things, rather than doing them ourselves.
And even though golf is a compelling pastime, and even though golfers are often fanatical about playing and making the most of it, when you get right down to it, most golfers stink. The par (or standard) score on a typical golf course is 72, yet the average golf score for most golfers is over 100. And that’s even true with most golfers playing on courses with which they are thoroughly familiar. As with any other area of human endeavor, there is a bell-curve distribution of scores among amateur golfers, but most studies conclude that the average score is 100 or higher.
Which leads to two unavoidable questions: (1) Why are golfers so bad?, and (2) Why do they keep coming back? I’ll leave the second one for another day and just focus on why we are so bad.
A Martian coming to earth and observing us playing golf would be perplexed. The ball is perfectly round, it is sitting still, and the area between where play starts (the tee) and where it finishes (the flagstick) has generally been cleared out of all possibly-interfering obstacles. The ground is smooth, the grass is very short, and the laws of physics don’t change from one shot to the next. Because of the aerodynamics of the ball, the environmental conditions don’t make much difference, and the players have all the time they need to prepare for and execute every shot.
Furthermore, the players are using tools (clubs) that have been specially designed over more than a hundred years for one purpose and one purpose only – to hit a golf ball straight along a set trajectory for a predictable distance. We seem to have good enough vision (possibly with some correction), flexible and strong bodies, and enough hand-eye coordination to hit the ball squarely almost every time – even bad golfers generally hit the ball squarely, it’s the errant path of the club that produces the bad shots.
And yet as a group we humans stink at golf. We have all demonstrated time and again that we are capable of hitting good shots and capable of getting a par on just about every hole, but it simply doesn’t happen. And just as importantly, we golfers don’t get any better over time. Show me one lifetime golfer – one who started playing at age 12 or younger - who is better at 35 than he or she was at 25. There is almost no one who improves noticeably from year to year – least of all, professional golfers. Absent a major investment of time and effort (i.e., quit your job), you will never be a better golfer than you were at 21. Next year’s scores will be the same or higher than this year’s scores. (When someone takes up the game initially as an adult, there will be improvement for the first couple years as s/he figures out how to use all the clubs and how to read greens, but the early improvement levels off after 2-3 years and we reach our ultimate skill level).
Notice also that golfers on the “Champions Tour” are no more accurate with their shots, and amazingly no better putters than those on the PGA tour. Strength and flexibility have nothing to do with putting, and the seniors have decades more experience than their younger counterparts on the PGA tour, yet there is no indication whatsoever that older professional golfers are more accurate with the woods and irons, or better putters than 21-year-old tour rookies. Practice makes perfect? Not in golf.
To go off on a tangent for a moment, our most famous golfer of all, Tiger Woods, has made two or three “major” changes in his swing over the years in attempts to correct a flaw or improve some real or imaginary shortcoming, but statistically he is no better than he was 10 years ago. Better with age? Better with practice? Not really.
After many years of struggling to become a better golfer, I have come to the conclusion that we golfers stink because the standard, “ideal” golf swing is so complicated that for most normal humans it is impossible to execute correctly with any consistency. It is simply too complicated. Entire books have been written to try to explain the golf swing, but briefly the complexity can be shown by listing the different body parts that have to move in perfect coordination in order to produce a good golf swing: hips, shoulders, upper arms, lower arms, wrists , and knees. And while executing the backswing, swing, and follow-through, the head must remain perfectly steady. Ironically, the baseball swing, in which you are hitting an object that is moving in three planes, is much simpler.
Golf instructors who are honest will admit that the one essential element of a consistent swing is “muscle memory.” That is to say, the knowledge of the swing must be so ingrained that it occurs without any thought. It is “natural.” Sadly, most exercise physiologists have concluded that development of muscle memory cannot take place past the age of 12.
The best illustration of muscle memory for most people is the “knowledge” of how to ride a bicycle. Riding a bike requires an extremely complex coordination of the actions of different muscles, which, working together, (1) propel the bike forward, (2) maintain balance, and (3) steer the bike on the intended path. If you learned to ride a bike as a child (i.e., developed the necessary muscle memory), then when you ride as an adult you don’t even think about how these complex activities occur. You simply jump on the bike to go where you want to go. If you DIDN’T learn to ride as a child, then you probably will never be comfortable riding in demanding situations (e.g., in car traffic, mountain biking) as an adult. The reason is because any time you ride as an adult you have to devote some of your attention to the basics of propelling, balancing, and steering the bike, which distracts you from the attention you must devote to not getting killed. The point is that an experienced bicyclist doesn’t even think about how to ride a bike when s/he is on the road; all s/he is thinking about is where s/he wants the bike to go. That’s how it is with muscle memory.
Accordingly (as the lawyers say), those who learned to play golf (properly) as children have an almost insurmountable advantage in playing as an adult, and conversely, if you did not learn how to hit a golf ball properly as a child it is almost impossible to reach the same level of “unconscious” performance as someone who did. Worst of all are those of us who played baseball extensively as a kid, because we have loads of muscle memory, but it is all wrong.
Most teaching golf professionals don’t even address the muscle memory issue – not that they could do anything about it - and devote their time to explaining and showing you the best way to swing a golf club, on the theory that if you know how to swing, you will be able to do it consistently. But there are so many variables in the swing that it is simply not possible to consciously control all the OTHER variables as you work on correcting the one that the Pro wants you to focus on.
What normally happens during a golf lesson is that the Pro watches you hit a few balls, then works with you to correct the few flaws that he observed while you were hitting those balls. By the end of the lesson – if all goes well – that flaw will have been addressed and you are hitting the ball properly. The trouble is, the flaws that manifested themselves for the Pro on that day are not your only flaws, they are simply the ones that showed up at that particular time. The following day something else will crop up, and there you are, proud that you are now swinging “inside-out” – thus getting rid of that nasty slice, but now your head is bobbing up and down during the backswing, so that you are topping the ball.
Because of the extreme difficulty of learning and internalizing the “perfect” golf swing – which many believe does not exist – many amateur golfers studiously avoid trying to “perfect” their golf swing. I would be inclined to say that at least half of all amateur golfers fit into this category. They never take a lesson, never read a book or an article, and when they practice they focus entirely on results, not giving a damn how it happens as long as the ball goes where they want it to go. For what it’s worth, they may look ridiculous out on the golf course, but they pointedly do not care.
There are even a few top professional golfers who have “lousy” swings (Jim Furyk and Kenny Perry come immediately to mind), and you can bet that they are not ever trying to “correct” their flaws; they just work on getting the best results with the swing they have.
I occasionally golf with a guy who swings the club cross-handed (he’s a little better than I am). As a kid, he was left-handed but couldn’t get his hands on any left-handed clubs, so he found that he could swing right-handed clubs that way with some success – a conventional right-handed grip was very uncomfortable for him. Over the years he got to be pretty good at it (10 handicap), and eventually reached the point where it felt more natural than actually using left-handed clubs “properly.” But when he goes into a slump, nobody can help him in any way, because his swing is his and his alone.
There is a huge industry that is geared to the golfers who are determined to “perfect” their golf swings and thereby improve their game. There are books, magazines, videos, television programs (a whole television network, believe it or not), and thousands of teaching professional golfers. There are countless training aids, exercise gadgets, corrective grips, special folding and weighted clubs, and painted rugs with the balls, your feet, and other stuff marked on them. There are programs designed to correct or improve literally every aspect of your golf game from before you step up to the first tee through the putting green and beyond.
On the other hand, there is a counter-industry of self-professed golf gurus who claim that the aforementioned “conventional” golf industry is full of beans. You don’t have to have a swing like Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus to be successful! If you just focus on this thing, or that technique, or stand in a different way, you can get great results in a very short time without going through the painful process of trying to learn and internalize the illusive Perfect Golf Swing. There is a mini-industry of gurus who worship at the feet of a deceased Canadian golfer named Moe Norman, who never took a golf lesson in his life, swung his club like a carpenter swings a hammer, and was reputed to be the best there ever was at simply hitting a golf ball straight and true.
This counter-industry could not survive if it were not for the difficulty of becoming a good golfer in the conventional way.
I am an impatient person and an impatient golfer. I have tried both the conventional and many of the unconventional methods, and have spent probably a couple thousand dollars over the past ten years (I took up golf at 50) on tapes, books, training gadgets, golf lessons, and most recently membership in a golf website. It is normal for me to discover some new twist or technique in my readings over the Winter, and try to implement it when I start golfing again in the Spring. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it is a mini-disaster, and sometimes it makes no difference.
Contrary to what I’ve written above, by exploring these new methods and techniques for the past ten years I have been able to make many little, almost immeasurable improvements in my game that have brought my handicap down from about 18 to about 12. More important, I now occasionally shoot a round in the 70’s.
My tee shots have been improved and lengthened by using a technique that I picked up from a “Stack & Tilt” video. My long irons have been improved by adopting a technique that is commonly called, the “single-plane swing” – and by discovering a brand of hybrid club that is perfect for that swing. My chipping is adapted from a technique developed by a guy named Dave Nevogt. My putting technique is entirely mine, and involves lining up my feet about 45 degrees open to the intended path of the putt.
All of this is contrary to conventional golf thinking, and I’m at a point now where any lesson with a golf professional would be counter-productive. And although I don’t enjoy every shot, every hole, or every round of golf I play, I usually have fun and I’m always thinking about the next chance I might have to go out and play.
