One Thing I’ve Learned (after 20 years)

Good evening everybody – Matt here, checking in after a few weeks of intense swing scrutiny.  Well, I’m happy to report that I’ve had some glimpses of the promised land after about a year of being basically lost with the full swing (we’ll see how long this lasts).  While most of my golf cranium is still what Bob Rotella might call “an unmitigated disaster the likes of which this world has never seen”, I have learned a few things that might be obvious to most.

 
“I am now dumber for having watched you putt.”

Never one to withhold information, I figured I’d share the most important one for now:

Don’t cherry-pick your lessons. I have been guilty of this crime for about two decades now.  When my swing is on, who needs ’em.  When I start to go off the rails a bit, maybe I’ll pop my head into a pro’s office and see if they feel like making $40, “the haard way“.  So I’ll take one lesson, then return to the lab and try to work on the one thing they taught me, simultaneously reading Golf Digest articles and dreaming up other great fixes as I drive down the road (at least I’m not texting).  OR, every once in a while someone will give me a gift certificate for a lesson . . . perfect!  It’s free, it’s an arms-length transaction, and I can take from it what I want without letting that maniac really mess with my swing.

“I tell ya this over the top stuff is killing me . . . how about twenty bucks if I pay cash?”

Well, and I’m sure you know where this is going . . . over the past few months I’ve had a few sessions with the same teaching pro, one every few weeks or so.  Some were proper 30 minute lessons, others were me just leveraging my prior lesson and essentially guilt-tripping the poor guy into answering a few questions, let me show you what I mean, and boom!, we’re on the range.

I’ll cut to the chase – I’m truly shocked by how valuable this process has been, and can’t believe I’ve blown it for this long.  The giant objectives that I was initially told to work on (bigger shoulder turn, releasing the club all the way to the target instead of chicken-winging it in after impact, etc.) were all whittled down to smaller thoughts, without allowing any new screw-ups to creep in.  In fact, I got so comfortable with the original concepts that my last session was almost like a bonus round . . . instead of working on things that felt CRAZY when I tried to fix them, we started messing around with things that would simply enhance an already well-struck ball.  I guess one could argue that these are still flaws being addressed, but the point is, they were all within a comfort zone that never threatened to derail my progress, it was basically just for kicks.  Of course these are things specific to my swing, but this included tweaks such as aligning the ball at the heel of the club at setup to promote a more inside-out swing (and reduce toe-balls), keeping the shoulders more level in the downswing, and emphasizing leg drive to gain distance.

So I guess that’s it for now . . . stay tuned for my next post, inevitably titled “When Good Things Go Bad: The Tragic Tale of a Man, His Leg Drive, and the Teaching Pro That Fleeced Him”.