Don't Hurry

Walter Hagen was quite a piece of work.  He was one of the best match play players ever, as evidenced by his five PGA championships when the PGA was a match play event.

He probably did as much to elevate the stature of the golf professional, who at one time was not even permitted in some club houses, as anyone.  He was probably the first professional who lived like a king.  He was famous for saying he never wanted to be a millionaire; he just wanted to live like one.

His cavalier approach to golf tended to psych out his opponents, as he always seemed to just be having a good time as he routinely claimed the lion's share of the prize money.  The fact that he had one of the best short games ever didn't hurt.

As far as his attitude to golf, and to life, is concerned, I think he nailed it when he said:

"Don't hurry.  Don't worry.  You're only here for a short visit.  So don't forget to stop and smell the roses."

Imagine the Ball Has Little Legs

Henry Cotton, who was well before my time, but was reputed to be no slouch as a player and a teacher, said, "Imagine the ball has little legs, and chop them off."  I believe he was the first teacher to teach the "impact" approach, having students hit a tire with one hand, then the other, and then both, learning to make a solid, square strike and building some golfing muscle in the process. (There are some good videos on YouTube showing Cotton's tire drill)

As someone who got lost in swing mechanics, I have found myself at the point where I can no longer even find my old swing.  However, I have found this idea from Henry Cotton very helpful in the recovery process.  Imagining those little legs under the ball and chopping them off works like a charm to give you the right strike.  

Harvey Penick taught his students the same thing when he told them to "clip the tee" under the ball. Harvey said he didn't know why, but clipping the tee caused the club face to be square.  It was like magic.  Harvey also loved to see a player who just brushed the ball off the turf, taking little or no divot.

Johnny Miller also likes to talk about the "brush, brush" drill, especially with chipping where you make sure you brush the grass under the ball.  This approach beats the hell out of beating down on the ball and taking divots big enough to bury small mammals in, as I am sometimes prone to do.  

Since I've fiddled with my swing to the point of almost total confusion and paralysis, I am back to trying just to cut those little legs out from under the ball.  It beats the hell out of worrying about my backswing.

If you're having trouble with your swing, or your ball striking, maybe chopping the legs out from under that pesky little ball might help you as well.

Rory Shows his Mettle in Dubai

What a wonderful final round in Dubai by Rory McIlroy.  Forced to be patient, and produce his best stuff by Andy Sullivan, who came charging out of the gate riding a hot putter, Rory showed why he remains one of the three best--if not the very best--players in the game.

Sullivan, who is no short-knocker himself, found himself routinely forty or more yards behind Rory after the tee shot.  He was clearly out-gunned, but, until he started losing tee shots left, fought valiantly and, as the two separated themselves from the rest of the field, forced Rory to dig deep and show just why he is a great champion.

With a two shot lead on the seventeenth tee, Rory found himself having to wait on the group in front.  During the wait, he and Sullivan, along with their caddies, apparently engaged in some light-hearted conversation.  Whether this caused Rory to temporarily lose his focus, we may never know, but his tee ball thirty to forty yards right of target and into the water suddenly made he and Sullivan tied as they stood over lengthy putts on the seventeenth green.  Sullivan missed his attempt.  Rory stood up and stroked a putt that never left the hole, making his bogey, and retaining a one-shot lead heading to eighteen.

After both players made pars on eighteen, Rory secured his third Race to Dubai title and the DP tour championship; a fitting end to what, perhaps might be called a disappointing season for Rory, only insomuch as he failed to win a Major.  

Two things to be learned from this week in Dubai are that Rory McIlroy is still going to be a force to be reckoned with, and, as Doug Ford once said, "It's just as important to sink a bogey putt as it is to drop one for a par."

A Couple of Up-and-Comers Shine in Dubai

That was some pretty impressive golf in Dubai from a couple of serious up-and-comers in Emiliano Grillo and Andy Sullivan.  

Grillo, playing with Rory, fashioned a terrific 64, while Rory shot his second 68 to find himself two shots up on his closest challenger in the Race to Dubai, Danny Willett.  Rory struck the ball better, but continued to be luke warm at best on the greens.  However, the quality of the man is that he still managed back-to-back 68's and staying in touch while not playing his best.  The great ones are able to do that.

Willett seemed to lose his cool after hitting a sloppy lay up out of a fairway bunker which nearly found a hazard.  Bad shots are inevitable, but it's always difficult to recover mentally from loose shots.  Fortunately, Willett managed to bear down and, when it looked like he was really going to stagger his way to the house, save his par on eighteen by holing a good putt to keep Rory in his sights.

Andy Sullivan, who is the only guy with three wins this year on the European tour, smiled his way around the course, giving his fan club wearing the smiley shirts plenty to cheer and smile about, especially as he rolled in a lengthy putt from the fringe on eighteen to grab a one shot lead with his second round of 66.

There is plenty of golf to play, and although Rory looks to me like winning the race to Dubai, if he wants to catch Sullivan, he better get the flat-stick warmed up. It's always down to the flat-stick in the end.

As for Sullivan and Grillo, me thinks they are both going to become much better known in the years to come.  They are really starting to feel their oats.  Speaking of up-and-comers, Matthew Fitzpatrick is another kid who looks to be a world-beater.  With nine top tens and a win in his rookie season on the European tour, this kid is definitely no flash in the pan and looks likely to be in the top ten again this week.

It's probably too soon to pick a winner, but one thing for certain, it's going to be a great tournament with lots of quality players still in the hunt.  I will be sure to set my video recorder.  In fact, I may even get up in the wee hours to watch it live.  It's going to be a dandy.

If

Golfers are prone to talking about "if."  Spiros and I were talking about this yesterday.

Spiros loves to compete.  He's a sixteen handicapper who can play much better when the chips are down.  We played the Warkworth course yesterday.  It was cold and breezy, but it was November and we knew our days were numbered as far as golf was concerned.  It's a long winter in Ontario, so we play until all the courses close; the weather be damned.

I had told Spiros to bring lots of money because I intended to give him the business.  He was more than happy to respond to the challenge, and, after we settled on me giving him twelve strokes, we played match play.  Spiros was on his game, and after shooting 40 on the front nine, had me two down.  He had made nothing but pars and bogeys, so I was really up against it, and I knew it.  

I was striking the ball well. But after holing a nice putt for birdie on five, the hole closed up and Spiros ultimately won four and three.  He had played really well, shooting 83 or 84, depending upon whether he wanted to accept the eight foot putt I gave to him on the one hole at Warkworth that, so far, has his number.  I forget the number of the hole, but it is a long dogleg left around a marshy area, with a big willow on the corner of the dogleg.  The first time Spiros played it, which was last week, he was BIPLI (Ball in Pocket Lack of Interest) after hitting it into the marsh three times before picking up.  Yesterday, he hooked his tee shot into the marsh and made either seven, or eight, depending on whether you count the eight footer he backhanded at the hole in disgust as a gimme or not. 

At the end of the round we got to engaging in the "ifs."  I told him that I thought he had played about as well as I'd ever seen him play and if he hadn't made that mess of the dreaded dogleg left hole, and if he hadn't made that silly six on seventeen, he'd have really had a good score, especially considering the weather.  He responded in kind, saying that if I hadn't missed three birdie putts inside of six feet, and if I hadn't three-putted from three feet on fifteen to lose the match, I would have had a good score, and it would have been a good match.

I suggested to Spiros that this was the funny thing about the ifs; golfers tend to talk about missing three footers as though they are some sort of anomaly that, in retrospect, should be written off as bad luck.  We tend to say we might have shot a good round if we hadn't missed a few short ones.  We don't tend to admit that we might have scored a lot higher if that hooked tee shot on ten hadn't kicked off the tree and stayed in bounds, allowing me to make my par instead of a double or worse, which happened to me yesterday.

Golfers will probably always engage in the what ifs, or if onlys, after a round.  But the sad truth is, as a buddy of mine likes to say, "if your aunt had had nuts, she'd have been your uncle."  Or, as Steve likes to say, "It is what it is."  Spiros gave me the business and we both took as many shots as we took.  No point in talking about what might have been.  What actually was, was pretty damned good.  We had fun, and that's all that really matters for old fat guys like us.

Do You Need an Attitude Adjustment?

I know I can't ever seem to resist quoting Bobby Jones.  The reason, of course, is that with regard to virtually every subject related to golf he seemed, to me at least, to have said it best.  

Consider in part what Bobby had to say about adjusting your mental attitude in his book Golf is my Game.  This was written some ten or twelve years after he was forced to give up the game because of a crippling disease.  He wrote:

"The businessman golfer takes lessons and reads books; he imitates good players; he buys new clubs; he does everything he can to improve his swing, his shot-making ability.  But he overlooks one important feature: he doesn't ask himself often enough if he is scoring as well as he ought with his present ability.

In every club there is always at least one man who has the reputation of making a poor game go a long way, the man who seems always to beat a player a bit better than himself.  He doesn't do it by any divine inspiration, nor yet by any trick of fate.  He simply uses his head, analyzing each situation as it confronts him, always keeping in view his own limitations and power.  That is what we call judgement, and it is a lot easier to use good judgement than it is to learn to swing a club like Harry Vardon."

I think this is really the crux of the matter.  We can make all sorts of decisions about how me might, over time, improve our game.  We might commit to getting more fit.  We might undertake to practise more, or take lessons.  We might buy yet another putter, or driver.  But the real question is, are we playing as well as we should right now, with what we presently have to work with?  If we aren't using good judgement, and we don't have the proper attitude, the answer is obvious.

Bobby Jones, despite being a prodigious talent who burst on the American golf scene as a fourteen year old, had to learn some things and adjust his attitude before he played consistently great golf and became a steady winner of Major championships.  One of the things he needed to learn was that one can't expect perfection.  He wrote:

"The challenge of golf is well known.  But I feel that the average player sees the wide superiority of the expert and concludes that this is perfection.  Is it not better for him to realize that there is no such thing as perfection... Golf, in my view, is the most rewarding of all games because it possesses a very definite value as a moulder or developer of character.  The golfer very soon is made to realize that his most immediate, and perhaps his most potent, adversary is himself.  Even when confronting a human opponent, the most crucial factor is not the performance of the opposition, but the effect of this performance upon the player himself...

In my early years I think I must have been completely intolerant of anything less than absolute perfection in the playing of any shot...I habitually played every shot for its ultimate possibilities, regardless of risk.  This lack of discretion must have been fairly obvious; for Bill Fownes, the resourceful Pittsburgh amateur, once said to me, 'Bob, you've got to learn that the best shot possible is not always the best shot to play.'"

Bobby analyzed his game and came to understand that he needed to become less of a perfectionist.  He wrote:

"It took some doing, I'll admit, but it is a fact that I never did any amount of winning until I learned to adjust my ambitions to more reasonable prospects shot by shot, and to strive for a rate of performance that was consistently good and reliable, rather than placing my hopes upon the accomplishment of a series of brilliant sallies...

I finally arrived at a sort of measure of expectancy that in a season's play I could perform at my best rate for not over half-a-dozen rounds, and that in any of these best rounds I would not strike more than six shots, other than putts, exactly as intended.

If one should have confidence in such an appraisal, which I had, the following conclusions were inescapable:

1.  I must be prepared for the making of mistakes.

2.  I must try always to select the shot to be played and the manner of playing it so as to provide the widest possible margin for error.

3.  I must expect to have to do some scrambling and not be discouraged if the amount of it happens to be more than normal.

The main point of all this for the play-for-fun golfer is to emphasize the importance even for him of adjusting his attitude towards the game before he goes out on the course.  Let him first divest himself of any thought that it may be unsportsmanlike or unworthy to prepare himself for the play as best he can.  There is no point in going out to play a game unless one has the desire to play well, and golf was not meant to be played impetuously; nor is one likely to exercise the needed restraint and self-discipline unless one has prepared oneself in advance.  You don't need to go into any ostentatious seclusion, but only quietly and within yourself, to get your mind on the game before you step on to the first tee."

I know I keep quoting Bobby Jones, but if ever there was a better summary of the attitude required to best play this game, I've certainly never read it.  

How'd My Swing Look?

It seems to me that one of the hardest things to do in golf is to stop thinking about your swing.  We often hear that impact, or the strike, is what really counts, but I still can't resist thinking about my backswing, or my left arm, even though I know "you don't hit the ball with your backswing, laddie."

I watched Dubuisson and Patrick Reed hit the ball this week.  It was very instructive.  Both of those guys have swings that are perhaps not quite textbook, but they can both flat out play.  Did you see the fairway bunker shot that Reed holed for eagle in the last round in Shanghai this week?  It was magic.

Those guys are ball strikers.  They hit more shots with cut-off, abbreviated finishes than probably anyone else in the game.  Dubuisson sometimes looks like he finishes with his weight on his back foot when he lashes at a drive.  You might not necessarily be inclined to recommend those swings to anyone.  But, man, do they ever strike it sweetly.

Steve is beginning to embrace the concept that is so obviously understood by Dubuisson and Reed, namely that the strike is what is all important.  Steve, who took up golf later in life, has always been caught up in the idea that it is the swing that counts.  When we first started playing together, he would often ask me how his swing looked after he played a shot.  My usual response was to ask him how the shot turned out.  After all, there really are no style points in golf.  

Yesterday, instead of watching Steve swing, I was focussing intently on his strike.  I would see him catch the ball first, brush the grass, and produce that nice sound and, without watching where the ball went, would say, "Good strike."  When he caught the ground first, or hit it thin, I'd say so, so he was getting some extra feedback from me on the strike, as opposed to his swing.

More often than not, the good strikes produced very acceptable results.  I'd then smile and say, "Terrible swing. But great strike."  

Bobby Jones, who I always feel compelled to quote from because he often said it first, and more often than not said it best, talked about why it is that golfers, paricularly golfers who take the game up later in life, look so uncomfortable.  In his book Golf is my Game, in chapter two, Bobby wrote:

"Those players we see today who have the appearance of naturalness and ease in their play are immediately identified as having begun to play as youngsters.  I think they have this appearance because they first thought of the game in terms of striking the ball.  So they set about doing this with no more self-consciousness than we would associate with chopping wood, throwing stones, or beating rugs.

I am confident that the adult golfer can and should approach the game in the same way.  He may not have the time available to the youngster, but he has the advantage of adult understanding.  In a few minutes study of this material in this chapter, he can learn as much about the possible means of controlling a golf ball as a boy could learn in years of play.

I am not one who enjoys heaping ridicule upon the average golfer.  It seems to me that those grotesque characters we see in cartoons are rare in real life.  The unskilled golfer often looks uncomfortable, strained, unsure, sometimes even unhappy, but he hardly ever presents a ludicrous aspect.  And I think that a great measure of his discomfiture is derived from his conscious efforts to follow prescribed routine, to look and move like someone else, or as he has been told.  I think he would present a more natural appearance if he should put his mind upon striking the ball, rather than upon swinging the club...

Golf is played by striking the ball with the head of the club.  The objective of the player is not to swing the club in a specified manner, nor to execute a series of complicated movements in a prescribed sequence, nor to look pretty while he is doing it, but primarily and essentially to strike the ball with the head of the club so that the ball will perform according to his wishes.

No one can play golf until he knows the many ways in which a ball can be expected to respond when it is struck in different ways.  If you think all this should be obvious, please believe me when I assure you that I have seen many really good players attempt shots they should have known were impossible."

So, all of us, it would seem, have a choice.  We can continue to focus on improving our swing, or we can focus on the part of the game where the rubber really hits the road; the strike.  I say "we," because I am just as susceptible as the next guy to getting caught up in thinking about swing mechanics.  

I have covered in depth Bobby Jones' information from this chapter in a blog entitled, The Wisdom of Bobby Jones: Striking the Ball.  I invite you to check it out if you don't have access to the book Golf is my Game.  It's the most important information you can ever learn about golf.  That's not just my opinion, because my opinion really doesn't amount to a hill of beans, it is Bobby's assertion.  After all, there are enough characters out there telling you how to swing the club.  But Bobby Jones tells you what's really important; how to strike the ball with the club head.