Tailor Made Golf Lessons

I took another golf lesson today. It was something that I’ve needed to do for a long time. Like many golfers, as little things go wrong with my swing, I apply Band-Aids here and there until I have no idea what I am doing.

I’m like the old joke where the guy goes to the tailor because one arm of his jacket is too long and the tailor tell him to tuck a little bit of it under his arm. Then he notices that one leg is longer than the other, so he tells him to bend his left knee. Finally he sees that his lapel is puckered up on one side, so he asked him to hold it down with his chin.

Leaving the tailor’s shop he passes two friends, and seeing their friend bent over and hobbling with his chin holding his lapel in place, one friend asked the other, “What’s wrong with Sam?” to which the other friend answers, “I don’t know but doesn’t his suit fit nice?”

It’s frustrating and amazing to me that what I think I am doing with my golf swing and what I am actually doing are sometimes so different. Granted my cat-like reflexes have far surpassed their nine lives and there are times when my rippling abs actually get in the way of me making a full turn, but I keep trying.

A couple of years ago the publisher of Tees2Greens and vaunted golf addict, Mike Casson and I attended Bill Moretti’s Academy of Golf Dynamics in Austin, Texas. And, except for the scorching heat that accompanied Austin in August, The Golf Magazine Top 25 Golf School was great fun and very helpful.

For me their teaching method was both beneficial and interesting to watch. It started with videoing each of the fifteen students’ swings and then spending no more than five minutes with each of us talking about what they saw. They told us that it was the first and the last time we would look at a video. Their reasoning was that they didn’t want us thinking about our swing in pieces. Some will likely disagree with that reasoning, but it is hard to disagree with Moretti’s twenty years of success.

Back on the range, the five instructors walked behind each of the fifteen students for not more than ten minutes before starting down the line with individual instructions. As you might expect, each set of instructions was different for each person but the goal was the same; the one-plane swing.

For the next three days I hit ten thousand balls more or less. My hands hurt, my legs hurt, my back hurt and parts we’ll just call parts hurt as well. Inter-mixed with ten thousand one-plane swing balls, we putted for hours, chipped and pitched for several more hours, and dug holes in the sand traps until we were almost covered up. We worked on downhill lies, up-hill lies and side-hill lies and every lie in between. You name the shot and we worked on it and in the end that was one of the most beneficial aspects of the school for me.

I’m sure I benefited from the hours of one-plane swing practice, but learning proper technique for many different shots was something that has continued to help me. Rarely do I have a shot that I don’t know how to play; that doesn’t mean that I can actually hit the shot, but at least I do know what kind of shot I should be trying to hit.

Moretti sent each of us home with specific drills, video tips and an email address that we could use to talk about any swing problems we might have in the future. I don’t know if this constitutes a lifetime guarantee, but it’s close.

The bottom line here is that lessons are good for your game if for no other reason than it encourages you to hit ten thousand balls. Give your PGA Professional a call when you’re having problems; let me know how it goes and I’ll do the same. As a matter of fact, over the next few weeks I’m going to take lessons from D.A. Weibring and Randy Smith and if they don’t tell me to give up the game, I’ll let you know how it went.