The Downhill Lie (7 page)

De-Grooving the Waggle

O
ne day I opened my locker and found a book titled
Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect,
by Dr. Bob Rotella. It had been placed there by a well-meaning caddy who, after watching me on the practice range, decided I was a head case.

Rotella is a sports psychologist who preaches positive thinking, calm acceptance and something called “fun.” In the golf world he has attained guru status, thanks to accolades from Tom Kite and other successful pros.

I pored through the whole book, dog-earing pages. One of the most intriguing chapters is titled “Thriving Under Pressure,” in which Rotella deconstructs the act of choking—a syndrome with which I am crushingly familiar.

According to Rotella, “A golfer chokes when he lets anger, doubt, fear or some other extraneous factor distract him before a shot.”

Here, I thought, is the seed of the problem. Anger, doubt and fear are essential ingredients of my golfing philosophy.

Nervousness is different, Rotella explains. Nervousness can be good. He recounts that basketball legend Bill Russell always felt more confident about winning if he tossed his cookies before a big game. (Although I’ve never vomited before hitting a golf shot, I often feel like doing it afterwards.)

Rotella goes on to compare nerves on the golf course with what you feel before having sex with someone for the first time. “If it didn’t make you nervous,” he writes, “it wouldn’t be so gratifying. In fact, it might be a little boring. Ask any prostitute.” (The next time I see one on the driving range, I will!)

Toward the end of the book, Rotella distills his formula for winning golf into about three dozen rules about courage, confidence, concentration, composure, patience, practice, persistence, potential and, of course, the elusive f-word: fun.

“On the first tee,” he writes, “a golfer must expect only two things of himself: to have fun, and to focus his mind properly on every shot.”

Gee, is that all?

Admittedly, much of what Rotella says makes sense; most golf books do. I now own a shelfful of them, and a handicap that flutters up and down like a runaway kite.

Golf books and golf magazines sell like crazy because every player is searching for the formula, the secret, the code, the grail—how do I conquer this impossible, godforsaken game?

And the more you read, the more hopelessly muddled you become. After digesting an article by David Leadbetter advocating an early cocking of the wrists on the backswing, I came upon the following quote from the late Byron Nelson:

“Make a takeway with no wrist break, and you’ll like what happens through impact.”

Now what? Choose between Leadbetter, tutor of champions, or Nelson, the only guy to win eleven consecutive PGA tournaments?

Because no two experts play, teach or analyze golf the same way, the instructionals are often contradictory and vexing.

About a year into my relapse, I bought a copy of
Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons, The Modern Fundamentals of Golf,
written in 1957 with the great Herbert Warren Wind. It was this classic text that a non-golfer named Larry Nelson picked up at the relatively advanced age of twenty-one, after returning from combat duty in Vietnam. By assiduously applying Hogan’s methods, Nelson taught himself to play, turned pro, and went on to win two PGA Championships and a U.S. Open.

I am neither twenty-one years old nor blessed with Nelson’s natural athleticism. Few amateurs are. Yet, early in his book, Hogan matter-of-factly tells of a businessman who came to him for lessons: “He was a 90-shooter in April. Five months later he was playing in the 70s and won the club championship.”

The story probably was intended to be motivational, but it made me want to toss my golf bag in the Indian River. How do you cut 20 strokes off your score in only five months?

Hogan’s student wasn’t portrayed as an athlete-savant or even as a man of uncommon discipline, but rather a regular guy. Hogan believed that “any average golfer” who dedicates himself to learning the fundamentals “should be coming close to breaking 80 or actually break 80” within six months.

The program worked for his businessman-pupil back in 1938, as it did for Larry Nelson three decades later. It might have worked for me, too, had the instructions not been presented with such intimidating, and occasionally stultifying, technicality.

For instance, five full pages are devoted to the pre-shot “waggle,” the key points helpfully emphasized by Hogan in capital letters:

EACH TIME YOU WAGGLE THE CLUB BACK, THE RIGHT ELBOW SHOULD HIT THE FRONT PART OF YOUR RIGHT HIP, JUST ABOUT WHERE YOUR WATCH POCKET IS. WHEN THIS TAKES PLACE, THE LEFT ELBOW, AS IT MUST, COMES OUT SLIGHTLY, THE LOWER PART OF THE ARM FROM THE ELBOW DOWN ROTATES A LITTLE, AND THE LEFT HAND MOVES THREE INCHES OR SO PAST THE BALL TOWARD THE TARGET. AS THE HANDS MOVE BACK TO THE BALL ON THE FORWARD WAGGLE, THE LEFT HAND ALSO MOVES AN INCH OR TWO PAST THE BALL TOWARD THE TARGET.

With all due respect to Hogan, one of the finest golfers of all time, I would suggest that life is too bloody short to spend more than ten seconds trying to decipher those directions. I’d also point out that any golfer who labored so painstakingly on pre-shot machinations would be pummeled unconscious by his playing partners, probably on the first tee.

A meticulous fellow, Hogan was so serious about his waggle that he provided not one but two illustrations in the book, to show exactly how it should be done. “The rhythm of the waggle varies with each shot you play,” he goes on. “don’t groove your waggle.”

One cannot groove what one does not have. My own swing begins with a tremor, not a waggle, and that seems to suit my game.

The legendary Texas golf instructor Harvey Penick cautioned his students not to become so fixated on waggling as to disrupt the larger task. As Penick pointed out, “The great Horton Smith used no waggle at all.”

Reading that made me feel much better, which was Penick’s speciality. With five million copies in print,
Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book,
written with Bud Shrake, is the bestselling sports book in publishing history.

“Golfers are gullible,” Penick himself noted, with the amused affection that flavors his writing. Short and anecdotal, the
Little Red Book
rambles fondly, like your favorite uncle sipping bourbon on the veranda.

When the book was first published in 1992, golfers devoured it because Penick’s wisdom is bite-sized, elementary and never stern; he waxes with genuine empathy for the Sunday hacker. Since he learned the game in the era (and company) of Hogan, Nelson and Jimmy Demaret, Penick’s advice can also be quaintly dated.

As one example, for swing training he buoyantly recommends “a common weed cutter” of the type once used by prison road gangs. Such implements were long ago supplanted in hardware stores by gasoline-powered, rotary-spooled yard trimmers that should never be swung like a 5-iron, unless you’re aiming to strip the flesh from your shins.

The core of the Penick approach was unshakable optimism, a trait not native to the wintry Nordic soul. When Penick declares that “golf has probably kept more people sane than psychiatrists have,” I can only absorb the remark as a commentary on the failings of psychoanalysis.

Golf books are like putts—the shorter, the better. For me, the most helpful ones are light on ruminations and heavy on the basics.
How I Play Golf,
by Tiger Woods, might as well be called
In Your Dreams, Sucker,
because no mere mortal can strike a ball the way he does. Still, the photographs in his book taught me more about the physics of a proper golf swing than anything else I’d seen.

Another good one is David Leadbetter’s
Positive Practice
, which also features excellent pictures. Like Tiger’s book, Leadbetter’s is large enough for the coffee table and written in language so simple that even Paris Hilton could make sense of it, were she ever to take up golf (or reading).

The key, of course, is in the execution. If the sport were so easy that any dolt could learn it from a book, all golf magazines would go bankrupt. They’re not; they’re thriving.

That’s because most players drift from weekend to weekend in a fog of anxious flux; they play well in streaks and then, for no plain reason, fall apart. They are seldom more than one poor round away from stammering desperation, and to these unhinged souls every golf article dangles the most precious enticement: hope.

Whatever’s wrong with your game, they say, it can be fixed. Just keep reading.

A sure way to transform yourself into a drooling halfwit is to scour a year’s worth of golf articles, absorbing all the tips offered by Ernie, Tiger, Phil, Annika, Sergio, Butch, Hank or name-the-expert. Before long, you will actually feel the lobes of your brain begin to swell. Soon your ears are seeping and your eyeballs are bulging and you can’t remember the alphabet, much less a helpful swing thought.

Naturally, I buy every golf magazine that I see and read it from cover to cover. Each issue promises a miracle cure for the slice, and one of these days I’ll find one that works for more than two or three holes.

A sample of teaser lines from the stacks on my desk: How to Play with Consistency, How to Play the Shots to Win, How Phil Nails His Tee Shots, How to Putt Like the Best, How to Save Five Shots, How to Hit Great Shots from the Three Toughest Lies in Golf, How to Get Your Game Back, How to Master the Scariest Greenside Shot, How to Beat Your Fear of Forced Carries, How to Hit One-Hop-and-Stop Wedges, How to Break 100, How to Break 90, How to Break 80, and an article that presumably would annul the need for all others: How to Be Tiger.

One popular magazine is
Golf Digest,
which I paw through every month like a junkie in a medicine cabinet. It was there I found a health study reporting that 80 percent of all golfers have pains, illness or injuries, 27 percent have back problems and 30 percent have teed off with a hangover. The study also said that 66 percent of golfers are overweight, a figure that seems somewhat low, based on a casual census of Florida courses.

Dan Jenkins, probably the funniest sports journalist ever, writes a
Golf Digest
column that speaks to the cranky soul of every middle-aged hacker. It was he who implored golf-course designers to make sure all putts break to the left.

“There ought to be an easy way to do this, modern turf and drainage and bulldozers being what they are,” Jenkins wrote. “Nobody can make a putt that breaks to the right. It’s unnatural. Unless you’re left-handed, of course.”

As an editorial counterpoint to the stroke-saving tips, equipment reviews and humorous commentary, golf magazines always include at least one stealth zinger that’s guaranteed to poleaxe your self-esteem.

The most unnerving golf fact I’ve ever seen in print: Justin Timberlake plays to a 6-handicap.

This is no joke.
Golf Digest
ranked the top one hundred musicians who golf as a hobby and, being a music fan, I’d skimmed the list with innocent curiosity.

Kenny G, who plays to a +0.6, is number one. That’s all right, as I have no strong feelings about Kenny G’s work; it’s gotten me through many long elevator rides.

Interestingly, among musician-golfers the prevailing genre is country. Low-scoring stars include Vince Gill (0), Steve Azar (0.9), George Strait (8.4) and Kix Brooks (10). I’ve got no problem with those guys, either. Country music is fine.

Nor would I mind getting whupped on a golf course by rock legends such as Alice Cooper (5.3), Robby Krieger (6.8), Roger Waters (11.7) or Glenn Frey (12.6). It would, in fact, be a trip.

Likewise, any player of my generation would be pleased to know he could unholster a shaky 15-plus handicap and tee off without shame in a foursome including Stephen Stills (15.1), Neil Young (18.6) and Bob Dylan (17). (Children of the Sixties might find it difficult to picture Dylan in a pastel pullover and two-toned FootJoys. Yet perhaps “Blowin’ in the Wind” was never intended as a social anthem; perhaps Bob was waxing about the seventh tee at Pebble Beach.)

The list of golfing musicians was entertaining, but of course I couldn’t enjoy it for the harmless celebrity froth that it was. No, I had to lock on to that single, ego-stomping tidbit:

Justin Timberlake plays to a 6.

Meaning that the former star of a hip-hopping, lip-syncing boy band can kick my sorry ass all over the links. That’s harsh.

I own no ’N Sync CDs, nor can I name a single hit song that the group ever recorded (although I’m told there were many). I wasn’t even sure who Timberlake was before he untethered Janet Jackson’s left breast during that Super Bowl halftime show, an act infinitely more forgivable in my view than carrying a 6-handicap.

Emotionally, I can handle being a worse golfer than Engel-bert Humperdinck (8.1), or Michael Bolton (10.1), or even—God help me—Pat Boone (14.8).

Not Justin Timberlake. Please.

True, by all accounts he’s a decent guy. Loves animals. Sends roses to his mom on her birthday. He even hosts a PGA tournament that benefits the Shriners Hospitals for Children.

But he was in a freakin’ boy band, okay? He
cannot
be such an excellent golfer. It just ain’t right.

If the kid’s fudging his handicap, he’s not alone. The
Golf Digest
survey included a disclaimer saying that while some of the handicap indexes came from the USGA, others were provided by the musicians, their pals or publicists.

Snoop Dogg claims to be an 18, and who without a concealed-weapons permit would dare challenge him on that? On the other hand, when does Céline Dion (an alleged 16.8) have time for golf? She does, what—twenty-nine shows a week in Vegas?

You can definitely sniff PR weasels behind the scenes, over-promoting their clients. Yet even if Timberlake is an honest 10- or even a 12-handicap, that’s still stunningly good golf for someone who sings falsetto and shaves with a cereal boxtop.

Golf Digest,
which is keen on lists, also publishes an annual handicap sheet for the top two hundred CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies. As a group the CEOs are better golfers than musicians, which isn’t surprising. Corporate big shots spend a lot more time on the course. Fifty-seven percent of those polled in 2006 said they play at least thirty rounds every year, which would be hard to do if one was touring with a globe-trotting boy band.