Clobberin' Time

I hit the driving range yesterday in hopes of doing something to improve my desperately lacking tee shot. For the last couple weeks, if you had video taped me hitting my tee shots and then searching the hole high and low to find them, taken that video, sped it up and given it a theme song, the whole thing would bear more than a passing resemblance to this.

Seriously, though, a good tee shot for a man of my stature should be reasonably straight and about 250 yards. And the fact is, about a month ago, that's how I was hitting it: high, far, straight. I was King of the World, but in a less Leo DiCaprio-about-to-die-in-a-horrible-shipwreck kind of way.

You remember that old song "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is." Well, a hippie undoubtedly wrote that, but still. That's how I feel. I want to take my tee shot to the nostalgic 50s style diner in its poodle skirt and ask it "Baby, Baby, Where Did Our Love Go?" (While I'm thinking about that song, dig the Supremes singing it. Damn, they were cool. And yes, I know that was the 60s, not the 50s.)

I have a two phase approach to solving problems like this. First, I do quite a bit of on-range cursing, but don't worry. I try to keep it PG-13 since there are sometimes youngsters about. My rule of thumb is that if Homer Simpson wouldn't say it, I won't.

The second phase, involves lots and lots of repetition and observation. Once you know the basics of how a swing is supposed to work, you can just try to stick to them. Chances are pretty good that you're just screwing up one of the 7 or 8 things that makes a swing work.

In my case, there were two things happening: first, I was teeing the ball too high. Seriously, by poking the tee into the earth another quarter inch or so, it made a big difference because it meant I was hitting the ball with a meatier part of the club. Second, I was standing too close to the ball and therefore not getting enough leg power into it. All of a sudden, I was hitting like Tiger Woods' older (just a little bit older, btw), less talented, lighter skinned, handsomer cousin with better skills as an executive manager and entrepreneur.

Well, anyway, that's my theory, but once I made the shift, I was hitting about two-thirds of my bucket of balls into the back of the net, which was 240 or so yards away with a 3 wood. (By the way, a 3 wood is a big club, but not as big as the driver. It's the club you use for your tee shots when you've, for example, broken your driver into fun-sized pieces and are waiting for the good people at Taylormade to send you a replacement.)

But the main lesson I'd offer here is this: if something's broke in your golf game, go work on it. A little coaching is a great thing, and it's not that expensive. If you get two or three lessons when you're starting out, it's probably a hundred bucks or so. (And hey, maybe if you're a single gal, it's a good place to cruise a cute golf teacher. Not that I'm into that. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Once you've got that coaching though, just spend time on the problem. Focus, people. Try lots of things and see what makes a difference, and just keep trying to do the thing that worked.

Yes, I know, I'm a golf genius. How did I ever come up with such an outlandish method as Trial-and-Error?

Well, by trial and error, I suppose.