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Ready to come out swinging
Sports Illustrated senior writer John Garrity was a 42-year-old eight handicapper when he suddenly lost his swing. Since December 1989 he has been looking for it -- a modern-day Odysseus adrift on the troubled waters of swing theory. As Garrity travels the world reporting on golf, he visits as many driving ranges as he can, avoiding the dreaded "mats only" ranges that prevent him from teeing it up. Wednesday, Jan. 24 SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Here's my current swing thought: I'd like to take a swing at the airline employee who left my golf clubs sitting on the luggage cart in Phoenix yesterday. As I explained last time, that snafu disrupted my day-trip golf lesson with Rob Stanger and forced me to spend an unplanned night and day in Palm Springs. Wednesday I flew back to Phoenix, waited about 40 minutes in baggage claim for my clubs, and then rolled them into the terminal parking garage. What did I find on the windshield of my rental car? A $50 parking ticket for leaving the car overnight in short-term parking. At least my room was waiting for me here on North Scottsdale Road. I half expected to find it ransacked and my laptop stolen. Screw this. I'm going down to the whirlpool and steep in hot water until my annoyance subsides. Friday, Jan. 26 Tiger Woods shot a 2-over-par 73 Friday in the Phoenix Open. It broke his streak of 53 straight PGA Tour rounds of par or better, and it gave him the opportunity to say what he always says when he doesn't have his "A" game: "The club kept getting stuck behind me." Tiger, like all of us, has tendencies -- bad habits that return whenever he drops his guard. My tendency -- the flaw that has crippled my game ever since I put on that straightjacket at the golf school 11 years ago -- is a faulty swing sequence. Brian Mogg spotted it the first time he gave me a lesson at the David Leadbetter Academy in Orlando. He described it as a failure to shift my weight forward before I started the downswing with my arms. Three days ago, on the private lesson tee at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Rob Stanger went to work on the same flaw. "It's a common problem," he said. "Your upper body and lower body start the downswing together. But if you look at any athletic move that involves hitting or throwing a ball" -- he motioned as if to pitch a baseball, lifting his left leg and stepping forward while his right arm was still reaching back -- "you see that your body moves forward and the arm follows. It's the rotation of the body that provides the power. The arm supplies guidance and control." I had a sand wedge in my hand. I was hitting 25-yard pitches to a practice green -- chip shots, really -- while Rob tried to increase my swing awareness. "Rotation and support," he said, making sure that I moved into a follow-through that put my weight directly over my left foot with my right foot on its toe (the "support," like a bicycle kickstand). Whenever I hit a shot with perfect tempo and ideal flight characteristics, he would ask me to repeat the swing with my eyes closed. "Work on your awareness," he said. "This is your perfect swing. You have to make it belong to you, and to do that you have to know exactly what it feels like. You have to increase your awareness." (Awareness has always been a problem for me. When Brian asks me what my swing feels like, I usually have to shrug and admit I don't know. I have a holistic view of the downswing as a brisk, one-piece WHOOOSH. This view, apparently, is misguided.) Anyway, Rob got me hitting some wonderful pitching wedges to a target green about 100 yards away. He made me conscious of both my body rotation, which controls distance and gets the clubhead moving down the proper path toward the target, and my hand rotation, which dictates whether the club face is open, square or slightly closed at impact. Coordinating both rotations simultaneously was difficult, but several times I got it right, trapping the ball against the turf with a slightly closed club face while keeping the clubhead traveling down the target line. Those shots checked up beautifully, a few feet from the pin. The next day, Rob had me warm up on the members end of the range while he gave an hour lesson to a young female touring pro from Japan. He then gave me the kind of golf lesson every hacker dreams of -- a playing lesson on the Mission Hills Country Club Tournament Course. I have long admired this layout, having covered about 10 Dinah Shore/Nabisco Championships there in recent years, but I had never played it until Wednesday afternoon. I was not disappointed. The Tournament Course is challenging without resorting to gimmickry, and it's a treat to walk among the tall eucalyptus trees while looking up at the San Jacinto Mountains. I had a blast. More than that, I got an extraordinary lesson from Rob, who talked me through my round while playing his own ball with an almost heedless dispatch. (Watching him eagle the second hole while devoting full attention to my swings and strategy was an eye opener.) There was hardly anybody on the course, so he gave me the occasional mulligan on a drive or long iron. "Try that again," he would say, watching one of my drives soar off into the tree line on the right, "only, concentrate on your hand rotation." More often than not, my second attempt resulted in a solid draw into the center of the fairway. But then, that's the story of my life. I'm the greatest mulligan player since Bill Clinton. It was almost dark and a bit chilly when we got to the 18th hole, a long par 5 with water down the left side and an island green. Rob, who had put on a jacket and earmuffs, tried to reach the green in two by hitting a driver off the deck from about 250 yards. Uncharacteristically, he smother-hooked it into the water on the left. "Well," he said with a smile," that's why you don't try that shot too often." I, meanwhile, showed some Midwestern grit by finishing in short sleeves. My mulligan drive split the fairway, my 6-iron layup pull-hooked way left into the rough on a grassy peninsula, and my wedge approach, while not flushed, flew over a hundred or so milling ducks and found the middle of the green. Fortunately, I three-putted from 35 feet and didn't have to dive into the water like the Nabisco winners. I changed shoes in a hurry, tossed my golf bag into the trunk and hustled off to the airport to catch my 6:20 flight. But before I left, Rob gave me a three-part homework assignment: 1) Keep working on my awareness; hit a lot of short irons with the proper swing sequencing and then try to achieve the same feeling with the longer clubs. He wants me to take practice swings with my eyes closed until I can do it without falling on my face on the follow through. 2) Work on rotating my hands through impact, "trapping" the ball for maximum compression while preventing the clubhead from exiting left -- my other crippling tendency. And, 3) Find an airline that carries passengers and their golf clubs on the same plane. He'll check on my progress in March, when I return to Mission Hills for the Nabisco Championships. Watch this space for another installment of Mats Only. To send John Garrity
advice, share your experiences, or suggest a driving range, click here.
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