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Fine start ends in cyber plea for help
Sports Illustrated senior writer John Garrity was a 42-year-old 8 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. Sunday, April 22 GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Yes, I've been on vacation. No, I haven't been playing golf. So it was a treat to slip out on the University of Florida course this afternoon and play a few holes by myself. And I do mean by myself. The SEC Women's Championship had finished up, so the course was virtually empty. First, I spent close to an hour hitting balls on the private end of the range. (They don't stack the balls in pyramids in Gatorland; they pile them up in a "UF" formation.) Then I walked over to the 13th fairway and started playing holes. I had only four clubs (3-wood, 6-iron, 8-iron and gap wedge) and three range balls. No putter. No golf shoes. Didn't affect my score, of course. I can kick the ball in the hole with my Clarks of England shoes as easily as I can putt it. I hit the ball pretty well on the golf course, but I struggled on the range. Or rather, I struggled on the range after I started fiddling with my swing. I began by hitting my gap wedge to the second target green, about 80 yards away. I took easy swings and dialed up the 12 o'clock position on my followthrough; that is, I tried to make the clubface vertical when the shaft was roughly parallel to the ground after impact. (Twelve o'clock, as my West Coast swing coach Rob Stanger has explained to me, produces a straight shot; one o'clock produces a fade; and 11 o'clock creates a draw. Eight o'clock, I gather, results in a broken collarbone.) Most of the time, I succeeded in hitting a crisp shot that landed within 20 feet of the flag and stopped dead after one bounce. Good stuff. Then I tried swinging into the 1 o'clock position. Trouble. I hit everything fat. Chunk, chunk, chunk -- it sounded like I was beating a rug. Big slabs of turf flew down range like clumsy geese. I was hitting from a very tight lie, and I figured it was just a case of there being no room to slide the club under the ball. I hit a few more 12 o'clock shots, and everything was fine. I moved up to the 8-iron and hit four good, solid shots to a target about 150 yards away. But when I tried to dial up 11 o'clock and hit a draw, I pulled the shot instead. And pulled. And pulled. The more I tried to close the clubface while keeping the tip of the shaft pointing along the target line, the more to the left my shots went. Pretty soon, the ball was curving left to right in a high, weak fade. My confidence was fading, too. I could feel my hands tightening on the grip, and I could tell that I was starting to pull the club down to the ball with my arms instead of swinging it in tempo. Furthermore, my divots had changed shape: from square to narrow; from relatively flat to a steep gouge. In my efforts to turn the clubface to 11 o'clock, I was obviously casting or flipping the club to a closed position, causing the clubhead to exit left with the toe down. The deep divot told me something, too: that I had probably moved the ball too far back in my stance. I stopped trying to hook the ball, moved it forward a couple of inches, and returned to my 12 o'clock swing. I immediately hit some shots that flew past the flag with just a hint of draw. Conclusion: My software still has a few bugs. It's time to call Technical Support. Monday, April 23 GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- I spent the morning in a conference room at the University of Florida football stadium and my lunch hour in the woods. (For details, check out the next installment of This Old Course which appears in the Golf Plus section of Sports Illustrated and here at cnnsi.com.) Afterwards, I sent an anxious e-mail to Rob in California, something along the lines of, "Can't swing to 11 o'clock, clubhead and ball exit left." Here's the plan. Rob will diagnose my problem and reply in the form of an e-lesson, which I will link to in my next column. In addition, Rob is going to prepare some additional swing lessons for the Mats Only archives. This will create an almost seamless bridge between my ineptitude and his aptitude. All this at no additional cost to you, the reader. 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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