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Mixing the best of both worlds Posted: Tuesday July 16, 2002 11:50 AM
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. Tuesday, July 16 GULLANE, Scotland -- I had dinner last night in North Berwick with Jack McCallum , SI's highly regarded NBA writer. Afterward, we ducked into the grocer's, where I bought four Cadbury chocolate bars with hazelnuts. I eat several of these a day when I'm in the U.K. They are great sources of energy and are nutritionally superior to the wan-looking cereals and gruels that the food police prescribe. (The American Cadbury bars, incidentally, are fraudulent bars manufactured by Hershey out of painted polystyrene and packing peanuts. They will not melt on a car hood in the desert, and they taste like they've been stored in a FEMA drum for 20 years.) Last summer, when I spent a week in Liverpool during a hot spell, the clerk at a newsstand politely declined to sell me a Cadbury bar. "The chocolate's soft," he said. "It isn't up to snuff." Two days later, in cooler weather, he sold me a half-dozen bars. If only my golf game responded so readily to a change in climate. A modest heat wave in Kansas City kept me indoors last week, but cooler air finally drifted down from Canada. On Friday I hit some balls in a southerly direction at the Milburn Country Club range, and on Saturday morning I drove out to the Blue River Golf Academy to practice hitting balls to the north. Sad to say, most of my shots went either east or west. As so often happens, I'm currently caught in a trough between two warring principles. On the one hand, I am totally committed to the swing method taught by my Mats Only neighbor, Rob Stanger. On the other hand, I am a true believer in the tempo-training trail blazed by my Kansas City pal, John Novosel. Each of these methods has cut 10 to 15 strokes off my handicap in the last year -- if you compute handicaps the way they do on infomercials. My Stanger swing, however, is still on training wheels. I can draw the ball or fade it, and I can control trajectory better than before, but I can only do these things at about 75 percent power level. If I have 140 yards to the green, for instance, I take an 8-iron instead of a 9 and pretend that I'm laying up. With the 3-wood or driver, I have to slow my swing down so much that I feel as if I am decelerating on the forward swing. I have hit some real rockets with this technique, but if I don't slow down enough I hit a snap hook. What I want to do is make a Stanger swing at a Novosel tempo. But so far, when I speed up and apply full power, I lose my feel for the clubhead and my ability to control the ball. This, of course, is what separates tournament pros from us hackers. Pros can control the clubface at very fast tempos; we hackers can't. Anyway, my Kansas City practice sessions set me back about two years. Playing Gullane No. 2 with McCallum yesterday afternoon, I spent most of my round in that lovely tall grass that looks so nice in photographs. And then I bought chocolate. I'm no psychologist, but even I see the connection. 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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