Sure Cures

We bought TOP TIPS, and we now have little stickers on the butt end of each of our grips, diagramming exactly how to address the ball for that particular club. There is no way to look cool with a Top Tip on the end of your driver. We paid $44.95 for the IMPACT BAG. It's specially designed to teach you the feeling of impact. You fill it up with sheets, towels, anything you like, and zip it up. Then you place the bag against an immovable object and swing your club into it. Or you could not blow the 45 smackers and use a pillowcase instead.

We even tried buzzing things. The SWINGTHING, which you attach to the shaft, beeps every time you swing faster than your preset swing speed. If you're swinging correctly, the beep should come at or after impact. If you're not, the beep comes before. But anything you might learn is lost in the embarrassment of standing on the driving range sounding like the Roadrunner.

Still, we never found a droopy-knee breakthrough until we discovered the STABLE FLEXOR, a molded piece of plastic that straps around your right knee to keep it from drooping during the backswing. Wearing the Stable Flexor makes you feel like Walter Brennan, because you are not able to stand up straight. But it seemed to do a nice job on the droopy knees. On a golfer's scale, we gave it a par. Only, for some reason, when we took it off to play, we hit everything thin.

"Looking up," said Carnac between sips.

Any blowhard with no more golf knowledge than Donna Reed can tell when you're looking up. Personally, we've always looked up, in case the tree was sending our Titleist back at our head. Still, we decided to beat this dread disease.

We came upon a man named Leo M. Kelly Jr., of the Old Chicago Golf Shop. Kelly showed us that people have been trying to cure lookuppedness for centuries. In 1940 they used the GOLF TRAINING RACK, a football helmet attached to a metal pipe. You simply stuck your head in the helmet, strapped yourself in, snookered down into your stance and swung. You were guaranteed to keep your head down. Keeping your spine attached to your neck was the problem.

In 1925 a man named William Goldworthy rigged up a sharp hook to the golfer's hat. If the golfer lifted his head, the hook would snatch off his cap. Or, possibly, half his forehead. This became known as Death by Goldworthy.

In the 1970s there were the GOLF GLASSES, a pair of glasses that were opaque except for a half-inch vertical strip across the center. The idea was that if you moved your head, you lost sight of the ball. We tried it. Didn't work.

We found some spectacles at Golf House, the USGA's headquarters in Far Hills, N.J., that have a little tube attached to each lens. If you move your head, you lose sight of the ball. Also great for diamond cutting.

These days, the hopeless up-looker can try the CROTCH HOOK, available in fine stores everywhere, in which you attach a Velcro strap to your head and a metal hook to your crotch, and then swing. This is amazingly efficient in keeping the head down. Unfortunately, it also results in numerous lost golf balls because you cannot look up to see where your ball went until someone comes along and frees you.