It’s funny the way you learn things. More than 10 years after I
first picked up a golf club, I’m just now learning how to hit the
ball. The pros call it “ball-striking.” They talk about it all the
time.
When you take golf lessons, or when a friend shows you how to
play, no one ever shows you the clubhead up close and holds it next
to the ball and says, “Now, hit this part of the ball with this
part of the club face.” Instead, the teacher shows you how to grip
the club, how to “address” the ball (how to stand up while
hitting), how to take the club back and keep the left arm straight,
how to swing “from the inside,” oh, the whole arcane mystery of the
golf swing, of which there seems to be more at every turn.
The premise, as golf iconoclast A.J. Bonar says in his video
instruction series, “The Truth About Golf” (www.ajgolf.com), is that
a perfect swing will produce a perfect hit on the ball. Which of
course it doesn’t all the time. A.J. then proceeds to demonstrate
hitting the golf ball perfectly while standing on one leg or the
other, off balance, simulating an injured right or left arm, etc.
(I bought the A.J. videos used for half price, and would not
discourage anybody from looking at them; I learned a lot, even if I
do not yet hit the ball perfectly.)
And A.J. does tell his viewers where to hit the ball: on the
equator, on the fifth groove up from the bottom of the clubface.
Got that? In John Feinstein’s A Good Walk Spoiled, he
describes how professional golfers have a worn smooth spot about
the size of a dime on the faces of their irons, at just about that
spot. That’s where they hit the ball.
ANYONE WHO HAS EVER SPENT TIME trying to hit a golf ball finds this
sort of precision nearly unbelievable. But we all know what it
feels like when we do hit a ball on that spot. It leaps off the
club at impact. It feels wonderful. It flies.
Consistent contact lets you do everything important to good
golf: hit the ball in the direction you want, for the distance you
want, at the trajectory you want. Pros who saw him practice still
speak in awed tones of Ben Hogan’s ball striking, of the sound the
club made when it hit the ball. Autodidact Hogan “dug it out of the
dirt,” as he said of his technique. And he probably began the trend
of thought that equated a perfect swing with perfect ball contact,
with his groundbreaking book Five Lessons in the Modern
Fundamentals of Golf. Indeed, he was the first golfer ever to
practice in a systematic way.
Good ball-striking wins. Bart Bryant won the season-ending Tour
Championship, a big-money tournament limited to the top 30 money
winners of the past year. Through the 72-hole event, Bryant put 45
out of 56 tee shots on par-4 or par-5 fairways, and hit 58 of 72
greens “in regulation” (one shot for a par-3, two shots for a
par-4, three shots for a par-5).
Those two statistics, driving accuracy and greens in regulation,
or g.i.r., make up what is less formally known as “ball striking”
on the stat-heavy PGA Tour. For the past year, the Tour leaders in
those categories were Jeff Hart, with a 76 percent mark in driving
accuracy, and Sergio Garcia, with a g.i.r. of 71.8 percent.
Beat the averages like Bryant did, and if you can putt a lick,
as the old-timers say, you can make a mighty comfortable
living.
ONE BUGGY FLORIDA NIGHT my wife and I went looking for a place to
practice our golf games. We found the funkiest looking driving
range I’ve ever seen just off several miles of boulevard
construction work in West Palm Beach, a shack, a vending machine
for the ancient golf balls, and chewed up tiny astroturf mats aimed
out at an expanse of lumpy untended ground. Out there, in the
steamy darkness, feeble lights illuminated distance signs: 100,
150, 200, 250, and, half-lost in the buggy mist, 300 yards.
As we lofted our modest practice short irons out toward the
100-yard sign, a beat-up pickup parked. A skinny young man in jeans
and his daughter of about eight got out. Dad hefted a big golf bag
out of the truck bed for himself and a small bag for his girl. They
set themselves up and began to swing, and the man and I struck up
an easy conversation, as you will on a practice range, about irons
and how they were made and what the benefits were of various kinds
of them.
“I got these Hogans,” he said (whack!), “a few years back for
about $150. Pretty good deal.”
I told him about the set of Powerbilts I had found for the same
money in an old repair shop, and how I had bought them mainly as
practice clubs. Forged irons, favored highly in the pro ranks over
the cast clubs most amateurs play (for the bigger club faces and
perimeter weighting for easier hitting), are supposed to give you
more feel.
“I guess they do,” (whack!). “Especially the long clubs.” Barely
warmed up, he pulled a 2-iron, a club scarcely lofted at all, and
very hard to hit because of that, and dragged a ball over to
address position with the club head.
Then he drew the club back and hit it, standing there as he did
a scant six feet from me. The dead old range ball took off like a
rocket, high, with a gentle hook to it, and fell to earth in the
dim distance near the 250 sign.
“Always hook my irons a little,” he said. “I guess I could fade
it if I tried.”
He powered another 2-iron Atlas missile into the sky, and this
one fell gently to the right at the end of its flight, still out
near the 250 mark. He hit several more. I wanted to melt into the
molten impact of iron on ball, to learn, to feel how it was
done.
But it is still a mystery to me, that gift. A young man on a
driving range in Florida had it. There was no brag in him. It made
me want to ask things like, “Who are you?” Maybe some pro slumming
it? I don’t think so.
So we practiced side by side, and I said, “Beautiful.”
