On Friday, during last week’s AC Championship at the Doral
Resort and Spa, television announcer Nick Faldo started with a joke
about not knowing who was who among the golfers on the course,
because so many of them had decided to wear orange shirts.
A quick photomontage of the day’s competitors showed Tiger
Woods, Charles Howell III, Henrik Stenson, Chris DiMarco, Zach
Johnson, and Karl Petterson, all wearing shirts of similar color.
It does not do it justice to describe it as “orange,” however. Last
year, I remarked to my wife that it had obviously become the new
fashion color in golf.
I would call the color “tangerine.” Nike — which Woods endorses
— calls it “bright Mandarin.” Callaway — Charles Howell III —
goes conventional, with “juice orange.” Ashworth uses “sunrise
orange.” Plain old Ping — plain old Chris DiMarco — calls it
plain old “orange.”
Anyway, it’s funny, and it was funny so see so many golfers, all
of them dressed head to toe by their sponsors — something new in
the past couple of years, and a generally salutary trend — all
wearing much the same thing on the same day, and generally not
acting like actresses at the Oscars who accidentally bought the
same dress.
WHY DON’T ORDINARY GOLFERS IMPROVE? They don’t, by the way. Year
after year, the United States Golf Association collects statistics
to prove that golfers, by and large, shoot about 100, and that’s
where they stay. Trainer Roger Fredericks says it’s because golfers
lose their flexibility, or don’t have enough flex to begin with. In
his infomercial for his stretching program, he makes a compelling,
and very funny, case, gently satirizing the kinds of swings and
body types one sees on the golf course, and, indeed, in everyday
life.
Other purveyors of golf instruction devices say it’s because
golfers don’t swing on the proper path or don’t muster enough swing
speed or don’t make a complete turn, or any number of other
reasons. I have just finished re-reading, for the umpteenth time,
Ben Hogan’s classic Five Lessons in the Modern Fundamental of
Golf, from the 1950s. Very little in golf teaching did Hogan
fail to anticipate. Hogan says that anyone who learns the basics
properly can break 80. That may be something like Bach saying to a
student, “Why can’t you do it? You have five fingers the same as I
do.”
But Hogan may be right, too. If he is, the reason why golfers
don’t improve is simple: They don’t practice. When they do
“practice,” they go to a driving range and beat balls until their
muscles go numb, but they simply practice the same old mistakes
they’ve always made.
Practice, as I have learned from having played a number of
musical instruments at a professional level, means doing something
systematic every day, according to a proper technique.
So if you buy, say, a weighted golf club in order to strengthen
your swing muscles and help groove a better swing technique, and
then do not use it in a systematic way, you will not improve. That
club has to be regarded just like a dumbbell. And if you wanted to
use a dumbbell to build your biceps, you would have to do, say,
three sets of a dozen curls at a weight that challenged your
strength, every day.
Instead, like every other kind of exercise equipment, golf
instruction aids probably get bought. And then lie around a
basement or a garage, unused.
Most golfers don’t improve for the same reason most people don’t
improve at anything. They will not commit to systematic, proper
practice. It gets at the very essence of human nature. We will
spend amazing amounts of energy to stay just as we are. People
willing to spend energy to change can accomplish prodigious
things.
BACK IN THE EARLY NINETIES, CBS golf broadcaster Ben Wright got
himself in a lot of trouble. He gave an intemperate interview to a
local newspaper reporter, Valerie Helmbreck, in which he said that
women’s golf suffered in popularity because there were too many
lesbians in it. He said women couldn’t swing properly because
“their boobs get in the way.” That and other things of alarming
insensitivity and cloddishness.
Initially, CBS rallied behind their man, conveying insulting
impressions of Helmbreck, who was all things Ben Wright was not:
female, an outsider, a small-timer. But Michael Bamberger dug into
the issue and broke the stonewall. Helmbreck’s reporting was true.
Wright really had said all those things. And CBS fired him.
Wright, with his rich Oxbridgean baritone, marvelous stock of
golf lore, and florid announcing style, has been bouncing around
small-potatoes broadcasting ever since, cast down from the heights.
But there is more to the story than just that.
Wright, on the air, and Helmbreck, very circumspectly, have
confirmed that, some time after the original incident, Wright got
in touch with the local reporter and apologized to her. And she
accepted his apology.
From here, I go on inference and a kind of radar. CBS’s announce
crew used to be a very hard-drinking bunch. Pat Summerall retired
just ahead of the boot, as it were. Wright, after his fall from
glory, got sober. And, in the language of recovery programs, he
“made amends” to people he had harmed.
Including Valerie Helmbreck.
