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One Under Par
Volume 7, number 1.

A Newsletter fromKeyGolf.....February, 2006

Arguing with An Expert...Is it OK to Challenge An Idol?
What follows is a quote from March, 2006 Golf Digest....

Last Thought Before I Swing (by Tom Watson, for Golf Digest)

"Hint: It's the same for every club

My last thought before I start the swing? It has to do with rhythm rather than mechanics. Usually I remind myself to swing to a count of "one. ..two" with a pause in between.

I want the club to swing like a pendulum. A pendulum goes back smoothly, changes direction smoothly, goes forward smoothly. I also want to swing every club at the same, easy pace. The long clubs take a little more time to swing, but the tempo should not get faster.

Another good overall rhythm image is to picture in your mind a player whose tempo you admire. It might be a tour player like Ernie Els or a good player at your course.

My natural rhythm is fast, but it still needs to be controlled and consistent. Most weekend golfers speed up their swings with the longer clubs and have trouble making solid contact. When your rhythm is too fast, you must recognize it to be able to slow it down.

The first foot of your takeaway pretty much sets your swing rhythm. All the more reason to make your last thought about rhythm."

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We have always revered the likes of Palmer, Whitworth, Jones, Watson, Nicklaus, Lopez, Player, Trevino, Hagen, Lema, Didrikson, Nelson, Hogan, Berg, Snead, Geiberger, Locke and Carner. Today's fields give us so many that to name more than Annika and Tiger might get us into a list too long to publish.

Now, after we include "respect" along with "revered" it is not a long journey to run afoul of all the avid players out there. So we know to tread softly when putting up a challenge to anyone on the "can do no wrong" list. Admittedly, it is a bit hard to step aside from "the box" and promote an idea whose time we feel has come, especially when, at the very same time, in a time-honored fashion, one of golf's heroes is promoting a point of view that is not only a direct opposite of what we have found to be true, but contains a false premise, coming from an "expert," that makes the truth from our mouth sound like a mistake. In other words, in Olde English tradition, bow first before approaching the throne.

The brief article by Tom Watson quoted above caused us to shudder a bit. Not because it's a particularly "bad" or "poor" idea, but because it contains a recipe for misperception by most, if not all, golfers. It sounds "good," but it places an exception to natural law in the hands of less talented golfers (than Tom), like a loaded gun with no safety in the hands of an inexperienced shootist. We admire and have no wish to discredit Tom. Rather, we prefer to correct a fault in perception, that has arisen in all of us, from our reverence toward tour players and gurus, that has been enticing us much too long. There is ample reason to believe that even those named above have lived their golf lives under the same veil of missing or misappropriated information, just like the rest us. Except those on our "list" have exceptional talent and get/got away with only minor abrasions and bruises, where the important stuff the rest of us missed, left us with "cuts and broken bones." We are not interested in fixing blame, and even if we were, we would not know where to place it, and that is not even the issue here. We are merely saying that it is high time to set the record straight. This is not "Lost" or "Survivor." But it certainly is a "reality game."

It is quite clear that the golf "universe" has long been mesmerized and restricted by ideas and thought processes that have been and continue to be weighed down by faulty or missing information. Where that has been the case, the space got filled in with guess-work and opinions that may have worked for a champion somewhere, sometime. Enter the dynamic called "I have got to figure this out," and you have a recipe for jumping on a bandwagon about anything that contains some kind of promise. We don't have the information, so we cannot evaluate. Now the door is open to anything any "giant" may set forth, and quite often does.

We have no motive here, other than to try to bring what is missing to a level at which we do not have to struggle with our games due to irrelevant knowledge and dimensions that are hidden from our view.

As we have gone about, broaching these concerns in the past, we have often felt that we were either riding in a horse race or watching it unfold, with horses that were unable to leave the starting gate. We have repeated ourselves so many times, over so many years, that we finally feel it may be a lost cause to try to intervene in the kind of thinking that has, and will, ultimately sabotage any, if not all, golfers' games. What is scary is that the misinformation appears solidly stored in a locked steel and concrete vault so that it might as well be invisible. Even when it fleetingly becomes visible, it can't get past the ill-formed mental constructs that are bound by the repitition of history. Result: anything new or different gets missed or discounted. It's almost as if golfers, as a group, have a fixation on preserving the "same old thing," as if anything that doesn't fit the past mold has no place in the present. There is a principle of perception that says "We keep on seeing what we always saw."

So if Tom means what he says, and we have no reason to believe otherwise, his words pack the substance of that past, continuing to reinforce what leaves us, unbeknowns, on a limb, rather than bringing light to what is possible within natural, normal, human experience and limits. The problem, then, is as we suggest. Most folks have not really paused to consider what is natural and normal, and that appears to include Tom. They probably think, or believe, they have considered everything, but the evidence is otherwise. And the missing information keeps rearing its head through every purveyor out there.

Tom says, use a 1,2 swing count with a break in between. Now, that would work, if, in fact every human thought was consciously independent and if our thinking and our acting were naturally geared to the same identical speed or time frame. Or if there were no difference in the kind of thinking required to build skills and that required to construct habits. Or if our thinking did not affect whether our acting would be manually generated or automatically so. Or if there were no such thing as a nonconscious thought that could rush in to fill the vacuum at the "break in between." Or if Mother Nature had set it up so that skills and habits were the same thing, but she didn't do that.

Our thinking and acting do not follow the same time frame. And our thinking does, indeed, directly affect our actions. Not only that, but our thinking is largely nonconsciously driven, and getting to that medium is the only way to build, produce and use habits. Thinking and acting speeds are asynchronic and the conscious mind only involves about 3% of what is going on in our minds all the time. So Tom's 1,2 key is actually an accident waiting to happen. It is a trap that sooner or later will take a player down. Why? Because it forces the player to remain in the manual mode, with no way to use the highest level of one's development, even if the person already owns one. Maybe that does not reflect Tom's situation, since, one way or another, he has found his own way, (apparently), but the average golfer will be in a heap of trouble trying to imitate what he is suggesting. Either Tom doesn't realize that, or he knows what we are talking about and is toying with us, the latter of which we supect is highly doubtful.

There is, first of all, absolutely no way to get a golf swing moving, with the freedom of automatic, using a manual cue to get it there. We didn't make that up. Mother Nature installed it. Now if he means "rhythm" to be the last thing in pre-shot one should think about and then provides the necessary time to shift gears, that would keep company with the natural principle. But natural sequence is not in evidence in what the article says. One must have a way to free the action from the mental command system, not a way to lock it up. Tom's way locks it up, though it might be that he, and those living in the past, would argue to the contrary. That means that he has practiced in such a way that he believes what he does helps his rhythm, when in reality, his rhythm is so good already (he has Craftsman in him and rhythm is a "natural" for that style) that it is taking the lead over what he is saying (the numbers 1,2 in his key), not the other way around. To illustrate how that works, I may tell people I am taking my dog for a walk. The reality is she takes me where she wants to go. If I think I am the leader, I am only kidding myself. Tom has immense talent, lots of experience, and plenty of time to practice. He can make what he says work. That is said with my tongue in cheek, since he is not getting to automatic even if he thinks he is. He can't because one cannot utilize manual thinking to reach automatic unless that thinking has no manual context. Furthermore, the anxiety issue is omitted here as well, and that is just one more piece of the conspiracy of missing information. But Tom has such good skills they carry him through - as long as he can maintain his practice. One must keep practicing the same old things unless the automatic process and habit development have been firmly installed. Your skills and mine may not be that good. So we need the habits that perhaps Tom gets way without, thanks to his superb talent. We don't doubt that he has habits or that they are very good, but the reality is that doing what he says needs to be done, prevents getting to automatic, so his habits are going unused, and his skills are forced to carry the load. Fortunately, his are very good.

Read his words about rhythm. He even believes he must "work on that," in spite of the fact that one of his main trait sets comes from the Craftsman in his style and the only thing needed there is the ability to "turn it loose" - a function of automatic. Craftmen are naturally invested with the capacity for smooth rhythm and for built-in consistency, so long as they can get their games to automatic. What prevents that from happening for all Craftsmen is that they haven't mastered the automatic principle. And even Tom says he has to "keep what he is doing in view," which would not be the case if his level of mastery was based on the automatic principle. Keeping it "in view," defaults to manual, no matter how much we'd like it another way. He even suggests that a player should use someone like Els as a visual image. Well, that's fine if you are a Craftsman, and if your first name is Ernie, but if you are one of the other three styles, or not named Ernie, beware. That may take you where you did not want to go, since everyone is different and unique, and we cannot "do it" like anyone else.

He then says that he needs to "control" his rhythm, which is tantamount to confessing that he does not know his own style, proposing to himself that the only way to "control" things is to "make it consistent," and offers the "first foot" of takeaway as a vehicle of consistency. (That may be true, but the order of consideration reveals a forced process, not one that is comfortably built in and available for consistent transfer into one's game). If he has to work on it, that does not bid well for the rest of us, so long as we only continue depending on beliefs from the past.

So what? Our consideration here is to stress the importance of, and value for, those who play the game, to come face to face with issues that must be in the game plan and cannot be ignored or overlooked without serious consequences in results. It is time to entertain our own "Reality" and go to the next level.

If you have asked yourself recently, "Am I ready for the season upcoming?" and you have been listening here, it may occur to you that, if you have to ask yourself that question, you have yet to come upon the true meaning of our subject in this edition of the newsletter. If you don't have room for that challenege, that's OK. Just be aware that what Tom has said in his article, while doubtlessly vauable to him, has little value at all for your game, so you can dismiss it entirely and ask for your money back from Golf Digest. We must learn to go with principle, not some exception that may serve the giants of the game. We will still like and admire Tom.