Stubborn tendencies!

During our initial five golf lessons, Stan and I covered a number of golfing areas including driving, iron play, chipping, putting and bunkers.

Throughout this period, Stan worked hard to overcome his ‘stubborn’ tendencies and demonstrated significant improvement in his set-up, technique and stability.

Anyone who has ever played golf will be aware that there is a vast difference between hitting balls on the driving range and actually playing golf on the course.

This is why it was important for Stan and I to play nine holes together. I wanted to be sure that he could apply the changes we had made to his game when it mattered – on the golf course!

After a quick warm-up, we wandered over to the first tee and discussed the idea of picking a definite target, visualising the trajectory and letting the shot go.

I was optimistic after seeing Stan follow this routine correctly and demonstrate a beautiful practice swing with fantastic balance. Unfortunately, once he had set up the ball, the red mist descended and the very manly instinct to ‘kill’ the ball took over.

Naturally, the outcome was less than fantastic, quite the opposite in fact. It is always a nice feeling to have a long walk to your ball after you have hit your driver. However, it is preferable that this long walk is in the direction of the hole and not sideways.

 This was the first of many times in the early stages of the round where Stan demonstrated that he absolutely has the ability to complete his swing properly in practice but not so often in application!

One important thing to remember about golf is that the only thing you can control is your process (swing and balance) and the one thing you absolutely cannot control is the outcome. So, don’t let your instincts make you try to!

As the round progressed I was pleased to see Stan follow the routines that we had discussed, particularly in his short game.

One particular highlight was a pitch shot on the sixth hole where Stan took into account his club selection, landing area and the break of the green before demonstrating a deft touch to put the ball within three feet of the hole.

Additionally, Stan really started to compress the ball with his iron shots and showed a marked improvement in his alignment and balance. However, the pièce de résistance came on the seventh tee when we took time to go into greater detail about picking our target, narrowing our attentional focus and holding our balance after the practice swing whilst visualising the ‘perfect’ golf shot.

Stan had picked a white house on the horizon as his target and whilst I was delighted to see the ball fly directly towards this house, I got more satisfaction from watching Stan hold his balance until the ball landed, 220 yards later down the middle of the fairway.

Stan has a very good ability to play golf when he concentrates and attempts to apply the changes that we have discussed.

Unfortunately, he has very stubborn tendencies, very strong instincts (which don’t work for golf!) and doesn’t get enough time to practice.

The difficult thing about golf is that it is very tough to apply concepts that don’t feel ‘comfortable’ and you don’t necessarily trust without spending time practicing them.

This nine hole session showed me the best and the worst of Stan’s game. He knows what he needs to do to improve and his development will depend entirely on how much time he can devote to practicing what he’s learned.

Currently, his good shots are definitely good enough to get a very reasonable club handicap. The bad ones, however ...