I’ve been teaching a friend to play golf from scratch. He was 49-years-old when we started. The only other person I attempted this with is our three kids when they were very young.
Teaching someone one-on-one in a complex sport like golf, with all its intricacies, could turn south for many reasons. First, to really teach, you need a level of expertise, which I don’t have.
For someone to get good at anything, you have to learn the fundamentals. Then practice, get feedback, practice again, expand the lessons and repeat. The formula itself isn’t complicated. Execution is a different story. And with golf – this frustrating, crazy, counter-intuitive sport – there are so many different ways you can choose to get someone started that it is difficult to even know where to begin.
What I did was go back to the beginning. Think through what you want to accomplish: hit the ball where you want it; come to understand which clubs to use in which situations; how to moderate your swing depending on your distance to the whole; gauge yardage; establish a very basic stance and grip you trust.
In golf, that’s barely a start. You can get into how the wind affects your ball. The type of grass you get with your lie and how you adjust. How temperature affects the distance of your drives. The list (once you take a friend to the links) is seemingly endless, because there is always more to learn. Which, of course, is one of the great allures of golf.
Both of us have benefitted from this incremental process. As you teach someone, you learn. You understand the purpose behind technique.
The very first day we went to the range after practicing putting, which I’d slimmed down to these two points: distance and direction. Determine the distance and direction, then hit the putt.
From there, we started with the wedge, the mostly highly lofted club for the short shots. After getting his stance and grip into a rudimentary acceptable range, I mentioned looking at where he wanted to hit the ball, and how far he wanted to hit it. We took it slow and short. Hit it 50 yards. Which means not taking a full swing.
We worked on that concept. Golf is not about clobbering the ball every time. Instead, each club and swing has its own background. I didn’t want him starting out swinging for the fences. As a former baseball player, he would have loved to swing away.
He whiffed a few times, feebly rolled a few, and occasionally popped a couple in the air as the bag of balls diminished. Several ended up down the hill from the practice box. No one else was there, so we trudged down and I had him hit the ball from a downhill lie.
This was one of those epiphanies – moving from flat turf to a hill. He looked back at me with wide eyes, like, “What the heck do I do now?” And I realized how the littlest things can baffle us and we must adjust, whether in golf or life.
I talked him through it, letting him know how the direction and trajectory of the shot would change based on downhill, uphill or sidehill lies. He understood the concept, and nodded, but it will be a long time before he gets that feel.
That short conversation sparked my own awareness-raising round – learning by going back to ground zero and coming to recognize why we have to change our mindset so frequently on the golf course to be successful. It’s tremendously difficult. No one, and I mean NO ONE, ever fully masters golf. The sport humbles us all. But golf continues to teach. I’m thankful for my friend giving me this opportunity to learn and grow again. I may not play better, but I know more.
Teaching someone one-on-one in a complex sport like golf, with all its intricacies, could turn south for many reasons. First, to really teach, you need a level of expertise, which I don’t have.
For someone to get good at anything, you have to learn the fundamentals. Then practice, get feedback, practice again, expand the lessons and repeat. The formula itself isn’t complicated. Execution is a different story. And with golf – this frustrating, crazy, counter-intuitive sport – there are so many different ways you can choose to get someone started that it is difficult to even know where to begin.
What I did was go back to the beginning. Think through what you want to accomplish: hit the ball where you want it; come to understand which clubs to use in which situations; how to moderate your swing depending on your distance to the whole; gauge yardage; establish a very basic stance and grip you trust.
In golf, that’s barely a start. You can get into how the wind affects your ball. The type of grass you get with your lie and how you adjust. How temperature affects the distance of your drives. The list (once you take a friend to the links) is seemingly endless, because there is always more to learn. Which, of course, is one of the great allures of golf.
Both of us have benefitted from this incremental process. As you teach someone, you learn. You understand the purpose behind technique.
The very first day we went to the range after practicing putting, which I’d slimmed down to these two points: distance and direction. Determine the distance and direction, then hit the putt.
From there, we started with the wedge, the mostly highly lofted club for the short shots. After getting his stance and grip into a rudimentary acceptable range, I mentioned looking at where he wanted to hit the ball, and how far he wanted to hit it. We took it slow and short. Hit it 50 yards. Which means not taking a full swing.
We worked on that concept. Golf is not about clobbering the ball every time. Instead, each club and swing has its own background. I didn’t want him starting out swinging for the fences. As a former baseball player, he would have loved to swing away.
He whiffed a few times, feebly rolled a few, and occasionally popped a couple in the air as the bag of balls diminished. Several ended up down the hill from the practice box. No one else was there, so we trudged down and I had him hit the ball from a downhill lie.
This was one of those epiphanies – moving from flat turf to a hill. He looked back at me with wide eyes, like, “What the heck do I do now?” And I realized how the littlest things can baffle us and we must adjust, whether in golf or life.
I talked him through it, letting him know how the direction and trajectory of the shot would change based on downhill, uphill or sidehill lies. He understood the concept, and nodded, but it will be a long time before he gets that feel.
That short conversation sparked my own awareness-raising round – learning by going back to ground zero and coming to recognize why we have to change our mindset so frequently on the golf course to be successful. It’s tremendously difficult. No one, and I mean NO ONE, ever fully masters golf. The sport humbles us all. But golf continues to teach. I’m thankful for my friend giving me this opportunity to learn and grow again. I may not play better, but I know more.