The Green Golfer is an ongoing column this summer featuring golf lessons from Past PGA of Canada president Barrie McWha at the Blue Ocean Golf Club and a journalist who has never golfed in his life.
I practised between lessons. Partly because practice (practice, practice) is what everyone tells you to do when learning something new, but also because hitting a few balls around my yard in the sun is a great way to spend an afternoon.
Canadian Tire has practice golf balls – they’re little orange whiffle balls that can’t break any windows or cause serious injury to my neighbours.
Practising helped (obviously), and when I got back on the course I was able to connect with the ball with a lot more frequency than last week.
I did get in trouble for wearing the wrong shoes. I was wearing flip-flops; it was a hot day. But Barrie is dead set against sandals on the golf course.
“Not nearly enough support,” he said.
We would not be going to the driving range today.
Golf sandals have become a bit of a trend, Barrie said. But he won’t even stock them in the Blue Ocean pro shop. So instead, we did chipping and putting.
The Lesson: We started with chipping. In this case, the ball has landed just short of the putting green and the goal of the shot is to pop the ball over the regular grass so it lands near the hole and – ideally – just rolls right in.
We used a 7-iron.
As Barrie explained it, the shorter the distance to your target, the shorter everything else needs to be as well. Hands need to slide farther down the grip of the club, feet are in closer together and closer to the ball, and the swing is shorter.
The full extension of the golf swing is easy to measure because you can look directly over your left (if you’re right handed) shoulder at the ball, and know if you are reaching too far or too short.
For chipping, you need to sort of estimate how far back your swing needs to go to get the ball far enough.
Really, what you should not be doing is thinking about how hard you want to hit the ball. Instead, if you concentrate on where you want the ball to land, your muscles will instinctively measure the length of the back swing for you. This is an example of the phrase “don’t overthink it,” which seems to come up in golf a lot.
The surface of the 7-iron is angled so that the ball lifts off in a nice arc on contact. Which means you only need to worry about hitting the ball; the lift is taken care of by the club itself.
The follow-through is what I had the most trouble with. The swing starts with a slight bend in the wrists for acceleration, and they straighten as the club gets closer to the ball. Everything should be in alignment at the moment of contact.
Wrists and elbows stay rigid as the follow-through releases the momentum from the backswing. As always, the backswing and follow-through are equal distance from centre.
I don’t really understand the science of it, but if you continue to flex your wrists into the follow-through, the ball basically just dies as soon as it’s off the tee.
Putting is a little bit different. It still follows the rule of “if the target is closer, everything is closer” but with a slightly different grip and swing.
The actual grip on a putter is flat along the front edge so that your thumbs can rest on it easily. The left hand stays the same as in a normal swing (like a thumbs up with a golf club in your hand), but the right hand now does basically the same thing as the left.
The right hand still overlaps the left like it does normally, but the right thumb and forefinger don’t connect. The right thumb sits just ahead and a bit on top of the left thumb, both extended along the flat part of the grip. Double thumbs up.
In the starting position you will be almost directly above the golf ball, with your feet hip distance apart. You never want your feet closer than that.
The putting swing is also a little different. Instead of really hitting the ball, the idea is to softly roll the ball with the putter. No acceleration.
The real challenge of putting is the slope and angle of the green you’re playing on, but that’s for another lesson.
I managed to get about three balls in the hole, and it was unbelievably satisfying. When I was growing up, I was so bad at sports that, even as an adult, the concept of actually getting the ball into the desired target – whether it be hole, net or Mayan death hoop – just never seemed possible to me.
I know it seems like a small thing, but seeing the ball go into the hole kind of made me feel like anything could be possible.
