The Green Golfer is an ongoing column this summer featuring golf lessons from PGA of Canada past-president Barrie McWha and a journalist who has never golfed in his life.
Back on the driving range, I hit what Barrie called a “learning plateau.”
This means that even though I was getting some of the basics down fairly readily in the first two lessons, we have now arrived at an impasse. That impasse is my shoulder rotation.
In the first lesson, we discussed the proper full extension of the golf swing. This is what I wrote:
“Keep your eyes on the ball as you coil your spine like a spring until your left shoulder rotates under your chin. Then uncoil it. Ideally, the golf club will follow the exact same trajectory it took on the way up, coming into contact with the ball at the base of the swing.”
This is not what I’m doing. I’m getting the first part right, the set up for the swing, but then something happens. Instead of swinging the club back along its trajectory, I hack at the ball like the golf club is a machete.
Although, speaking of the set up for the swing, Barrie had a few pointers for me.
The full golf swing is a completely fluid motion, but for the purposes of teaching it, Barrie broke it down into sections.
First, bring the club up so that the shaft is parallel to the ground. This offsets your weight just a little, so you will instinctively lean to the right (or left if you’re left handed). One of my problems was that I was leaning too far to the right. The weight shift should be subtle.
Once the shaft is parallel to the ground, your upper arms are pretty much done with their part of the swing. Next you hinge at the elbows, bringing the club up higher, followed by the wrists.
The right elbow and right wrist will end up bent at about 90 degrees.
As you uncoil your spine and straighten your arms, elbows and wrists, the acceleration of the club doubles at every flexion point. There’s a nice swish sound as it travels through the air.
My most significant problem was actually a pretty simple one. Right at the last second, I straighten my back just a little and miss the ball. This, as I mentioned earlier, is a problem stemming from my shoulder rotation – or lack thereof.
According to Barrie, the rotation needs to start with the shoulders and everything else just follows. I rotate at the hips, hence the machete swing.
Sometimes I clipped the ball with the bottom of the club, sometimes I just missed it entirely.
“The margin of error in golf is very thin,” Barrie told me. “The ball is only an inch and a half in diameter. If you’re out by a quarter inch, you’re OK, but if you’re out by half an inch, you don’t even hit it.”
I was pleased to find that even if I wasn’t making many solid connections with the ball, the ones I did hit were going more or less in the right direction.
