Handicaps

When people I don't know ask me on the golf course, "What's your handicap?" I usually answer weakness and arrogance.

But seriously, there's a better, simpler way to assign handicaps. The current method is to take the average of the best ten of your last 20 rounds (best in terms of score minus par rating) and multiply that by 0.96, and that's your "Index". Now divide that index by 113 (don't ask) and multiply the result by the slope rating of the course you're going to play and round to the nearest whole number.

Here's how I'd do it. Take the card from your last round. Determine your modal score relative to par. (The modal score is the one that occurs most frequently. So suppose your card had 10 bogeys.

Automatically, that's your modal score, because if you have 10 in 18 holes, you can't have more of any other score.

Anyway, continuing on, let's say that  of the remaining 8 holes, you had two doubles, an "X" (where you picked up, out of the hole) four pars and a birdie. If form holds true, the most likely score for you on any given hole is bogey or better.

So, here are the levels:

1. Modal score = better than par

2. Modal score = par or better

3. Modal score = par or worse

4. Modal score = bogey or better

5. Modal score = bogey or worse

6. Modal score = double bogey or better

7. Modal score = double bogey or worse

and on and on ad infinitum.

Here's the interesting thing. Between any two players, find the difference between them. If the difference is 0, they play even. If it's 1, that's worth a half-stroke/hole. Each whole number is worth one-half stroke/hole. So if my last round was exactly what I described above (level 4), and I play with a guy who had 12 pars, 4 birdies and two others (that's level 2), I get one stroke/hole.

FORGET RATING THE HOLES. FORGET AVERAGES. FORGET COURSE RATINGS OR SLOPES. 

C'mon Tiger, let's play!

The performer's NOMIND.

When you're learning to play the piano, you endure hours of practice so that your fingering is automatic, and your hands stay at the same level. My first piano teacher placed a penny on the back of my hands while I did scales, and if I made the penny drop, she'd whack my hand with a ruler. Now when I type, I look at the screen and the words appear as if by magic, because I learned touch typing in 1950 (not for numbers, though).

In the learning phase of golf, we have to practice for 10,000 hours (not a made-up figure, cited by Gladwell in his new book, "Outliers", on athletic and musical performers). In that time, if we've done it right, we learn where to place and how to move every part of our bodies, from feet to hands. After enough time has passed, we have developed our own, characteristic "Signature Swing", and with it we can hit shots as well as our genetic and environmental limits will permit.

That means there's no more learning to do.

So that we can play our best, a few of us train ourselves to focus our attention on the path we want the ball to take, pay attention to how we set up, start the club moving on the backswing and feel where the shaft and the clubhead are right up to the end of the backswing. 

Notice I didn't say "try to feel" -- we've learned to do nothing but TAKE IN INFORMATION on the backswing.

Once the backswing feels complete, we acquire the ball, or more precisely the spot on the surface of the ball that we're aiming for. This varies depending on the trajectory we wish the ball to take. At that point, our well-trained bodies take over and the stroke is completed at a subconscious, or nomind, level. We then can observe if this has been one of the 5-10% of our shots (same percent as Hogan, Snead, Woods, Nicklaus) that comes off just as we'd planned, or not.

The point is, we don't give ourselves a bunch of instruction as to what to do during the swing. We take in information on the backswing, then let the subconscious take over on the forward part of the stroke, while we look at the spot on the ball.

This state of nomind is best practiced with the putter, a ball, and a target, be it a hole, a coin, or a golf tee. The trick is allowing yourself to feel the motion of the club -- not your hands, not any part of your body -- and then shut that off by looking at the ball. You give NO commands, no instructions, as to how to do it. You ALLOW or PERMIT your trained body to make the ball go where you want it to go.

NOTHING about a flat wrist, a steady head, an accelerating stroke. NOTHING. NOMIND.

As soon as you start directing what your body can accomplish without direction, you are heading into dangerous waters. That's how the yips -- and more golfers yip with the driver than the putter -- begin.

Attaining NOMIND is not easy, but once learned it becomes automatic, and golf becomes easy. 

Playing the game

The key to lower scores is to concentrate on strategy, rather than tactics. Strategy means keeping a target SCORE in mind, and playing the shots that allow you keep at that score or lower. Tactics involve how to swing the club, or make a stroke.

As long as you're trying to think, or remember, your way through the stroke, golf is Hard Work.

The common errors

Most handicap golfers, from the mid-single digits to the 18-and-over crowd exhibit the same basic flaw.

Flaw #1: Most of these folks move their hands and arms too much, and their torsos too little. They understand that power is in part a function of the length of the backswing, so they do the natural, instinctive thing, and push their arms away while keeping their torso pointed right at the ball. That poses several problems, most egregious being the disconnection between the major body mass and the much lighter arms, but also making it very difficult for the clubpath to come from the inside out. That -- not a grip fault -- is why 90% of amateurs slice the ball.

Not a whole list here. Fix flaw #1 by keeping your hands pretty much in front of your body, even on the target side, until you've rotated your torso about 45º away from the target. If you continue until your back is almost facing the target, the weight of the swinging club will move your arms back much more than it feels like you're moving them. If it doesn't happen, you're rotating your torso too slowly.

The next thing you do is reverse the torso rotation. Unless you have a death-grip on the club handle, that will keep the clubhead behind your hands. As you rotate smoothly past the ball, you should feel the club being pulled downward at the ball.

This is the moment to avoid Flaw #2. Most beginners believe that the best golf shot has the leading edge of the club even with the bottom of the ball at first contact. That may be true, but it means that, when you make an error, half the time you'll be hitting "fat"-- hitting the ground behind the ball (away from the target). As you feel the clubhead being pulled away from you and down, try to hit the top of the ball. You can even pull up a bit, which will increase the speed of the clubhead, as well as reducing the chance of a fat hit. And increased clubhead speed is the most rewarding thing you can do with a full shot.

"Forgiving" clubs

Back in the day, golf clubs were designed by golfers, who then hired manufacturers (or golfers were paid by manufacturers to design clubs). They were tested by the designing golfer, and others, and tweaked by what golfers felt and saw on the range and on the golf course.

Now, golf clubs are designed by engineers. The first really "engineered" golf clubs were designed and manufactured by the genius who invented the rabbit-ears TV antenna. He (Karsten Solheim) designed his putters and irons with some of the weight removed from behind the sweet spot, or the center of percussion [pc], and relocated at the toe and heel of the club. Some more pc metal was relocated along the bottom of the club, and hey presto, balls struck on the sweet spot went higher. Balls struck off the sweet spot, toward the toe or heel, went straighter than they had with the older, "golfer" designs, and lost less distance, to boot. 

Solheim reckoned he could market these clubs to the average golfer, since they would require less precision to get a semblance of a golf shot. And right he was.

Still, the men who played golf for a living didn't want clubs that hit the ball higher; they knew how to do that, and actually preferred to flight the ball lower, where it would be less affected by wind. Nor did they want a club that straightened out their shots; most of them considered the straight shot the hardest to produce, and preferred curving the ball left-to-right or right-to-left, to gain access to the more difficult pin positions.

We call the modern clubs [designed by engineers and tested by machines that grip the club mechanically, hit without a backswing (thereby not "loading" the club) and input motion at the beginning of the stroke, never adding power with hand action, never rotating the head around the shaft, the way human beings do] forgiving, because they let us get better results from off center contact than we would get with the golfer-designed clubs.

I call the older designs rewarding, because they allow golfers to shape shots and keep them down out of the wind, because of their more uniform distribution of weight in the clubhead.

As far as actually learning how to hit golf shots, the more you can observe the results of a mishit, the easier it is to build a stroke that allows you to shape shots, access difficult hole locations, and become a better golfer. 

It's all a tradeoff, of course. And you don't have to be doctrinaire. For example, I have several sets of clubs, some very rewarding, others more forgiving, and neither is best for all conditions, all rounds.

The Golfer's Goal

The obvious goal is better -- lower -- scores. But that's the distal goal. The proximal goal is your best swing.

Most of the world's golfers look at the scorecard and make the obvious observation that, as the holes get longer, par goes up. They use this bit of information to define their best swing as the one that sends the ball the furthest distance.

There's nothing wrong in that. It's the obvious choice. 

It's not mine.

At my advanced age of 68, I can still hit a 7-iron a maximum of 155 yards on a level lie in the fairway, 70º, windless day (like we see a lot of those), as opposed to the 185 yards I could manage 30 years ago (the figures are approximate -- I've lost about one yard/year off the driver since my peak at the age of 27.

If I have a shot of 155 yards under the conditions I just described, I am NOT going to take a 7-iron, or a 6-iron. I might hit a five, probably a 4-iron. 

Why? Because I've hit a shitload of 4-irons and I get more and more accurate as I scale down the effort from the 185 yards that is now my max with that club until I reach my most accurate distance, 155 yards. When I aim at a target that is that far away, the circle of balls past the target, short of it, left of it and right of it is as small as it gets. Hitting to a nearer target with the same club gives me no more improvement in accuracy, so 155 yards is my BEST distance with the 4-iron under benign conditions.

The point is, and I can't overstress this, no matter your level of talent, no matter your mastery of the skill of ballstriking, your most accurate -- hence, most efficient -- use of any club is considerably less than your maximum distance.

That is the swing that will help you reach the distal goal of your lowest score.

How mammals learn, Part Deux

Well, we learn many different things in many different ways. There is the "human see, human do" method, which involves watching someone do something and then attempting to translate what you've seen into your own movement.

This is very, very, inefficient. Years ago, I watched a lovely lady pianist attempting Rachmaninoff's Concerto #3, which demands a lot of fortissimo (very loud) playing. She struck the keys so hard that she actually lifted her ass off the piano stool. I know this because I was looking at her ass.

What I saw was a movement that was the RESULT of other movement. No one learns to play fortissimo by being told 'get your ass in the air'.

Golfers who watch good golfers 100 years ago noted how their hips (or, the front part of their asses) moved, shifting and rotating. That movement, in the early 20th Century, hadn't been part of golf instruction, but thanks to the keen eyes of the observers, it was soon incorporated into the lexicon of golf instruction.

It is, of course, bullshit. 

Those early observers noted that the good golfers -- who were pretty much self-taught -- didn't move their heads (so much that they'd be noticeable) or bend their arms (more than about 30º) at the elbows, and so more bullshit was added.

Then, there was the advent of the high-shutter-speed still picture, which enabled the observer to see what could not be seen with the naked eye, things like clubhead lag and shaft flexion. Sometimes, famously in Ben Hogan's first book, "Power Golf" the focal-plane shutter sweeping horizontally across the frame created a FALSE image! But true or not, there was much more bullshit added.

Now we have video, and complex discussions of the plane of the swing (wrongly defined; there's no such thing as a curved plane). Even more bullshit.

Then there are the "scientific" attempts to analyze the stroke; Ralph Mann's computer analysis of 100 pros defining (make that SWAGing) how "The Pro" swings. And too too too many others to mention. 

Well, let's just say that attempting to copy external observations is as likely to get you a good golf swing as playing "Hamlet" in Act V will get you to know what it's like to be dying.

Which brings me, at loooong last, to the point. The most efficient way mammals learn is by thinking of what we want to do, trying to do it, and observing whether we got what we wanted. If we did, we do it again; if not, we do something else.

Three steps: CONCEPTION, EXECUTION, CORRECTION.

Oh, but that's too simple. You can't make a living telling people to just hit it. Try, and if you don't succeed, try something else. 

But it is that simple. If you don't think so, go Google SEWGOLUM.

 

How mammals learn (and golfers are mammals)

Experimental psychologists define learning as a change in behavior as a result of practice over time. Note that the definition is not an improvement, but a change. Practice something inefficient and your behavior will change, and become less efficient, as long as your practice is directed at making you more inefficient.

I know lots of golfers who believe that "the secret is in the dirt" and that they can improve their game by practicing more. I think of the secret as "in the safe" -- the safe has a combination lock, and the reason to practice is to figure out the combination.

My combination works ONLY for me. I can tell it to you -- it's very simple -- but I guarantee that it won't help you if you follow it. 

I've been playing golf for more than 50 years, and it took until very recently for me to unlock the safe, but once I did, I found my secret, and it works. It worked last week, yesterday, and it will work today. 

Alan Watts wrote, "Once you've gotten the message, hang up the phone."

Why did it take me so long to get the combination and unlock the safe? Because I tried way too many combinations that belonged to other people: people like Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, David Ledbetter, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Eddie Merrins, Percy Boomer, Jeff Goble, Bobby Clampett, Nick Faldo, Butch Harmon, Hank Haney...and that's a partial list. 

All of those books and lessons amount to the same thing: ways that other people play golf. Not one of them gave me a way for me to play golf that is best for me. The only person who was able to unlock the combination was me.

Now, I don't have to practice. I can warm up, but I have nothing to learn. I have the combination and have opened the safe. I took out the secret, memorized it, burned the paper that it was written on, and left the safe empty and with the door ajar.

I have to add that if I had tried to use the method I now employ earlier, I don't know whether it would work as well as it does. Perhaps it works so well because I tried all of those other approaches, perhaps not. No one can tell for certain what might have happened in a parallel universe.

Why golf is difficult.

The ball is a mere 1.68 inches in diameter. Any impact above the equator -- the horizontal midline -- of the ball is a miss, so the whole target is 0.84 inches. Subtract about 1/8 inch for the little depression in the fairway that the ball has nestled into, and we're down to 0.58 inches. Another eight of an inch for the grass, and we're at 0.42 inches.

Even on an easy swing with a wedge, the clubhead is traveling at about 50 mph. Imagine trying to drive a car going 50 mph through an opening with 0.22 inches on each side. Not an exact analogy, but that should give you an idea.

Damn tough game.

Tradeoffs

Robert Heinlein made up the word TJANSTAAFL...there just ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Anyone who things you can hit golf shots both longer and straighter because you're using some equipment, or some technique, is just wrong.

No, not just wrong. Stupid as well.

The physics -- not the psychophysics -- are immutable as gravity. Increase both power and accuracy? It's like the perpetual motion machine, or the fountain of youth. Nice to contemplate, but not possible in the real world.

My goal on this blog

I've been a lifelong athlete, a golfer for almost 50 years. I'm also a scientific investigator of learning and human performance, and a statistician.

I've renamed this blog in the hope of providing useful, and unusual, information on how anyone, at any level, can increase his enjoyment of the game.