Most Days I’d Prefer To Paint A Wall

Now I’m no Charles Barkley when it comes to my golf swing, but I can relate to the classic Lee Trevino quip, “My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch.”

In my mind, there are two kinds of golfers: those who are good at the game … and the rest of us. The secret to being good at golf, I’ve always read, is practice, practice and more practice. Uggh.

Good golfers enjoy going to the range a few times a week to groove their swing or work on their putting. They hit thousands of practice balls a year. They’ve read every instruction book ever written, watched every YouTube video tip. They’ve gone to golf camps, golf schools, taken lessons and do those silly practice swinging motions when waiting for an elevator.

Bad golfers, on the other hand, are uh, none of the above. Let’s just get to the first tee and see what happens.

Ben Hogan believed in practice. “Every day you don’t hit balls is one day longer it takes you to get better,” he said. “The secret is in the dirt. Dig it out like I did.”

“The harder I practice the luckier I get,” Gary Player confirmed.

“I figure practice puts brains in your muscles,” Sam Snead said.

Still, I cannot seem to get excited about the secrets of Hogan’s dirt or Snead’s muscles. Sure, I’d like to play better golf, but c’mon. Hours and hours on the practice range is as exciting to me as painting a wall, cleaning the oven or riding a stationary bike … borrrr-ing!!

So, I was fascinated by a story my pal Kevin told me the other day.

“I just shot one of the best rounds of my life,” he said.

“Cool,” I enthused. “Tell me.”

I was expecting to hear how he’d just spent hours on the range adjusting his wrist cock or something, and that it produced his stellar results.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just … wasn’t thinking.”

“What’s that?” I asked. Light bulbs were flashing in my mind.

“I was so tired, I just wasn’t thinking,” he repeated. “Won the tournament.”

Kev is a pretty good stick when he is thinking, so if not thinking was the key to a career round, maybe that would work for me too?

By now the sirens were sounding and my future in the game lay before me. It’s not Zen golf, exactly, but the idea of getting better by not thinking appeals on so many levels. Can we get out from under the tyranny of par at the same time? My 10 beats your 11, as in match play?

Once all the voices in your head stop reminding you that the perfect swing is somehow related to balance and your torque value — whatever that is — and the latest six-part swing theory falls back into the hellscape from whence it emerged, perhaps a glorious day of fairways and greens and one-putts awaits us after all?

It’s worth trying. If not, there’s always cleaning my oven. ▪