Billy Martin

by Bill Pennington

  Then one shot goes left. You quickly tee up another. Another ball to the left. You reach for another ball and think about more left hip turn. Oh, no, that’s more left. Tee up another. Man, that’s left of left. Another ball. You almost hit the guy next to you.

  You hastily tee another ball. Wow, that one is way right.

  What follows next are the fastest fifty balls you’ve ever hit. When you finally stop, you are sweating and exasperated. You give up on firing your left hip. You just want to hit it straight again without a thought about the distance. But the ball is going left, then right, and once you almost missed it. Your hands hurt and your back is getting sore. You look down at your bucket; only ten balls left.

  Ten balls left to fix my drive! What happened? You take a deep breath and try to relax. You slow your pace and leisurely hit the last ten balls more or less straight, the way you did when you arrived.

  You look at your watch. You’re late for meeting your spouse. You pack up, passing the practice green in a hustling walk to your car.

  “How did the range go?” you are asked later.

  “Got my swings in,” you say. “It was OK in the end.”

  Yes, I have seen you before.

  In the mirror.

  So, why do our practice sessions at the range seem so unproductive?

  “Because at the driving range, people hit golf balls,” says Laird Small, the 2003 PGA Teacher of the Year and the director of the Pebble Beach Golf Academy. “On the golf course, we have to hit golf shots.”

  That’s more than a cute turn of phrase.

  “It would do amateur players a lot of good to attend a pro tournament so they could go to the range and watch the way the pros practice,” says Butch Harmon. “The pros never beat balls. They’ll hit about twenty-five or thirty balls in an hour. They are simulating real golf where you have to wait between shots.

  “Who plays golf by raking one ball after another into the same place while hitting the same club? Nobody, right? So why do people practice like that?”

  Every teaching pro I have talked to on this subject said recreational golfers should hit only a small bucket of balls, about thirty minutes’ worth, at the range. In that time, they should be working on improving just one thing, whether it’s staying in balance or staying in tempo or hitting the ball first rather than the ground. It can be anything, but stick to a small, specific goal.

  “You have to have a specific full-swing practice goal, because that practice session goes by very fast,” says Mike Bender, listed in the top ten of Golf Digest’s teachers nationwide. “It takes about 1.5 seconds to hit a shot. Even if you hit a hundred balls, that’s only two and one-half minutes of swinging. So you better have a specific goal if you’re going to get something out of two and one-half minutes of practice.”

  Some golf pros suggest that golfers go to the short-game practice area first to be sure to fit that into their session. At the least, they say, set a time limit for full-swing practice regardless of how things are going.

  “People should spend no more than one-third of their time at the range,” Bender, who has an academy in Lake Mary, Florida, says. “It could be as high as 50 percent, but only if they just took a lesson and are working on a new swing technique.”

  The rest of their practice time should be spent on the short game.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking: Putting and chipping are boring. Seeing good shots soar off your driver is a rush.

  “That’s part of the love-hate thing in golf,” says Bender. “They love to practice their driver. They hate it when they can’t break 100. But here’s what people have to understand: The full swing is 80 percent technique and 20 percent feel, and the short game is 80 percent feel and 20 percent technique. Improving your short-game feel is much easier and will make your scores drop right away. On the range, people often aren’t sure what’s going on. Even a bad swing produces good results a few times. Then people try to recapture that moment for the next hour or more. They’re spinning their wheels.”

  Bender and Laird suggested making short-game practice fun by playing games with yourself or a buddy. Try to see, for example, how many 5-foot putts in a row you can make. Have a competition to see who can hit the most chips within 3 feet of the hole. Loser buys the drinks afterward.

  Either way you probably save money, because you’re buying small practice buckets instead of jumbo ones.

  The next most underrated golf essential?

  Rain gloves, a rain suit, and waterproof golf shoes. I know that’s three things but they’re all related. And I know this may sound like I’m now calling for technically elaborate equipment purchases when I’ve been largely preaching golf minimalism. But the fact is, it does rain out there eventually, and if you’re a real golfer, you don’t come inside unless there’s lightning.

  I concede that I used to all but give up at the sight of a decent downpour, and I know a lot of people who still do. The Scots have a saying: “Nae wind, nae rain, nae golf.” In much of America, it’s more like “Rain? Wind? And the cart girl went in? I’m outta here.”

  But I’ve come to see that successfully playing in the rain is a mindset. It is not hard, or terribly expensive, to be prepared for rain, and you get to play more that way. As with most things in modern golf, new equipment can also help considerably. These days, we have it pretty good in sloppy conditions. For the best advice on playing well in the rain, I scoured the list of Golf Magazine’s top one hundred teachers for someone with a deep background in getting wet on the links. I came upon Jerry Mowlds, who grew up in Oregon, turned professional four decades ago, and is the director of instruction at the spectacular Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club outside Portland.

  Mowlds told me all his tricks, like how he stores a few old regular gloves in a plastic bag inside his golf bag. “That can get you through eighteen holes easily,” he said. But sometimes it’s raining too hard for a regular glove. So he always has rain gloves, which are made with a fabric that grips better when wet. They cost about $20. “I am sure every tour pro has rain gloves in the bag,” Mowlds said.

  Mowlds also said to buy a waterproof rain suit made for golf, or at least for athletics, not one for duck hunting or watching a holiday parade in a mist. This is the biggest expense ($200 to $800), but you should get one, or at least an inexpensive one. Why? Consider how many days there will be in the next three golf seasons when rain may ruin a golf round you were looking forward to playing. If it’s more than one a year, given the price of greens fees, the suit will probably pay for itself in four years. The majority of golfers won’t fork over the expense of a rain suit. I know I went through a stage when I tried to get by with a heavy windbreaker and lots of towels whenever it rained. That was a mistake. But we make bizarre choices. We think nothing of spending $100 to play golf for one day but won’t spend $400 on a quality rain suit that might last ten years and allow us to enjoy forty more golf rounds when it’s raining. So think of it as an extra $10 for every round it rains. You spend that on a hot dog and drink at the turn.

  A good rain suit should have a few components. First of all, it shouldn’t make all kinds of swishy sounds when you swing or walk. New stretchy materials eliminate all that noise. Since it will probably be slipped on over your regular golf outfit, the rain suit should have two-way or sturdy, wide zippers. Most of the jackets have a high storm collar to keep the rain off your neck and back. One company, Zero Restriction, makes several good models. So does Columbia.

  Waterproof shoes, meanwhile, are everywhere in the golf marketplace now, and there’s no reason not to have one pair. “Playing in the rain used to be a mess; people don’t realize how good they have it now,” Mowlds said. “Our shoes, socks, and feet would be soaked by the time we got to the first green. Nowadays, with all the waterproof shoes, everybody is dry. But people buy a $70 pair of cheaper golf shoes instead of paying another $70 for something waterproof. Even if it’s not raining the day you play, it might have rained the day before. Do you want to step in
a soft puddle on the first hole and have a waterlogged sock and shoe for the next four hours? Just spend the extra money.”

  Speaking of money, the last of my most underrated golf essentials is the cheapest by far. It is the banana. It comes in its own easy-opening wrapper. It travels extremely well, including in a golf bag unless you forget it is there. Its yellow color matches well with the green—or brown—of every golf course. Golfers worry about how to replenish themselves on the golf course and spend way too much money on prewrapped sandwiches and expensive energy bars. A simple banana has fiber and ample quantities of vitamins B and C and loads of potassium, which helps restock electrolytes. That’s why you see so many tour pros eating bananas on the course. It’s an easy, quick refueling stop.

  Underrated? You bet. A ripe banana in the bag might be worth a stroke per nine holes. One other thing a banana won’t do—it won’t stain your shirt, pants, or skirt if you accidentally drop it. That can’t be said for a hot dog with mustard. And that’s no myth.

  Debunking myths and falsehoods is fun. It will make golf essentially easier. But remember, this is still golf. No other sport will test you in the same way. Sam Snead and Ted Williams were once discussing what was harder, hitting a golf ball or a baseball. Snead acknowledged the golf ball wasn’t moving but added: “You don’t have to go up in the stands and play your foul balls. I do.”

  Think about that for a while. If it helps, remember, we’re never alone. Golf mistreats us equally in the end. It also lifts us up. The ultimate essential remains the understanding that this odd, unique game we play demands a singular skill at finding the silver lining and moving forward to the next shot. This coming from a golfer who wrapped a pitching wedge around a tree while just practicing. But distorting golf’s often brutal reality is a golf essential.

  I am certain that during one of the earliest golf matches in the fifteenth century along the Firth of Forth in eastern Scotland, a beleaguered sheepherder missed a 3-foot putt when his rounded stone lipped out of a rabbit hole. He considered flinging his stick in the direction of the North Sea but instead reminded himself that he was getting better at this new game, he would improve if he just practiced a little more diligently, and besides, that rabbit hole was irregular and too small for such a good putt anyway.

  Then, as the other sheepherders trudged away, he slammed his stick into the little bag he was carrying on his shoulder. He felt better.

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  About the Author

  BILL PENNINGTON is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Times. A former syndicated columnist, Pennington was a beat writer who covered much of Billy Martin’s tenure with the New York Yankees. A fourteen-time finalist and six-time winner of the Associated Press Sports Editors annual writing award, Pennington lives with his family in Warwick, New York. This is his fourth book.