ONE OF the more discouraging aspects of the quest for a decent golf swing has been the importance attached to unremitting practice. The club golfer does not, as a general rule, go for this sort of thing, preferring, instead, to press on in the belief
that one of these days everything will fall into place and all will come miraculously together without a bead of sweat being expended. In recent years, the spectre of hard practice has been joined by another grim presence – the drive for physical fitness.
The fact that good golfers are now working out in gymnasiums on a regular basis, doing press-ups and pumping iron at ungodly hours, is, in many ways, even more daunting than the prospect of long sessions on the practice ground. Practice sessions can be simulated by backsliding club golfers who simply dump down a selection of beaten-up old golf balls and whale away feverishly for a while before the potent combination of exhaustion and failure drives them to the bar, feeling sore but virtuous.
Press-ups and pumping iron are something else. There's no getting around them. I just have to think of them and I get the same sense of hopelessness that comes over me when green factions suggest that I should get on a bike and cycle to wherever I want to go. It's not that I've got anything against green and I would cycle if I could, but the fact is that I have reached the stage at which any attempt to take to the saddle would represent an extreme hazard to traffic. My legs wouldn't operate the pedals, my back would give out, the bike would lose momentum and I'd fall off.
This is how it is, unfortunately, and the whole thing would be totally counter-productive in that the amount of petrol, fumes, pollution and carbon footprinting caused by ambulances, fire appliances and so forth rushing to my aid at various scenes of chaos would negate the minimal savings effected by any brief bike-borne wobble upon which I might embark. The same futile pattern would be evident at the gym where iron would remain unpumped, press-ups unpressed up. Even in the Army, when I was in what passed as my prime, press-ups were lung-bursting affairs. The PTIs, sickeningly fit and keen as mustard in their red and black striped jerseys, swarmed around us like aggravated wasps. They used to use the phrase, "Ten press-ups, go," like commas between commands to perform other impossible exercises. One of the exercises came after the order: "Up on the wallbars, go." This led to the victims hanging from the bars by their hands and being told to raise their knees to their chins. Their chins! This was the optimism of madmen. Most of us could barely manage a kink in our legs.
Club golfers – wisely, in my opinion – approach all forms of physical exertion with great caution. I've lost count of the number of acquaintances who have excused their appalling golf by saying they'd been doing some work in the garden. As one who eventually elected to live in a top-floor flat in order to avoid the risks inherent in gardening, I can sympathise fully with those people. Painting and decorating is another area to be avoided and, indeed, the ideal home environment for those with golfing aspirations would seem to be a tent pitched on a concrete base.
The French professional, Thomas Levet, may or may not work out in the gym, but he certainly puts in the practice. Interviewed after playing himself into hot contention in the Andalucian Open on Saturday, Levet was asked why he had risked going for a big tee-shot on the last hole rather than laying up and taking the water on the left out of play. Smiling, he insisted there had been no danger. "I can't go left with that tee-shot," he said, and he seemed to mean it.
Whatever else happened on that shot, he knew he wouldn't pull it because of the way his swing is set up. This is the sort of revelation that convinces me that people who play golf at the top level possess a few more chromosomes than are issued as standard. It's what makes so many instructional books so incomprehensible to so many. We are told to show, say, one and a half knuckles of the left hand when we grip the club. Now, I know for a fact that half a knuckle here or there means nothing in my scheme of things.
Once, I played at North Berwick after having been given some advice by a friend – a very good golfer – about how to set about improving what he considered to be an overstrong grip. He wanted me to show only one knuckle, as opposed to the two or three I'd been showing before. Thus braced, I set to and was soon in deep trouble.
After one particularly grim tee-shot, I was approached by a professional I knew who had been loitering, alone and unobserved. A gruff man, he wasted no time. "Whit are ye tryin' to do?" he asked. "Weaken my grip," I said. "Weaken it?" he bawled. "Behave yersel. You need a' the strength ye can get."
The full article contains 897 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
