I’m looking across the room at Terry MacDonald and the light bulb glowing above his head. Then another bulb glows above Sandy MacDonald, his wife. And then the two men sitting next to me. And finally, I sense, me, when a tingle starts up my arms and neck and finally hits the brain. It’s the glow of golf understanding, an elusive light sought by many but seen by few. The understanding that says, I’m starting to see why I always chili dip my chip shots!
It’s the first of three days at the Ben Sutton Golf School in the Catskill Mountains. There’s Terry, a retired insurance adjuster; Sandy, a retired high school secretary; Larry Cournoyer, a police detective from Massachusetts; Bill Orsini, a banker from New Jersey; and me, a journalist from downstate New York. Terry and Sandy are relative newcomers to the game, retirees who’ve found pleasure playing this game together. Larry, who like me has played many years but strains for the next level; me, to crack the 90 I’ve touched four or five times in the past three years but have never bested. And Bill, bless his heart, a newcomer in his 50s from a golfless family who’s fallen in love with this confounding game.
Learning golf is like learning a language. You can do OK with the books and a weekly class, but there’s nothing like visiting the foreign country for immersion. Anyone who wants to learn to play golf should find a local pro and take weekly lessons. But anyone who can swing the next level should get into a school, whether just the three-day course, which nearly every school offers, or up to a weeklong. And video analysis, we learn right off the bat, has become an essential tool in the intensity of immersion golf.
At the moment, we’re in a little house near the driving range watching video shot in the previous hour by our pro, Gregg Gamester, nickname “Gamer.” We watch Terry chipping. And, doggone it, every time he flips his wrists on the
Searching for
Arnold Palmer
A neophyte fanatic goes in search of a golf education | BY GREG G. WEBER
follow-through it’s like a butcher swatting flies at an open-air market. Gamer, using some amazing software, stops the action, runs it back and forth in slow-mo and frame-at-a-time, then illustrates with lines drawn on the screen the appalling angle of Terry’s left wrist. It doesn’t take Arnold Palmer to see the error.
Next up is Sandy. And a swat. Then Larry. Same thing. Then Bill. Yep. And finally me, and … good grief, my wrist flips like a butcher, a very fat butcher. The software, Gamer had warned, tends to shorten and, therefore, widen one’s appearance, enough to turn Twiggy into
Miss Piggy, and me into an alarmingly fatter Jackie Gleason. Nonetheless, the video does not lie about the wrist flip. And as we would learn, the golf swing is a lot about the wrist.
“PENDULUM” IS THE WORD After sobering observations we are off to the practice green to remake ourselves, beginning with the putting stroke—the foundation, Gamer explains, on which we would build the rest of the swing, from quarter to half to full, all of which share, at the moment of truth, a straight left arm and wrist aligned perfectly in