When I started my first real golf experience, I was pretty young. My father taught me, as is the case with most young boys. However, I did not really “get into it” until I was older. Sometimes in my twenties, I picked up the quintessential book on the Golf Swing by Ben Hogan. I was asked to go golfing by a group of business friends. So I went and bought some golf clubs, which I still use btw, and went out to my first golf outing. I never practiced; I only had what Mr. Hogan told me. I stepped up to the first tee box, swung with my driver, and hit the ball straight down the fairway for a solid 250 yards. The people with me were joking around about how I was “sandbagging,” as there was a friendly bet going on around the score of the game.
Now, I did not score well in that game, I did not understand golf course mechanics at all, and it took me several holes to get what putting was all about. I would usually get the ball within 20 – 50 feet of the green, so chipping and pitching were a struggle for me. I started to get the hang of it. My first score ever in an 18-hole golf game was in the high 100s. Not too bad, considering that I had never played before. Many things were broken that day, but one thing that seemed to go well was my golf swing. This is because I had no pretense. I just stepped up to the ball, took a swing, and hit the ball as straight as I could. Sure, I could improve accuracy and distance, but for the most part, I was on or near the green in 3 – 4 strokes.
Yesterday, I had to pick my daughter up from golf team practice. I got to see her hit the ball a few times. Having only a few lessons and no experience, she hit the ball straight and got clean contact. So, this got me thinking. How did I mess my golf swing up so badly since I was her age?
When I first started my goal was just to swing naturally, get clean contact and make sure the club face was aligned on contact. All obvious things, even to a beginner. Left to my own thoughts, and a little advice from Ben Hogan, I had this figured out. Now, I could work on confidence so that when I hit the ball, I could do so with more power and consistency. However, this is not what I would do. Over the course of the next thirty years, I would buy hundreds of golf books, watch countless videos, take many lessons, and rethink my “golf swing” hundreds of times. I realized that all that work amounted to nothing but anguish, pain, consternation, and frustration.
A few years ago, I played Golf for the first time in a few years. I went out golfing with a group with an “I do not care” attitude. I hit beautifully for the first nine holes, the best I had ever done in my life. I think I scored at least 3 birdies and 4 pars. Then, on the following nine holes, I tried to make some “improvements.” That was a disaster. When I got home, I took some lessons on the weekend with a local golf pro. We tweaked my swing some more, tried a few things, and completely wrecked my golf swing. I realized after watching my daughter, just swing and hit with little worry about the nuances of golf swings that I need to come back full circle.
So I tried it. I went out and started hitting some golf balls, and this time, I just let myself swing and hit the ball. Wow. My golf swing was excellent and consistent. There were some minor variances in my aim, but for the most part, it was straight and the correct distance for the club type. So I have come full circle. I could have saved myself thousands of dollars and a lot of heartache if I had just kept with the natural swing in the first place.
However, this is the lesson here. As with Golf, as with anything else in life. You start out with a sense for things, and you do pretty decent at it. It’s not awesome, but it’s passable. You set out to make improvements. You learn quickly just how hard it is to go to the next level. You work incredibly hard for a long period of time just to try to improve by another five percent. Then, one day, you discover the basics again. You go back to the easy, natural way, and you find out that you are now better than you were before. You did get to that slight improvement after all, but it seems like you are just sticking to the basics.
In life’s journey – you will always come back to the basics and find out that getting to and staying with the basics is more challenging than you think. You will be taken off course in your quest for improvement, only to find your way back to it eventually. Simplicity is always the answer, but getting to that next level of simplicity requires a lifetime of suffering through complexity.
