I don’t fish, but I do a lot of casting. Unfortunately, it’s with my golf clubs, meaning that my over-the-top swing can produce wayward shots in all directions.
Until the other day I didn’t know how out-to-in my downswing was. Now I do – 11 percent to the left. Every time. Every club.
“At least you’re consistent,” said Ben Krug, the head pro at Angeles National Golf Club in Sunland. “So I think we can work with that.”
Krug was my instructor at the fifth PGA Teaching Competition, an event where a Southern California teaching pro works with a student for a couple hours before the student plays a round in tournament conditions and with the pro by his or her side. It’s a cool concept and one organizer Tim Johnson says is a good way to highlight regional PGA professionals. Handicaps are used and the teacher can earn money depending on how his or her student does on the course. The latest round was on the Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills Country Club, the annual site of the LPGA’s first major of the year.
Krug brought his Flightscope along, hence the accurate reading of my swing. He proceeded to talk about angles and my clubface being open or closed, etc., but never wanted to change my motion, as flawed as it is.
“I mainly want to understand a student’s pattern and, from there, help them understand their ball flight laws,” Krug said. “For someone like you, you actually hit the ball very solidly … and 100 percent of the time your path is to the left.”
Rather than run through a gamut of A-to-Z fixes, Krug stayed with what he calls the ABCs of the swing – clubface, path and angle of attack.
“What you define as bad is really just a face that’s open to your path and target line,” he told me. “There are a couple simple things to work on for that.”
Except for about three minutes, what we didn’t work on was putting and chipping. Oops. After starting the round with a 4-putt double bogey and taking three shots to get out of a greenside bunker on the next hole, it was obvious we’d be out of the money and I’d soon be out of my mind with negativity. But Krug stayed positive and I did have some impressive shots mixed in with my short-game blunders.
Overall, it was a good learning experience and, even though I was about to post an embarrassing score, at least I could finish strong. (That always seems to happen, right?) So on our last two holes – Nos. 12 and 13 – I busted my drives on the par-4s to 120 and 116 yards from the pin. With wedge in hand from the fairway both times … I proceeded to make a pair of 7s.
So much for that theory.
