It looks like my last blog ignited a bit of a firestorm in some minds as I hoped that it would.  Our goal here is help people get better.  To make that happen I have to make people think and I have to find a way to inspire them to act!  I won’t always hit my mark, but I really think that from time to time everyone needs to get reeled in a bit.  It is just that sometimes I think that we get a little bit too excited about the latest revelations on the swing and simultaneously miss both details and the big picture. I love the interchange of ideas.  I love thinkers and analyzers.  I’m one of you in that regard, but you have to follow up the thinking and analyzing with physical effort.  In short you have to follow up the thoughts with action.

There are fundamentals and key concepts that have to be mastered in this game before we can move on to higher levels of proficiency and sometimes due to either the excitement generated by the prospects of certain new information or sometimes due to sheer laziness people get the idea that they can do an end run around the fundamentals.  You can’t!!  You have to spend the time to master the basics.  

Watched my son Jackson play hockey this weekend in a tournament in Acton, Ontario.  He is 11 and in PeeWee playing against 11 and 12 year olds.  His teams’ first game of the tournament was on Friday night and it was a terrible mismatch.  They faced a team from Guelph Ontario that was bigger, faster, more disciplined, had several players that would qualify as bona fide PeeWee stars and on top of it all they had been taught a very specific way to play.  Above all else what was most clear is that they listened.

Our team was overwhelmed.  The fact that our goalie who is generally exceptional took an accidental zinger to the side of the head that dazed him during warm-ups only compounded things.

Watching the game as a parent was very difficult. The Guelph team pounded us 9 or 10 or 11 to 1….We all basically stopped counting and the time keeper mercifully stopped posting the escalating score once they had us by 6.  The hardest part to watch was the spirit get knocked out of our kids and to see some of them stop caring about the game they were playing.  I can’t stand to see someone quit.  It tears me up actually.

I’m speaking with Tony Haney this morning to get me on that Flight Scope machine again and get some film for Smash part 2.  In the mean time I thought that I would update everyone on my progress getting into shape. So great to see the Dirters Weight Loss group form and that many of you have been so active in it.

On January 1st I let everyone know that I was committed to getting back into shape. Since it is February 1st now I thought it would be a good time for an update.

To give you some background I have tried to do this in the past and failed mainly because I went after it too aggressively and simply could not carry it through.  . This go around I’ve decided to change one thing at a time and so far I have done pretty well I think.  Here’s what I’ve been up to.

As many of you who read this blog know I have long been an advocate of firm grip pressure.  I got this from reading George Knudson at the recommendation of John White.  20 years ago he saw that I was loose at the top of the swing and that I was losing some control of the club and encouraged me to experiment with different pressures.  After that experiment I satisfied myself that firm was the way to go for me. 

Over the last couple of days I’ve been going over some of the books that I was reading back in those days and in particular I dusted of Advanced Golf written in 1957 by Cary Middlecoff.  It’s a great book and unlike swing specific books like Hogan’s  Five Lessons Middlecoff’s book offers a broad view including more about the playing of golf and les about mechanics.  It is valuable in the same way that Tommy Armour’s How Play Your Best Golf All The Time is.

I got this book in the 1980’s from my grandfather who had purchased it in 1960 when he thought that he was interested in golf.  Turns out he never really had time to take up the game, but he had the book so he gave it to me.  Like he did, I also parked the book on a shelf for a long time, but I did eventually get down to reading it.  Here’s what Middlecoff had to say about his grip pressure….

The Caress of Steel... No I'm not talking about the pivotal Rush album, although Lakeside Park and Bastille Day are both blogworthy if I really think about it. I'm talking about the steel golf shaft.  Since the original Sevam1 YouTube videos began I have received a ton of questions about just about everything in golf you can imagine.  One of the things that I am asked about often is the evolution of golf clubs themselves and it is a subject that we could go on about for pages, but I thought it would be interesting to touch on two particular things from the first half of the last century.  First, the advent of the steel shaft and then the evolution and final standardization of the golf ball.  It may be interesting to some of you that the standardization of the golf ball was in large part a reaction of golf’s governing bodies and an effort to reign in what they had unleashed when they approved the steel shaft.

A lot of people ask me why I do not wear a golf glove.  Actually there a lot of reasons for that.  First is that when I started playing golf as a kid most kids didn't wear a golf glove and so neither did I.  I didn't have a lot of money to throw around on accessories....I needed to save my dough for new StarFlite golf balls, Snickers bars and that grape or orange flavored fountain drink that they served at the Oak Hall par 3 course. 

So early on I just didn't wear one because we didn't have money for them.  I do remember though that one year I got one for my birthday.  It was brown with a mesh back and had no fingers.  That was a style I guess and actually it went way back from what I can gather.  It didn't take long for that thing to dry out and turn just crazy slick.  I soon found there was not much point to the thing after the first week.  It looked kind of cool though and I felt pretty special to have one.  For those of you who are not so long in the tooth as I am you might be interested to know that the FootJoy golf glove has only been around for about 30 years.  Before that you could generally look for a club manufacturers name on a golf glove.

A lot of people think that the golf glove has always been around and in a way I guess it has because they've been maiking them since the late 1800's, but they were never all that popular until the 1960's.  Look at pictures and you won't see a glove on Hagen or Sarazen or Bobby Jones.  You won't find one on Hogan or Nelson either but the first guy to make people stop and think about the golf glove was Sam Snead.  Snead was basically the first pro of any major status to dawn the golf glove.

We're a few weeks into a new year and two weeks into the PGA Tour schedule. There is so much ahead, so much to do and so much to learn.  I have a great feeling that by working hard and fostering positive feelings and sharing information everyone here in The Dirt is going to look back a year from now and say to themselves "I can't believe how far I've come".  That will most certainly be true for your golf games and what you learn about how this game is played by the best of the best, but also how we relate ro one another.  More importantly you all come to know that there is something to learn from almost every interaction you have here in Secret In The Dirt.

The most recent blog that I've written about Learning From Children seem to have been especially important reads for so of you here in "The Dirt".  It reminds us of how much we can learn just through observation.  The child just has to be a child in front of us for us to get a feel for what he is on about.  It also makes me think that we can learn new things just about any place. I've learned things from 30 handicappers and appreciated the opportunity.  I like those "I never thought about it like that" moments when they come. I can tell you that they don't come from rehashing the same old ideas with the same old people.  They come when you cast a wide net which is what we are doing here.  The bottom line of it all is that we are helping one another. That is the spirit of "The Dirt".

The picture to the left is a young Bobby Jones. Amazing turn.  This is something that I spoke of in my book when I talked about kids.  They move differently mostly because the equipment is too heavy for them to move any other way.  They have to use the body.  They have no choice.  Adults do not have the benefit of this.  The first time they pick up a club they already have enough strength to get somewhat acceptable results just with their hands and arms so the body never really properly enters the picture.  They just give the ball a healthy chop or slap and that becomes pretty much the extent of it.

The part of this that is cool is that this body action will tone down somewhat as the child grows and gets stronger, but the big moves , the body moves, remain a core element of their swings so now when the rest of the picture firms and stabilizes the critical movements of the body and the sequence remains in tact.  It is my belief that this is one of the key reasons for starting people off young and then just letting them swing.  Incidentally, swinging anything I believe would be helpful to golf.  A baseball bat for instance.  Heck even waving a broom around will give a person the general feeling of what the body has to do.  Most importantly though the child learns to respond to the thing that he is holding in his hands.

If you ever want to find out something about how we learn things.  Spend a little time watching kids.  Have a look at how they learn things or more accurately how they teach themselves to do things.  When you do... some things will stand out that makes children a sharp contrast to adults.  A child does not require oodles of information.  They are eager to start and to simply try because they are keen to "see what happens" without a conscious concern about the initial results. They are used to "learning by doing" with everything else that they do so they are eager to get to the "doing" part. 

Kids are used to not getting it right the first time. Kids observe well and can integrate visual images rapidly.  In other words they are very good mimics and can transpose what they witness and incorporate it.  A child will naturally focus on the "big picture" items first. So observing others (usually grown ups or sometimes other kids) and then making the big motions is not much of a challenge for a child.  Perhaps part of their rapid improvement relative to adult learners stems from a combination to their lack of self consciuosness about what they are doing and their willingness to simply "give it a go". A child simply does not need a lot of instruction.  They generally just need a little encouragement and the freedom to treat the task as play.  They are in a world of "no negative mental scar tissue" and the longer we can keep them in that state the better.

2010 is well behind us now. My first resolution was to figure out how to work some of the features in this blogging tool that have been tripping me up. The fact that your reading this I guess is confirmation that I've made good on that one but it took me a while. The rest may be a little harder.

Over the years of pounding on computer keyboards and guitar strings and pushing pencils instead of walking, running, skating, pounding hockey pucks and swinging golf clubs I've become...well soft. Soft is the only way that I can describe it. I can do all of the things that I used to do but slower and with less precision and power than I would like. My wide load big butt impression of Porky Oliver is to the left.