New York Times at it again!

And So It Begins

  “Mr. Boehner is known as an avid golfer, a sharp dresser and a regular smoker.”

The caption under a photo of John Boehner in the NYT. The NYT is very subtle using well chosen captions and pictures knowing that few people actually read the article. Code words like ‘golfer’, sharp dresser, and smoker, freeze-frame the persona they wish to project onto the next Speaker of the House, hoping that the ‘small people’ will view Boehner as a showy, shallow conservative who smokes and plays an elitist game while the poor people struggle.

Your Electric Golf Brain

Tiger is electrifying even when he plays badly but do the great players literally find a way to give themselves a jolt when they need it most? In February 2009 John Krakauer and Pablo Celnik of Johns Hopkins found that noninvasive electrical stimulation enhanced motor skill acquisition. Basically they performed an experiment where electricity was applied to the subject’s brain.  

A small but very important strip of brain neurons called M1 plays a major role in learning golf or any sport. Access to M1 in the experiment was obtained by placing a current producing device on the top of the subjects head directly over M1.

The group trained 45 minutes a day for five days performing a new motor activity that they had never done before. They tested three differently configured groups and found that the best performance belonged to the group that along with training in the new motor activity was also given a jolt of electricity.

The results of the study have a basis in how the brain normally functions. Since the brain is composed of neural networks which communicate with one another through electrical-chemical events, it might be possible to enhance the signals or even discover the code that allows information to be shuttled back and forth between the brain areas responsible for learning movement. Neurons are brain units whose many branches form highways where electrical flow lights up the brain like a Christmas tree. This Electrochemical event called depolarization is regulated by the speed and strength of the impulse

First your brain turns all information that strikes the senses [sound, heat, light etc.] into electricity then that electricity is routed to the proper brain areas for decoding This process helps your brain answer some key questions --what is this sensation I am experiencing and what do I do with it? Once a decision is made a second electrical code is sent out of the brain and down the spine to the muscles telling them how to respond – thus I run, fight, or make a golf swing.

A surmise: If properly coded currents of electricity enable you to learn a golf swing, it might also be that well timed jolts of electricity enhance the speed and quality of your swing. Electricity as an intervention is hardly new as anyone who wears a pace-maker can attest. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery is common where an electrode is implanted deep in the brain to treat Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. And of course the technology known as TENS is routinely prescribed for pain relief. 

If it proves to be efficacious it might be possible to strategically place a small device located directly over M1 that was programmed to deliver jolts of energy to foster both motor learning and golf performance. Currently the big issue in competitive sports is doping but as our intervention capacity expands we’ll face some knotty questions about how much athletes should be allowed to take advantage of neuroscience.

DO YOU HUNCH YOUR SHOULDERS???

          Hunch-Flip Syndrome

Hunching your shoulders during your downswing ruins impact. When you hunch you in effect slam on the shoulder brakes and this “stopping to hit” causes the club to flip and the ball to squirt off line. The young player in the photo has failed to keep her swing pace in good order and thus falls victim to what I call the Hunch – Flip syndrome. Here is how it works.

Bio mechanically for every 1° of hunch you lose 2° of thoracic rotation and according to the conservation of momentum when you short-circuit your rotary capability the club will flip past you because your trail arm is only so long and it effectively shortens when you stop your back shoulder so it loses pace during the race to impact. Held back by the retarded shoulder your back arm will reach its full extension too early transferring so much force to the front wrist that it must collapse resulting in a weak flip at the ball.

In the correct swing the trail shoulder keeps moving allowing your arm to “stay long” thereby keeping the pressure off shaft.

    The tour pro in this photo has used his shoulders beautifully – – note how the shaft of

    the club is pointing directly at the midline of his body with no flip and no lagging back

    shoulder. Even though his right foot is still on the ground there is little weight on his

    right side -- he has no crease in his shoe.

    This young player shows what happens when you stop the

    rotation of the shoulders through impact. Notice how hunched

    her back is and how her core has failed to keep pace. This

    causes the right-hand and arm to overpressure the left and

    flip the clubface shut. The shaft of her club is not pointing to

    the midline of the body because she has put so much pressure

    on it. She looks like she's trying hard to stay behind the golf ball 

    and unfortunately she is succeeding. There is so much weight

    on the back foot that you can see a crease in her shoe. She needs

    to get up on her left side and allow her shoulders and core to

    fire through the ball.



 

USE JACK'S PHILOSOPHY

Average in Most, Exceptional in a Few.

Jack Nicholas didn't waste time during his career chasing the perfect swing or for that matter the perfect all around stat game. Once he learned the basic swing from Jack Grout he received very little substantive instruction – yearly tune ups he called them. His focus was on golf, not golf swing. After Grout died Nicklaus visited another teacher but in essence it was a business relationship to endorse their golf schools – Nicklaus wasn’t taking lessons.

The Nicklaus game plan was built around his strengths. He used a three-wood off the tee for most of his career, and like Tiger, he excelled with the long and medium irons. He was also a great putter from 10 feet and one of the best lag putters of all time. This combination of skills allowed him to have an inferior short game and still become the greatest player ever.

Nicklaus didn’t waste years trying to perfect every phase of his game like Tiger has. Golfers don’t run out of talent, they run out of time thus it depends on your focus during your peak years – and you can waste a lot of time trying to be perfect. It’s hard for a 25 year old to understand that in a blink of an eye they’ll be 50.

To be a good player you must digitize your performance, create a skills package then bring your weaknesses up to average. Find out what you do well and then construct your approach to playing the game around your edge.

While it goes against all the hype talk, the winning formula is average in most, exceptional in a few.

ARE YOU LUCKY????

On Luck

 When the average golfer hits one into trouble they usually pay dearly but it seems like every time Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods hits the ball in the bushes they have a shot – a little opening and a good lie in the midst of trouble all around. Are the pros really this lucky or does it just appear that way?

According to research by Robert A. Connolly and Richard J. Rendleman, Jr., Univ. of NC at Chapel Hill not only are the pros lucky but their luck is a key element of winning the tournament. In fact there are only a few players such as Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods skillful enough to win with only a little luck.

Of course when great players get a break they are skillful enough to convert the advantage. Too often the average player catches the one over-hanging tree limb and bounces back deeper into the forest while the tour pros can thread it through an opening the width of a cheerleader then bend it to the green and stop it dead. Basically it doesn’t do you much good if you’re lucky without the skill to convert the luck to a lower score.

The researchers found that during the years they studied the PGA Tour winners they attributed 9.6 strokes to good luck. The No. Carolina team put it this way:

‘We find that mean skill alone is insufficient to win a golf tournament; a little luck (i.e., unusually favorable outcomes and/or skilled play) is required for the most highly skilled players such as Tiger Woods, and lots of luck is required for more average players to win.”

What kind of luck are the experts talking about? It’s lucky when the golf course fits your game so that pin positions, tees and lines of play support your game. It’s lucky when they hold the tournament at the golf course you are familiar with, which may be why rookies have such difficulty in winning on the PGA Tour -- the courses are all new to them. Celtic Manor was very familiar to the European Ryder Cup team but not to the Americans and simply knowing where to miss can be a key to the amount of luck you have. As Gary Player said “the harder you work, the luckier you get!”

It’s lucky having a starting time when the weather is nice versus four hours later when the winds are up and the rain is pelting. And of course the more traditional concept of luck -- good bounces, landing on a sprinkler head and ending up next to the flag, hitting the pin and going in the hole, a perfect lie in deep rough and a free drop because of some sort of interference, are all examples of good luck. Ernie Els hooked it 50 yards into the left woods on the 11^th hole at the Masters one year, so deep that the maintenance staff though it safe to pile some bushes there. Els legally dropped it so he had a narrow opening back to the fairway and pulled off the shot. In the most incredible bit of luck I have ever seen, Tiger Woods hit his ball onto the roof of the clubhouse and received a free drop next to the green – it was so far out of bounds that the tournament staff neglected to mark it OB – Tiger sheepishly made par and shrugged his shoulders as if to say – ‘hey I’m not only great but I’m lucky, which makes me really great!”

These are all a matter of luck but its part of a player’s skill package how they respond to both bad and good breaks. The takeaway is that your game must be good enough so that luck becomes the deciding factor – then the key is to hang in there until your turn comes!!

A Water-Logged Cup

And it rained and rained at this year's Ryder Cup giving Judy Rankin an opportunity to explain something that has always puzzled the American golfing public --- the squeegee rule -- at seven o'clock in the morning.

It took 27 hours to complete the first day’s matches, long enough for our national debt to go up another 3,240,000,000 [2 million a minute]. At one point there was a better ball, a best ball and I think a butterball going on at the same time -- all with different formats.

To add to the confusion the US team [and their caddies] had to buy rain suits in the pro shop because the ones furnished by Captain Pavin weren’t water proof – thus there was no US insignia or colors to distinguish them. Did I mention it was seven o'clock in the morning?

  

Why were they trying to play golf in October in Wales? Part of the problem was the PGA tours Commissioner's office, who in order to promote their own cup -- the FedEx Cup [fondly know as The Finchem Cup] -- pushed the Ryder Cup back so the weather was bad enough to force the Monday finish.

Who Is Godot?

When Godot Doesn’t Show

In a web article titled Why most golf statistics whiff and how to fix them, Michael Agger describes the work of Mark Broadie, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia. Dr. Broadie concludes that golf statistics are faulty because they don't factor in the concept of shot value. In his schemata he calculates how many strokes it takes a scratch player to hole out from any particular position on the golf course. So instead of painting 150 yards on the sprinkler head it might read 2.3 meaning that the benchmark is two strokes plus the fraction. If you were on the tee box of a long hard par 4 the shot value might read 4.9, while the three foot putt might be at 1.

Your job is to maneuver the golf ball around the golf course so that you maximize your fractions i.e. you don't have to be perfect just fractionally better, so that over a round, a year, or a career, your fractions cumulate into advantage.  

The knack of scoring means maximizing your fractional advantages on each swing, a general pattern of play characteristic of players who have learned ‘it’ – – how to get the ball in the hole. These players have stored the pattern in their subconscious through experience yet this skill is so hard to identify that those who have ‘it’ don’t even know what they have. Jack Nicklaus gave his sons everything they needed (lessons, equipment, money etc.) but he could not give them ‘it’.

When a dominant player like David Duval or Ian Baker Finch looses ‘it’ [i.e. knack of scoring] they are bewildered and invariably look to their swing as the problem. They look at their stats, and conclude that their swing needs to be more perfect, so they find a new teacher then wait. They are in effect “Waiting for Godot’ – and sometimes Godot doesn’t show.