The Fine Green Line: My Year of Golf Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours
336
The Fine Green Line: My Year of Golf Adventure on the Pro-Golf Mini-Tours
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Overview
One day, playing a particularly spectacular round of golf, husband and father John Paul Newport suddenly tastes what it's like to be a pro. Deciding to take a year off and hit the road playing golf's mini-tour circuit, Newport embarks on a wild trip through America's fairways. Over the course of his journey inside the somewhat shady, often hilarious underbelly of professional golf, he uncovers a world of people so totally addicted to golf, to the delusion of achievable perfection, that they sacrifice everything else to the quest. He also discovers the nature of his own obsession with the game, and how this constant pursuit of perfection on the golf course reflects the same challenges and frustrations one encounters in life. What does it take to master such an intricate, unpredictable game? In golf, as in life, why is one so consistently incapable of acting up to one's clearly established potential?
As Newport struggles to cross that Fine Green Line--the infinitely subtle yet critical difference between the top golf professionals and those who never quite make it--he realizes that life, like golf, doesn't let you get away with anything. This is a story about letting go of fear, facing challenges, and embracing risks--a compelling personal journey that captures many of the frustrations and elations of midlife both on and off the course.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780767908955 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crown Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/20/2010 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 834,353 |
| File size: | 445 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1 The Broken Stick
My year of golf began officially--not that there were any officials keeping track--in October 1995, with a lesson from Michael Hebron. It was my first golf lesson ever, and in addition to the predictable paranoia anyone would feel handing over something valuable to a stranger (one's soul to a priest, one's mind to a shrink, one's swing to a golf coach), I was intimidated by Hebron's reputation. One of the country's most respected teachers, just a notch of renown below the celebrity instructors like David Leadbetter and Butch Harmon who hang out on the PGA Tour practice tee, he is the author of (among other titles) The Art and Zen of Learning Golf, a title which
intrigued me. Among his former students were Tour stars like Vigay Singh, Steve Pate, and Ian Woosnam.
Given my tight budget, I hoped to talk Hebron into giving me lessons for free, or at least at a steep discount, and most of my thoughts during the drive to the lesson concerned how to make my case. "I am no ordinary student," I rehearsed out loud in the car. "I am on a quest. I am embarking on an everyman adventure sure to be of interest to all living Americans. My goal is to penetrate the very heart of golf. I will practice like crazy. My hands will bleed. I will purify my thoughts and become the ball. And all I need to succeed is your instruction--and your support." In practicing these remarks I made dramatic gesticulations with my nonsteering hand. By the time I arrived at the Smithtown Landing Country Club on Long Island, where Hebron teaches, I felt reasonably confident.
At the pro shop, however, the clerk insisted that I pay $150 in advance--so much for the free lesson--and when I walked down the hill to the covered teaching tee and spotted Hebron working with a strong young Japanese player, my self-assurance melted. The student, so far as I could tell, possessed an absolutely flawless swing. Which particular, minute detail of the swing he and Hebron might have been working on was impossible to determine. After each swipe at the ball the Japanese guy held his finish like someone posing for the PGA Tour logo. Nevertheless, Hebron always stepped in to suggest some adjustment: a one-centimeter forward shift of the upper torso, perhaps, or a half-degree left swivel of the hips. I had to assume the Japanese guy couldn't putt; otherwise it seemed certain that I would have recognized him from the Tour.
When the lesson ended they shook hands, then bowed to each other in the Oriental fashion, and Hebron walked over to where I stood trying to look nonchalant and introduced himself. He was a decent-looking man in his early fifties, fit and of average height, with sandy, gray-speckled hair and a boyish face that was just beginning to show the effects of years in the sun. But his eyes are what caught my attention. They were striking, vivid blue and penetrating, yet strangely nonrevealing, like a reptile's.
"What can I help you with?" he asked.
The words of my carefully composed little speech deserted me. Whatever confidence I had had in the car was now completely gone, replaced by need--raw, unadulterated, heartfelt need. I stood before Hebron's reptile gaze stripped of all pretense, suddenly as awestruck as a child who finally gets to the front of the Santa Claus line at the department store. I could only sputter nonsense. What I really, desperately wanted, I realized, was the same thing all golfers want.
"I wanna get better," I said. "I wanna get better at golf."
Hebron nodded understandingly and said, "Let's see you hit a few balls." He told me later that new students often break down in this kind of confessional way ("It can get emotional out here," he said), so in hurrying me to the practice mat he was probably trying to keep things from getting messy.
I chose my pitching wedge to hit with because the wedge is generally one of the hardest clubs to screw up with. I took my time, stretching a little while trying to regain my emotional equilibrium, and slapped a half dozen balls towards the 125-yard sign. The results were better than I could have expected. I hit every ball on the noggin, and one actually hit the 125-yard sign. My confidence came back.
When I turned around to face Hebron, however, he was nodding ominously--like a doctor who has seen the lab report but is not yet ready to divulge the disheartening results. "Yes, I see a few things," he said noncommittally.
Then he asked me to hit a few more balls with a video camera rolling, and after he ejected the tape we walked up a cart path (my cleats clattering on the pavement) to a small, cinder block shed a pitch shot away. He asked me what my handicap was.
"Five," I told him. "No wait. Actually, three." In fact at that moment it was 2.7, but the Japanese guy and Hebron's enigmatic nods had left me feeling insecure.
I decided to broach the subject of my grand plans for the Year of Golf. "My intention, you see, is to work really hard on golf for an entire year." I tried to sound positive, but couldn't bring myself to mention anything about Q School or turning pro. "I'm going to practice really, really hard and my object is to see how good I can get in that time."
"I know the answer to that one," Hebron said brightly. "Not very."
"Not very?"
"That's right."
"But . . . don't you think if I absolutely commit myself to golf for an entire year, I can get better?"
"Not much," he said.
"Not much?"
"That's right."
I didn't quite know how to respond. Wasn't a teacher supposed to be encouraging? We walked on, my cleats echoing in the uncomfortable silence. Finally I said, "Why is it you think that?"
"Because the golf swing is complicated. You've got seventy bones and two hundred muscles and they all have to work together. That isn't easy to make happen."
Hebron could tell that I wasn't satisfied with this response. "Let me put it another way," he continued. "College golfers usually start out with a handicap about like yours, three or four. They play 250 days a year, three or four hours a day, for four or five years, and usually by the time they graduate they're scratch players. The ones who go on to do well after that are the ones who happen to be very good in the short game, but that's another issue. And grown-ups like yourself don't have nearly that much time to devote to the game, so it takes even longer."
"But I do have that much time," I said excitedly. I told him about my plans to write a book about the Year ahead and how I had always been a good student in school and how I was intensely motivated. He didn't seem very impressed.
"Generally we tell low single-digit handicappers it takes three or four years to drop a single stroke."
Three or four years! Had he been paying attention? I was dismayed. A year from now I would be going to Q School. By then I needed to be at least scratch!
"That's impossible," I blustered.
"Some students are better than others," he shrugged. "Maybe in your case we could take a stroke off in just one year."
By this time we had entered the cinder block shed, which was lined on three walls with mirrors. A red circle was painted in the middle of the floor, intersected by various other multicolored lines and multicolored footprints like you might see at a dance studio. The Sheetrock near the video installation was plastered with photos of famous golfers in mid-swing.
We sat down at the video table and watched my swing, which I had never seen on tape before. I was pleasantly surprised. My timing seemed smooth--not too fast, not too slow--and I finished on balance.
"Is that similar to what you thought it would look like?" Hebron asked.
"Actually it looks better than I expected," I said. "Because when I'm standing over the ball I don't feel nearly as comfortable as I look like I am here."
"Hmmmm," he responded, and took out a black grease pencil. He froze the tape at the instant of impact--the view was head-on, with me facing the camera--and drew a straight vertical line on the screen through the ball. "How much of your body is behind the ball?"
"About half, I guess," I said, thinking this was probably the right answer.
"And how much of the body of Davis Love over there is behind the ball?" He pointed to a picture on the wall of Davis Love III at a similar instant of impact.
I studied the photo and saw that all of Davis Love III was behind the ball.
"So that would be my first observation about your style," Hebron said. "The second would have to do with your spine. See how the upper part of your spine is leaning slightly toward the target at the top of your backswing?" He played the tape back and forth sadistically. "In the swings we like, the spine leans away from the target. Look at Davis again."
Sure enough, there was geeky Davis Love tilting his spine perfectly. I was embarrassed. I was guilty of reverse pivot, a flaw I was well acquainted with from reading instructional books. In fact, when friends asked me to look at their swings, reverse pivot was often one of the first things I pointed out. I myself had stopped reverse pivoting years ago--or so I thought.
Hebron led me out on the floor and we worked on attaining the correct spine-tilt. I stood in the middle of the painted circle and checked my posture in the mirrors as I swung. When I had done this enough to feel thoroughly awkward, Hebron introduced another correction. He had noticed on the range that the ball was too close to my feet at address, and so we established a new setup that felt like I was leaning over the edge of a cliff. In passing he also mentioned that I would eventually need to change my grip.
Then he talked about my broken stick.
"If your left arm is 30 inches long and your club is another 30 inches long, what we want at impact is a straight 60-inch stick, but a 60-inch stick that is leaning, with your hands ahead of the ball."
He took me back over to the video machine and froze my swing. "Would you say that we're looking at a straight, leaning stick in this picture?"
"No."
"The best players in the world play golf with straight sticks." He pointed to Davis Love III again.
"You're playing with a broken stick. Look at this--your hands are actually behind the ball at impact. That means your system can't be producing enough power."
He sat back in his chair and sighed. "When you paint, is the paintbrush in front of your hand or are you pulling the brush behind your hand?"
"I'm pulling the brush behind my hand."
"Is the brush straight or is it leaning?"
"Leaning."
"Is a hockey stick straight up and down when it hits the puck or is it leaning?"
"Leaning."
"Is the baseball bat out ahead of the hitter's hands at impact, or is he pulling the bat through the strike zone with his hands ahead of it?"
"His hands are ahead of it."
"The straight, leaning shaft compresses the ball and that's what makes the ball jump off the clubhead. This is a fundamental. I'm only going over very fundamental concepts with you today. There are three reasons people don't get better. Lack of a plan, misinformation, and trying to learn the big things before the small things. We're going to start with the small things."
I nodded obediently as Hebron continued talking about broken sticks and proper alignment, but I stopped paying close attention, counting on my whirring tape recorder to preserve the wisdom for later. My mind wandered back to how good my wedge shots had been, the ones that were the basis for all this withering dissection. I'd made solid contact each time. The trajectories were uniform. The balls all landed within a few yards of each other.
"The thing I don't understand," I interrupted when Hebron paused for a moment, "is why, if my swing has all these deficiencies, my shots on the range went so straight. They were all pretty good shots, weren't they?"
"Pretty good?" Hebron burst out. "Well, that was a pretty good paper you wrote back in college, John Paul, but it wasn't an 'A' paper, was it? That was a pretty good round you shot at the U.S. Open last year, Mr. Norman, but you still came in second. What's pretty good? If pretty good is all you're after, you're already pretty good. Why did you come to me for help?"
Hebron's reptile eyes were merry. He arched his eyebrows quizzically and craned his head forward in a stagy manner and said in a sappy voice, "Why bother getting better at all?" Then he laughed out loud--a friendly, ironic, welcome-to-the-nuthouse sort of laugh--and gave me a big wink.
This sudden transformation of Hebron from dour instructor to fellow traveler filled my heart with joy. It made me think we shared a fundamental conviction, namely that the game of golf is absurd. Admitting to yourself that whacking a dimpled ball around some pasture with hard-to-manipulate clubs is a boneheaded pursuit seems to me the first necessary step in any serious golfer's journey. Once you can accept this, you are freed from ever having to think about it again, and thus can get on with the business at hand.
"Why bother getting better at all," I repeated. "That's the million-dollar question, all right."