March 1, 2013 at 3:47 p.m.
Capital G Golfer in the Making
Turf's up for our man Glenn
Most golfers have a fault in the swing that needs to be ‘fixed’ to improve their game.
A slice, for instance, that causes the majority of the shots to curve left to right.
So fast forward to the lesson with the Bermuda Sun’s Glenn Jones, who I am instructing as part of the Capital G Golfer in the Making series.
At the end of the lessons, Glenn has challenged reggae superstar Collie Buddz to a one-on-one showdown on the course on March 19, so there’s a lot at stake.
For the first session, I am looking at his swing and how he is hitting the ball.
I am also taking a look at his clubs, as this will often be a good clue on what is happening in his game.
The only thing that jumped out was a missing club, no driver! More of this in the next week’s story.
What was highly unusual was the lack of faults in the swing and set-up.
Although Glen had not had any formal coaching before, his form and understanding of the golf swing was amazing.
So I decided that to spend much more time on the range would be pointless.
This in itself is important to understand.
Many players practice their full swing for hours and spend little or no time on the other parts of their game.
In doing this they try to perfect something that already is good, and neglect areas of the game that are just plain terrible.
So on the range we just worked on feeling a slightly more descending blow, feeling that despite being on a mat that a divot is being taken after the ball.
Glenn had a tendency to try and puck the ball off the surface rather than hitting down into the ball.
So we then moved to hitting off turf, taking a small, shallow divot.
We also went down to the short-game area and looked at some simple chipping.
This again is quite good and makes me think that Glenn could be an exceptional golfer if he put his mind to it.
However, we could see that while some of his shots were excellent, they were not consistent and after some subtle changes and most importantly some practice and understanding of what we are trying to achieve, the consistency improved.
The key area we focused on was the concept of controlling distance, which is done by controlling the length of the swing.
Overall I found that Glenn has a good swing and that we need to work on his ability to take it to the course, which is what it is going to take to be able to beat Collie on March 19.
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