My Awful Golf Swing

My wife and I went on a wonderful trip to the Maine coastline last month. We stayed at The Samoset Resort, known as "The Pebble Beach of the East." The views from the fairways along the coast were phenomenal. Fortunately, the similarities ended there, as Pebble Beach $500 greens fees are a bit to dear for me. The early season rate of $70, including cart, suited me just fine at Samoset. And the lobster....yummy!

During one of our rounds, my wife caught my swing on video with her iPhone. Although the quality isn't exactly ShotLink-calibre, I was able to learn a lot from what she captured. I already knew that I had a problem with a lack of lag in my swing away from the driving range. Almost a yip-like reaction, in fact, when on the course. But what I saw on her phone was horrifying.

So I've decided to make lemonade from my lemon of a swing. I hope you enjoy my analysis, and if you have any thoughts to add, by all means....

I'm OK with this set-up.  The ball isn't as close to the left heel as
is commonly taught, but this angle is a little deceiving,
so it's not quite as much in the center of my stance as it may
appear. I tend to put the ball a little farther back in my
stance than "normal" with all of my clubs.

Still OK with the swing. Not quite to parallel, but I'm fine
with it.  J.B. Holmes, Tom Lehman, and others don't
go to parallel, and they generate ample club head speed.

It's hard to tell without the pictures side-by-side, or better
yet, overlapped, but my downswing starts with a quirky
move where I actually raise the club head a bit. I don't
like it, but it's not the worst part of my swing.

Here is where the worst part of my swing starts to
rear its ugly head. My wrists are already starting to
break down.  Horrible. The forearm/shaft angle should
still be at least 90-degrees here, and it clearly is not.
I also dislike how my legs flare, largely due to the
feet not being square at setup. I'm OK with the left
foot flare, a little at least, but don't like the
right foot.

One frame later, and there is almost no lag left. Absolutely
dreadful. One the absolute most key principles that
separate the pros from amateurs is the lag at about .05
seconds before impact, and I've already lost nearly all
of it here.

Right after impact, it's clear that I had begun my release
far too soon. And why is that right arm not tucked near
the side of my body? I taught myself that move in becoming
a fairly decent power hitter in softball. It's also a
fundamental of a good golf swing, and yet I'm nowhere
near doing it correctly.

This isn't so bad.  You would never know that what
immediately preceded it was so hideous.

Wrists rolling; again, not so bad.

A bit of a weak Reverse C finish, but not all bad.  A little
Nicklaus-like if I do say so myself.

Now for the positives:  Hmmmm. Give me a minute.

OK, that I can still swing at about 110 mph with this swing should mean that I have a serious upside if I can make the right changes. The lag/delayed release is what can generate so much effortless power from the pros. I have the strength to do it; I just need to put in the quality reps to make it habit.

I've already spent good time on the range trying to fix it, and results so far are positive. A nice side effect is that I re-aggravated an old back injury, which has severely limited my playing time, so I have to take it easy when practicing. How is that good? I'm getting to it.

Working on the small muscles to create lag in my swing is a lot easier on my back than trying to get it with a violent hip turn. I've lost no club head speed, despite swinging much easier now.  Once the back is 100% again (should I be so lucky), I would hope I could pick up a few more mph.

I'll keep the blog up-to-date with my progress, and assuming my back continues to get better, I'll do a similar bowling analysis. The debacle that was the USBC Open Championships this year made me do some soul searching.  But again, lemons to lemonade, it allowed me to discover a key thing the pros do that I don't do, and the similarity to my golf swing is striking, no pun intended.

Stay tuned.

Baton Rouge Breakdown

The trip to Baton Rouge a month ago for the USBC Open Championship couldn't have gone much worse, and yet I see nothing but silver linings.

For the tournament, I averaged 60 pins below my league average.  That's ten pins per game worse than I did last year, except last year my average was ten pins higher. (So it's really 20 pins worse per game.)

For the second year in a row, I had thumb swelling issues.  You'd think I would have learned to get the balls re-drilled to be large enough in the thumb holes to avoid this.

Don't get me wrong; I doubt I would have done well regardless.  The thumb hole wasn't sticking for the entire 90 frames, although it sure felt like it in afterthought. And my spare ball wasn't quite as bad, yet I couldn't pick up spares to save my life.

But it wasn't just the bowling that went wrong.  From having to wait around several hours after the flight landed due to some communication mix-ups, to United Airlines losing two of my bowling balls on the return flight (I got them back eventually), it was a comedy of errors. "Comedy" is a good word for it, too, as I am able to have a laugh at it all now, and I even managed to laugh at it while it was all happening.

So I'm looking forward to the things I need to work on already, beyond equipment issues. And I'm looking forward to redemption in Reno next year.

If any team will have me after this year's debacle, that is.

...and to think the Dixie Chicks' careers were ruined

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
- Bertrand Russell

I haven't posted too often about political issues on my blog, although I hope to do more of that in the near future, perhaps even starting separate blog to do so. Part of the reason is that I don't want to alienate friends who may disagree with my points of view. I believe reasonable people can disagree reasonably, but you never know who's going to go unreasonable on you.

This whole Ted Nugent vs. President Obama thing compels me to write at least a little. As might be apparent in my few political posts, I tend to "lean left." The best way I could describe what I mean by that is if you were to take, say, 20 hot-button issues of the day, I would probably be on the "left" on about 13 of them, give or take. Relative to, that is, the general populace, NOT what the Fox News folks would want you to believe.

So while Bill O'Reilly no doubt would call the likes of me "far left" (to help move the perceived center as he is wont to do), the Nuge reminds me of one issue that gets me going sometimes. If you were to believe him and his NRA brethren, you'd believe guys like I want to take everyone's guns away. They even use the fact that Obama has attempted no such thing as an argument that he will do so if reelected.

That people believe this stuff is mind numbing.

It won't help, I'm sure, but I can definitively say that I know many, many people who are left of me politically. My wife, in fact, is a deer-lover. She'd swerve to miss a deer even if it meant putting pedestrians' lives in jeopardy. And yet I can say this with 100% honesty: I know of absolutely no one who wants to take away your or anyone's guns.

Sure, many like myself want reasonable laws to keep up with the times. Did our Forefathers have semi-automatics, or even nuclear weapons in mind when they considered the Second Amendment? So laws like waiting periods seem to make sense. This is no less an attack on the 2nd than saying you can't scream "Fire!" in a crowded theatre is on the 1st.

Put simply, it's a lie that people like the Motor City Madman keep perpetuating.

But if anyone reading this already believes it, I doubt my words have made an iota of difference.

Fenway Park and the Pebble Beach of The East

After checking StubHub nearly daily for over a month, I finally found five tickets that were decent enough, and reasonably priced enough, for the Boston Red Sox vs. Cleveland game May 10 at Fenway Park. Author Harvey Mackay once wrote, "A dream is a bargain at any price." So I could have spent more and justified it, but as I posted last month, I need to mind our budget.

I had a chance to buy a pair of State Street Pavilion Club tickets for $80 (face value is $170), but knew that my wife and I would likely be going to the game with her friend and her friend's kids. It wasn't easy to find five together that worked out price- and location-wise. Fenway Park is a "bucket list" item for me, but I wasn't going to settle for being 500 feet from home plate just to save a buck or two hundred. So for some $66+ per ticket after fees, we got our seats.

In fact, only four of them are together, and one is directly behind the four. I figure I'll take the one, while my wife catches up with her friend and helps with the kids. So that will be fine. I just won't be able to save their lives when a line drive comes their way while I'm watching every pitch, and they're comparing stories of motherhood.

My wife has interesting friends, in a good way. This particular friend happens to be a fairly recent Mrs. New Hampshire winner. Her husband is bass player for the metal band (or whatever genre you call their style) Godsmack, one of the few bands of their ilk that I quite enjoy.

(I don't think they'll mind my bragging about knowing them; I would guess that they pity me enough to offer their support.)

In fact, the idea was to get together when the band wasn't touring so that he could go, too, and when I reached out to her, she didn't think they'd be touring yet in early May. As it turns out, they are, and had I booked the trip for just a week later, their concerts would have been close enough to the Boston/New England area to meet up with the whole family. But I wasn't confident that I'd be able to find an open week to trade my RCI timeshare, as the Samoset Resort, where we're staying in Rockland, Maine, is pretty popular once spring gets going.

I'm pretty pumped for that part of the trip, too, as another "bucket list" item of mine is to play golf at Pebble Beach. Until I decide to take out a home equity loan to pay Pebble's fees (plus mandatory stay at the Lodge at Pebble Beach), Samoset, a.k.a. "The Pebble Beach of the East," will have to do. The sub-$100 greens fees make me smile, too.

Minnesota Warming

Sometime in the late 1970s I believe, there was a Sears Die Hard battery commercial which featured a car in the middle of a frozen lake in International Falls, MN. It wasn't even in the winter; it was in April. See, that's how long it stays cold in International Falls, near the Minnesota/Canada border. The point of the spot was that you can leave a Sears Die Hard battery in a parked car all winter long in International Falls, and it will still fire up just before the ice melts.

Today, International Falls broke its record high temperature. By 20 degrees! It reached 79 today. Yes, 79 degrees, in the winter, in International Falls.

That's like 33 degrees in August...in Hell.

I suppose there still is some ice on the lakes in IF, but I wouldn't walk on it, let alone hop in a car to see if the battery has lasted the winter.

Now, to the Global Warming deniers, of the human-aided kind (AGW) or otherwise, I won't be foolish enough to commit the same fallacy that many deniers do when they say, "Where's your global warming now?" whenever we get a big snowfall or cold spell.

But I will say this: "Why so quiet, now?"

Why March Madness just doesn't mean that much to me

As someone who enjoys athletic competition, I get caught up in a lot of events, especially when I have a reason to root for a team, even if it's not my favorite game. I'm thinking specifically of basketball, a game that I continue to lose more and more interest in.

What triggered this post is that in a rarity, my alma mater high school is/was ranked in the top ten in Minnesota. Tonight, they had a chance to go to the state tournament, but lost in OT in the regional final.

I saw the game-winning basket on the news tonight. The winning team's player dished the ball off to a teammate, who laid it in. In dishing it off, however, he also plowed over a well-positioned defender. After viewing and reviewing the play several times, thanks to DVR technology, I know a few things:

1) It was a textbook charge that went uncalled
2) It happened right in front of the official
3) My blood pressure went up a bit

Basketball is as fun a game to play as any for me, except perhaps ice hockey. But it's terribly frustrating to watch, because of the officiating. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with basketball officials as a whole; rather, the game itself simply makes for what seems to be a flip-a-coin process in deciding when to call fouls. Still, so often it seems that the officials are too afraid to make the calls that so clearly happen right in front of them, especially in the final minute.

"Let them play!" the non-thinkers say.

"No, make them play, so that it's a fair result," I say.

Yes, ice hockey needs to call boarding more strictly, and call a penalty a penalty even late in the 3rd period and overtime.

Yes, baseball umpires make up their own strike zones.

And yes, football officials seem to have trouble with holding and interference calls, to name a couple.

Yet none of them seem so random as in the calling and non-calling of basketball fouls. I'm sure you could point to a time earlier in the game where my school got away with something, and the calls probably do typically even out. But it's all about the integrity of the game, and a game that over the years has required me to invest a couple hours or more of my time, only to be decided by something so random as to whether an official decides to blow a whistle or not, has very little credibility with me. I also find it ironic that basketball officials are the least tolerant of criticism, "T-ing up" people if they look at them funny.

As much as anything, this is why I hope my two youngest boys don't follow their brother's footsteps by quitting hockey and switching to basketball. I'll put up with an idiotic parent cheering on his imbecilic son who just cross-checked my boy with no call from the ref. But I can't handle endings like I saw tonight.

Leaping Lucifer, look what day it is!

It's another late night finishing up some stuff for work that I didn't get to today. Yesterday I received 206 e-mails, 174 of them work-related. I'm working on a mini-project to break down the work e-mails beyong just how many. It's been very busy lately, but I guess that's a good thing.

It's also the last day of February, so I figured I'd better take a break from disecting e-mails and such to post something...anything. Not because February 29 only comes every four years. Rather, it's because lately my blog posts have come only about every four weeks.

So true to form, I'm realizing another month without as many blog posts as I'd like is about to end, and thus am trying to get one more in before the new month starts. Only this time, it's zero. So I will be clicking "Publish Post" before the stroke of midnight, because I would hate to have to try to access Facebook on a pumpkin tomorrow morning.

Lots has been happening lately, not just at work, but in my personal life. I'm glad my tax return will be nice, as much of the happenings happen to be expensive. To wit:

1. I just bought four tickets today to the Madonna concert coming up in November. Just under $800. We hope to sell two of them at a nominal profit, to help pay for some of it.
2. The trip to Baton Rouge for the USBC Open Championship is coming up. April 28 & 29, to be exact.
3. While I'm in Baton Rouge, Bruce Springsteen will be performing in New Orleans. I might just have to take the drive to see the Boss for the sixth time. It will be sad without Clarence this go-round.
4. After the USBC trip, my wife and I are going to vacation in Maine. We'll stop in Boston for a game at Fenway.
5. My son graduates high school in June.
6. I'm taking my daughters to the Brian Regan show Friday night. I took my son to it last time around, so it's their turn.
7. My wife and I have decided to put curbing in our yard this year, replacing the plastic lining that has been gradually coming out, being clipped by the lawnmower, etc., over the last nine years.

I'm sure there's more, but I'm starting to get depressed. I may have to skip the Springsteen show. Until, that is, he swings by the Twin Cities.