The first question I asked golfers is what makes your golf ball go? And
they're like, never thought about that, Well, I hit it, and
my mind and swing momentum and my club head speed, and you know,
they say all these things. It's like yeah, yeah, yeah, but
the real thing that makes your golf level is you, which is the ven
news and the bad news. And then the next question is who are you?
But my answer out of your practical level is and who I am?
Who are? Is life energy in a body? Life energy key g kundalini
prana. We don't have words in English, but they do in the East.
This life energy, it comes into your body when you get bored,
when you die, it goes out of your body and the last breath,
that's where the breath comes in. Our breath kind of carries this animating life
force and it has four faculties. They're called your mind, your body,
or emotions in your spirit. Hi. This is Randy Erickson from Moraga,
California, and I play at Moraga Country Club. This is golf number nine
hundred and fourteen. Most golfers make centered contact on our random basis with our
golf sense A Jamie's Imron This is Golf Smarter, sharing stories, tips and
insights from great golf minds to help you lower your score and raise your golf
IQ. Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter
Podcast. Jamie. Thank you, Fred. I'm always so happy to be
here. I appreciate it. Great great having you back on. This is
your fifteenth appearance and Golf Smarter ever since two thousand and eight, you've been
coming on, but it's been a couple of years since you've been on,
so I'm really glad to get you back. You've been traveling a lot,
we had COVID, so it's been tough for us to get together again.
But I'm really excited to get you on now because I'm so proud of you.
You are receiving an Excellence in Golf Award this coming week from the San
Francisco Pride Golf Tournament PGA Pride. The PGA Pride, please explain more to
me. I was reading the press release, but this is really a prestigious
award and you should be so honored to be getting at what's going on with
this? Well, thank you. I really I'm honored, and more than
that, I'm excited about the tournament, the event, it's the fifth annual
PGA partnering. The PGA partnering with San Francisco Pride Committee, which is huge.
You know how big that event is every year quarter million people at least
and the San the Parade, right, Yeah, the San Francisco Pride Committee
does a lot of community organization support, so it's a fundraiser event. But
the PGA has been partnering now for five years with San Francisco Pride as part
of their diversity and Inclusion initiative, which I want to thank Greg Fitzgerald.
He's a PGA pro in the South Bay and it was his brain child and
he's the for the PGA Northern California PGA. He's the director, i believe,
of the Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. So it's a big event,
raises money, everybody's on board. The event. The night before as hosted
at the Fairmont Hotel and we play at Harding Park, which of course is
a US Open major venue. So there's a lot of support behind the LGBT
community and diversity in general and particularly for you know, the LGBTQ golfers and
athletes. So you know, people playing are from a wide swath of the
community. You could say allies whatever, but you know, it's not like
to just gay people playing golf. But it's really something to be at the
tournament, to be at Harding Park and to see rainbow balloons, and you
know, it's a very colorful event and at this US up in venue.
So it's really big steps forward. And it's the fifth annual and again I'm
very honored to be to be the honorary this year. That's awesome. So
why you why did you get selected for this honor Do you know why?
I mean, who do I have to get your brother on to have you
brag about it and brought you? Oh? Thank you. So I've been
playing golf since I was seven and I won my first tournament I ever played,
which happened to be the Wisconsin State Junior Championship. I grew up in
Milwaukee. I was barely thirteen years old. And today that sounds kind of
funny because we've got kids playing golf at unbelievable levels right at four or five,
six, seven years old. But back then that wasn't like that.
We hardly had any junior programs. I think there was one of the girl
who played golf and where you know, where I came from, but we
did have, you know, a robust tournament and I beat the seventeen year
olds and then I won the junior title. I think three out of my
four times I tried, and I was ranked in the top ten nationally as
a junior player. I lost on a nineteenth hole and sun death right of
the semi finals Girls Nationals at pine ER's Number two to Laura Law, who
of course went on to play the LPGA tour. Amy Alcott and I became
friends at that tournament. We both qualified shoot in seventy six and that's how
we met. So you know, there were that was kind of my cohort
and then I actually went to Stanford, but I got there a couple of
years before title nine. I was probably your scholar athlete to you know whatever
classic one who would have been recruited except that there was nothing to recruit for
because it didn't quite exist. But I have gone on to join the LPGA
a little bit later in my career, and so I've been class A pro
teaching pro for twenty twenty five years. But in the interim I started practicing
aikido, which is a Japanese martial Art of Peace. And I actually opened
my own dojo when I was twenty five. It was called the Women's Ikeedo
School of San Francisco and I ran it for many many years, and i've
I'm now a six degree black belt in ikedo and done a lot of things
in ikedo, So that's in another part of my I would say my athletic
career. I helped introduce ike to the Soviet Union and a gorbachef years.
I've co founded a Middle East Ikedo piece project, help start ikedo and Palestine
and Ethiopia. I was just in Western Ukraine and Slovakia a few months ago.
I went to Poland. Since the war started, I've been doing ikedo
based and ikedo teaching and trauma stress relief work, so you know, I
do a lot with that, but it's been over twenty years. And I
also a psychologist and get to brag, so I'm like therapy, that's why
you're here. Yeah, I have a master's agree in clinical psychology and I've
worked, you know for many years doing doing therapy. And I also have
been doing a lot of corporate leadership consulting for the last teen years or so.
So I've blended the principles of IQ too. What's your universal principles for
excellence? I call the mechanics for the Magic with golf and created KEII golf
centered golfing and so everything that I've been doing in my teaching and bringing these
principles to golf in particular and then also to peacemaking and leadership and excellence,
I would say that's why I got chosen. Wow, that's so awesome,
that's so great. Congratulations, that's wonderful. And what is where are we
going to go with this? You know, the LPGA or the PGA itself
seems to be a bit more inclusive to the LGBTQ plus community than other pro
sports. Is that a facade or from your perspective, is it real?
I think it's a facade. I hate to say. I mean this is
why PGA's initiative is so important. The LPGA actually is doing a lot of
work around empowering young girls in golf. We we think we've hit our millionth
girl through our LPGA USG Girls Golf sites, which is fantastic. And the
LPGA is also doing a lot, particularly around racism and a more inclusivity so
that it's not just sort of white men playing golf. The PGA is the
first that I know of to actually have a major lpg LGBTQ initiative, and
so, you know, honestly, I think in sport is probably the hardest
place to come out. And I mean, if you really think about it,
very very very very few pro athletes, whether it's the PGA, the
LPGA, the Major League Baseball all can you name out players the NFL,
the NHL, the NBA. Very very few. It's difficult. And we
can talk about why it's so difficult in sport in particular to come out,
but is it easier to come out in sport that is not team sport like
tennis or golf versus a team sport like the Major League Baseball or the NBA,
which you know, there've been players in the NBA that have come out,
but then they kind of got not blackballed, but isolated. Perhaps it's
the best better way to put it. Yeah, Well, the teams,
I'm not sure if if that's the differentiating thing. It might be part of
it. But I think some of these sports that are like so manly,
right, it's the manly thing, and I have written some articles about this
I can share with you and with the audience here. Please make sure I
get the links and we'll put them on our show notes for the article we'll
do. Okay, thank you. So one of them is called mixing up
manly with athletic and what I mean what I mean about with that, And
if you think about the NFL, which is or the NBA, you know,
it's kind of like hyper hyper masculinity, right, and plus the team
sport thing in the locker room and all this homophobia and da makes it really
hard. It's like, is if we can't put our minds around the fact
that you could be a gay man and be such a man you know,
I mean a football player, right, we don't. We just kind of
don't equate those two things. It's like you're either not really a man if
you're gay, or if you're gay, you know, you're not athletic,
or you're a designer. All the stuff that people have. It's these gender
stereotypes that we're really dealing with. Okay. And in tennis, we've of
course had Billy Jean King and Martina Navratilova who were huge in the game and
have made a big difference, But you can't think of a lot more sort
of out lesbians, much less gay men in tennis, So think about that.
And in golf, quite honestly, there's only one pro name as tad
Fujikawa, and he played on the on tour. I don't know if he
still has his card. He was our Honorie a couple of years ago at
this one. So but and he came out, But I don't know if
you can challenge you to think of PGA Tour players who you know who are
saying, hey, I'm gay. And on the LPGA tour we had Muffin
Spencer Devlin came out in the nineties. She was kind of in my cohort
and she was on the cover Sports Illustrated, and you think that would have
opened the door, but it really hasn't. A Couple of years ago,
Mel Reid, who's currently on tour and she's doing well, she came out,
but that's officially out there, so people know, there aren't very many
who are really out there and talking about it. So even though we know,
for example, that in the LPGA it's actually very diverse in terms of
you know, straight women, gay women, etc. But you don't know
about that very much. We're mostly excited about all of the tour players who
are becoming moms right or they're getting married, they're getting married to men and
they're becoming moms. It'll be interesting if we have a tour player who is
married to her wife and becomes a mom, if that's going to be it
publicized, or if people are going to rejoice as much for them as they
would for any other woman who has a baby right on tourtout these things because
gender stereotyping. Yeah, go to Team Sport Brittany Grenier, who had headlines
for all the wrong reasons. She's pretty open, she's pretty she was out
there about this and very clear and you know, her wife, it was
they didn't shy away from that, which I think was really quite awesome,
very very awesome. It's pretty unusual, actually, but I think that that's
a step forward. And it's only happening now twenty twenty two, twenty three,
that's taken till now, But that is a great thing. On that
note, if we think about her, why did she go to Russia in
the first place, And most of the women who have gone to Russia,
and particularly they pay you could they can make a million dollars playing basketball in
Russia. Where here the top w NBA players, And these are statistics as
of I believe to twenty one, maybe into twenty two. But we're making
literally up for action of what the male players make. And I'll give you
a few numbers on that. As of a couple of years ago, the
top w NBA players women's basketball players were making. They got salary raises up
to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the year, so a quarter million
dollars. A rookie in the NBA who hasn't even made a name for himself
yet starts at seven eight million dollars. You're kind of average, pretty good
male players making fifteen twenty million something like that. The very top, like
Steph Curry was fantastic, but you know, he's a think he's in the
forty forty five million dollars or something. He arranged making twenty forty thirty forty
million dollars. Nobody, relatively speaking, are making at least eight ten fifteen
million dollars. The tip top w NBA players are making like a quarter of
a million. So to put that in perspective, I call it and I
have an article on the pay chasm and gender pay chasm in golf. So
we talk about a gender pay gap that women on average makes seventy seventy five
maybe eighty percent of what men make for the comp world jobs eighty percent.
I mean, if you took that Britney grinder would be making you know,
ten mill or I don't know many, you'd be making millions. The top
players and they're making like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars have to go
to Russia to give a million dollars to do what they do, which is
just played back what they do. So I don't think these are things people
think about or are very aware of in golf. Which is better And the
LPGA is one of the longest, if not the top, in longevity and
prominence as a women's sports organization. Even so, we're finally getting some pay
bumps. But the total purse up until two years ago, the total person
an LPGA event was what the winner of a PGA event would make, you
know, And then the winner of an LPGA event would make fifteen percent maybe
it's up to twenty or twenty five percent of what a PGA winner makes.
Tour winner makes and again, and then compare that to seventy five or eighty
percent of what women make, which is already still not okay and it's actually
illegal. President Kennedy mandated equal pay sixty years ago. Seventy years ago,
we're still not there. And think about those percentages in sport, and we
think that, wow, professional women tennis players or basketball players or golfers are
doing so much better than you know. They can make hundreds of thousands and
millions. But if you take it as a percentage of what the men are
making, it's way way less. It's a pay chasm according gender. Yeah,
amazing. Yeah. I didn't usually would have taken a commercial break five
or six minutes ago, but I just didn't feel right interrupting this conversation with
that. But I do have to go away for a moment. We'll take
a break. We'll be back right after this. You had said that you
wrote an article about this, but I'd really like to dig it a little
bit deeper about the article you wrote called mixing up Manly with Athletic. Well,
it's actually part of a series that I wrote about hetero slash sexism and
golf and PJA pride is an opportunity to talk about these things, So thank
you, and I'll give you the links to this. It's a four series
articles. So you know, I was a great little athlete when I was
young. I just kind of came out very athletic, love playing baseball,
and I ended up not being able to play baseball because I was a girl,
and like, they just wouldn't let me play. They mean, even
my parents, the adults. I just you know, threw the ball against
my garage door and played catch with myself or you know, hit a dance
the garage door. That's pretty much where I ended up. I couldn't play,
and girls couldn't play Little League. Yet I was a great golfer and
that was kind of allowed, you know, and my mom was a good
golfer, so well that was cool. I got to play golf, but
yeah, I really wasn't allowed to play most things. And I was called
a tom boy, so there was it's like it's if you were athletic,
yeah, to kind of be a boy, right, Like why's that?
Why couldn't I just be an athletic girl, a talented athlete as a girl.
That was kind of an anomaly. And guess what it probably man I
was gay, you know, but in my case it turned out. But
it's not necessarily true at all. You can be athletic and be a girl,
right and you can also be athletic and be a gay boy, which
people still have a hard time wrapping their heads around. Michael Sam was the
first really out football player, I don't know, six years ago, something
like that. He lasted in the NFL only a year or two. He
was bullied so badly and nobody could wrap their heads around it. So and
that if you're a boy, maybe you're not interested in sports. I mean,
there's a spectrum of these things in our interests, and they're really not
about being a boy or a girl and being blue and pink and all this
stuff. They're just about who you are and what your likes and interests and
talents are. That should be available to everybody. And it shouldn't be that.
It shouldn't have been that I had to be a tom boy who's maybe
not really a girl because I'm athletic, Like, what's that all about?
And so these are the things that I think we need to be questioning,
and we are. We're making progress. I will say that we're making progress,
But even in the twenty twenties, it's not easy for a gay athlete
to come out put it that way. No, And it's hard to paraphrase
doctor King, you know, talking about not the color of the skin.
But we can't talk about the quality of character. I mean, isn't that
should be the judge the way we judge. It's just the quality of character.
Everything else is superfluous. If you know, if they can beat you
at that sport doesn't matter, does it right? If they can beat you,
they can beat you, you're gonna have to work a little bit harder.
Yeah, well, we just really need to kind of uncouple these sort
of basically sexist, hetero sexist, genderized notions of who's athletic and who's not
or whatever it is that we're interested in, or who's artistic or you know,
I mean, anybody could be any who's a leader, who's a politician,
who doesn't matter? That should really be available to across, you know,
humanity, Hu womanity. My niece in Israel, she knows some English,
and she goes, why isn't human Why aren't you a hu woman?
Horrible? I have two grandchildren and a girl and a boy, and the
girl girl has no interest in playing any ball type games. She doesn't seem
to have any athletic tendency at all, which is fine. We don't care.
I mean, if she want to dress as a princess and play with
those you know, those kind of toys, great, no one's gonna say
that's wrong. And the little boy, who's just two and a half,
just love having a ball in his hand. It's crazy. I mean,
it's not like we've assigned anything to him. He just loves having a ball
in his hand. He loves hitting, you know, hitting a ball with
a bat. And they have my son has a putting green in his front
and he likes to go out and roll roll the ball. He doesn't know
how to hold the club yet, but he likes to have being out there
with the ball. So it's not like we're forcing it. You know that
some people are forcing those things on kids. It's weird how it's just kind
of you know, you really kind of you kind of never know. I
had you really don't, you really don't. I had some friends in Israel.
They have a little boy who he's like five, and he's just like
this little come up bio and he's just a little you know, it looks
like a little wrestler. And I invited them to the Pride Parade and they
came and he dressed up as a princess. I was I myself, couldn't
believe it. And they said, yeah, that's what he wanted to wear.
So that was cool. And that I was with a friend of mine
who's a top martial artist in Canada and her daughter has a baby, so
I was, you know, we just kind of went chopping after martial arts
event that I taught, and it's got instructure and the baby had on one
blue sock and one pink sock. Baby in a crib, you know,
And I said, I said to her mom, I go, well,
that's really interesting. That's pretty cool. I've never seen that. And she
goes, I know my baby is bisexual. Bisexual. Oh my god,
that's so good. Okay, we'll steal that one. We'll see where and
she goes, I don't know where. She's a baby. I don't know
where she's going to go, but we'll see. That is so good.
I even wrote that down. We're going to use that one, all right,
Look, can we get to golf? Can we talk about to talk
about golf. Okay, good, good, And it's interesting. The iketo
part we've talked about many times, and breathing and being centered. But aketo
is a sword practice, not a sport obviously, or can you is it
called a sport or is it a practice. It's a martial art, and
it's a martial art, Okay, I'll tell what I tell about ike is
it isn't martial arts, so it's got self defense and empowerment, and all
martial arts, frankly, are helping to deal with stress. If you think
about it, they are a stress practice management practice because we're under stressed when
you're getting attacked, right, strike, sponges, et cetera. All that
goes on. So it really teaches us to be more masterful in the face
of a threat, things to cause our fight flight responses, all of that.
But ikeito is also very athletic. I mean you start rolling around and
doing it, you're sweating and huffing and puffing. So there's a lot of
athleticism to it. And it's also a spiritual philosophy. And it's also Yeah,
there's a very famous book by teachers since gone, but I got to
train with him. He was the first American who trained with the original founder
of iketo back in the late fifties, around nineteen sixty, but he wrote
a book called It's a Lot like Dancing, And the reason for that is
that it works on a principle of harmony and flow. You don't go against
and try to overpower. You are centered, you're working with energy, you
move with, go with the flow, and then you join with and so
ido to the eye, the untrained eye just looks like it almost looks like
ballet. It's so beautiful, this quality of blending and moving together. So
for me, it's a beautiful combination of all of those things. And then
very applicable to golf. You know, yeah, we it's not only a
sword practice, but we do. We use our arms kind of like swords,
and ike too on the samurai sword. And I realize one day that
I've been like holding a sword a golf club since i was seven years old,
getting my energy from my body, threw my arms into this club to
hit the ball, get my energy out to the tip of the face of
the club, the tip of the sword the face of the club to make
contact. And they're two interesting things because in ikeo we throw people like a
big body, how do I throw? I can throw two hundred and fifty
bound men boom like that. And in golf we have we have to get
our energy down to the you know, the like the smallest ball in sports
and get all of that energy into a tiny little all compared to a great,
big person. But it takes, frankly, it takes the same universal
principles and qualities to be able to do those things. Well, oh fascinating.
All right, we're gonna take another time out. We're gonna come back
and talk more golf right after this. Okay, let's talk about some golf
stuff. And one of the things that there are a couple of the things
that you've always impressed upon me and all the times you've been on the show
is being centered and breathing. And we've had Jane's story on numerous times and
just you know, talking about connected golf connected, breath connected, putting her
latest and she's all about it's all about the breath too, and her martial
arts practice as well. So let's talk about both of those things, being
centered and breathing and how they impact your performance in golf. Well, if
the first question I ask golfers is what makes your golf ball go? And
they're like, I never thought about that, and then well I hit it,
and my mind and swing momentum and my club head speed and you know
they say all these things. It's like yeah, yeah, yeah, but
the real thing that makes your golf ball go. And I'm giving you a
very short course here we go into a much more what makes your golf buggle
is you, which is the good news and the bad news. Right,
and then the next question is who are you? So we get pretty deep
pretty fast, right, the age old question who are you? But my
answer at a very practical level is that who I am, who you are
is life energy in a body. Life energy key g Kundalini Prana. We
don't have words in English, but you know they do in the East.
So it's this life energy. It's what it comes into your body when you
get bored, when you die, it goes out of your body and the
last breath, so that's where the breath comes in. Our breath kind of
carries this animating life force and it has four faculties. Again, I'm giving
you a crash course. I go into this and my golf mastery schools and
whenever and my mastery trainings, leadership trains. But our life energy is experience
and express through four universal faculties, human faculties, and they don't know gender
or race, or age or country or anything religion. They're called your mind,
your body, or emotions, and your spirit. And that's not New
Age stuff. Okay. So that's where we get our mental game, our
thoughts, our physical our health, our being, our technique, our clubs,
emotions. It was golf an emotional game like duh, yeah yeah,
and then our spirit, which I take to be our motivation and our passion
and our target and goal orientation. Okay, so, and those things have
to work together. Connection is what I key means. I actually ai and
ikido. It's Japanese Chinese. It actually means love, but love is taken
as connection, joining, blending oneness. Ikey is about connecting your energy,
getting your mind, body, motion, spirit, all working together in harmony
and then delivering to whatever your target goal is. And it's our breath.
It carries our life energy. And when we relax and we're not tense and
we're unified, we're integrated. It turns out that we can use our energy
in a much more effective way. So that's kind of the theory. And
I'm going to tell you right now, I'll share with everybody my theory of
better golf. Okay, and so I'll tell you briefly. Here's the equation,
and then i'll explain it. The equation is centered plus centered equals centered.
Okay. Yeah, centered plus centered equals centered. Okay. So let
me Okay, so I brought my centered putter. I mean, this is
all ball. As we say, here's for those of you who are listening
on the podcast. The putter that she's holding up right now is a block.
I mean, the putter face itself is no wider than a golf ball.
It's exactly there's specifications and so it's exactly the width of a golf ball.
Here's another very centered golf ball. All these new ones are showing us
the center more than ever lines up with the little line. Most putters have
a line. They'll have a little black area that have something the two ball
putter. They're exactly the width of a putter, and so center putter.
Who makes that putter, that's the who we're just getting that made anymore.
It's called the stubby. You might find one on eBay, I got it
fifteen twenty years ago. But it's all ball, as we say, and
you can see here that if you hit it off the heel or the toe
or this is turning or spin and you're not going to get all your energy
solidly into the golf ball so that it will launch online and with proper distance,
all your energy will go in the golf ball. When your energy doesn't
and you miss the center, it reverbs back, it hurts your hand,
the ball spins offline, it doesn't have the enough momentum that you intended.
So those are all the problems with not making centered contact. When we make
centered contact, all our energy goes in the golf ball. Again, we
get accuracy, distance, consistency, all those things are right. So centered
contact is what we call hitting the sweet spot right all right, and we
all know about that. Those are the shots that look good, sound good,
feel good. Then they keep us coming back. So this is one
of the things that happens in golf. Probably every listener you and I can
identify most golfers make centered contact on a random basis out right, sometimes once
in a while two yes, three no, four yes no, right,
So it's kind of a random basis, and I'm just talking about when you
talking about centered contact, we're not just talking about a putter. Oh no,
no, we're talking about you know, facing the club. I got
a club over here. But yeah, and that sweet spot it's an engineered
area between two vibrational notes on a golf club. And when you hit that
spot, it's like hitting a harmonic on a guitar. It's like crystalline and
it's like ping. Yeah. Great name for a golf company. Yeah.
And Carson Solheim who who was the founder of Ping Golf and a solhanm cuff
his family on the LPGA tour. But so he was. He was not
a good putter. He was an engineer and he was playing around with putters.
This is back in the sixties in his garage and then all of a
sudden he what he did was play around with a sweet spot. He expanded
it, and then he came running in one day to tell his wife he
had the answer. He went, it's like a tuning fork pitting all the
energy vibrates perfectly, boom into the golf ball. And his answer, putter,
it was a n SCR. There wasn't room for the w on the
Putter, it was, but that putter is iconic and golf and it's the
winningness puttering golfs to date, excuse me to date. But so what he
did was to make it easier to make centered contact and keep the ball rolling
online. Okay, so let me go back to centered plus centered equals centered.
In martial arts and in KEYI golf, we learned to be centered in
our own body and we turn we're centered, we make centered, contacted impact,
we finish up standing nice and balance. So balance is about being centered
and your balance throughout your swing. Now, when you sway, when you
lift, when you do all these things that golfers do, or your hands
turn right off the bat, or they get in a funky's position, they
take the club face off center, make it harder to make centered contact.
So you go off centered, you're gonna have a harder time making centered contact
or making it on a consistent basis. If you could, if every golfer
could raise their percentage of centered shots from random to consistent thirty fifty, sixty
seventy percent, we may not get to one hundred percent. We don't have
to do nobody's perfect, but we get those percentages higher higher and higher.
That means we're going to be hitting the ball where we intend down the fairway,
onto the green, rolling online to the whole, even into the hole
more often. And that's about us learning to be centered, solid base balance
and then moving making our weight transfers and a centered, balanced way instead of
all this other stuff. So when you're centered, you move in a centered
way, you're going to make more consistent centered contact. Centered plus centered equals
centered and golf. If you can ask any PGA or l PEGA professional and
teaching professional, good golf is about making centered contact on a consistent basis.
WHOA I need to figure out how I'm going to phrase the next question,
and I'm going to do it after this break and we're let's hear what's going
on in golf smart Mulligans this week. This week is part two of our
conversation with Jeff Ritter, and we're going to discuss what you, as a
golf student need to understand where you are now, where you're trying to go,
and why you're trying to get there, then decide if you're doing the
right amount to reach your goals. Here's a taste on what you need to
know about a golf club. So every golf club has three basic design features.
Number one, the club leans on an angle to the inside of the
target line. Well, guess what, that's the angle you should swing it
on. Number two, the club is built so that when it strikes the
bullet and lean towards the target. Well, when you do that, it
creates maximum fresh from golf ball. The golf ball squeezes down to a portion
of its normal size, and when it expands, it shoots like a bullet
off the face. What's the third thing? If you swing it on its
angle, then the club face tends to rotate in accordance with that angle,
what we call swing plane. So you're telling me that the entire secret for
how to hit a golf ball is presented in the way they designed my golf
club. Yes, So why is it that people grab these clubs and instead
of swinging them on a tilt, they swing them straight up and down on
straight line. Why is it that instead of delivering a forward landing shaft,
they deliver a backward leaning shaft. And why is it instead of having the
face rotate with the plane, it usually rotates somewhere else Because they have no
idea what they're trying to do. That's episode two hundred and thirty called Getting
Into Your Coach's Mind featuring Jeff Ritter. It's part two and was originally a
member's only episode, so this is the first time it's ever been released publicly.
So even if you've been listening to Golf Smarter for more than a decade,
it's probably the first time you'll hear this. That's golf Smarter Malls being
released this Friday morning, Originally published in February of twenty twelve as a members
only episode. If you're a fan of golf Smarter's content, then don't miss
your chance to get two episodes every week. That's golf Smarter, golf's longest
running podcast, and golf Smarter Mulligans, episodes from our archives that revisit the
best of golf Smarter. They're both available for free from wherever you're listening right
now. Okay, so when we're out there and things aren't going exactly right,
we tend to tinker, and we tinker with our hands, we tinker
with our turn all these is it as simple as we're just not making centered
contact, it is, and all that tinkering and tweaking I call it.
It's the tweak method. Tweak this, tweak that. First of all,
you're mind is out at the periphery, it's at your hands, it's over
here, it's doing this, it's it's out there doing something. Your mind
needs to come back into your body, down your center column, into your
lower belly, your Buddha belly, your lower belly. And by the way,
this is where we have non stress breathing. Okay, we calm on
a nervous system in our belly, and then that connects your belly. Your
center's in your belly, in your hips, which is over your legs and
feet. That's your base, your foundation for balance and centeredness. Okay,
So when you bring your mind back into your body and into your belly and
down into your feet, and I teach you, Jack Nicholas said, golf's
played between the arches of your feet. If you're thinking that, it's all
in between your ears. You're up here, and up is fear and stress
and all of that. If you're thinking about what you're tweaking, you're out
there. Should I be doing this? Should be doing that? Oh,
and you're also in emotions that are kind of freaked out. Okay, not
balancing center, and it just kind of tends to make it worse. The
tweak method, So learning to just bring your mind and your back into your
belly and you your base. That's number one. And I teach you what
I call swing patterning. But how do you start your swing? Just get
your swing going properly from and stuff be your right foot down swing and stuff
of your right foot you or your back foot be left foot if you're lefty.
But that's how quarterback throws, you know, fifty sixty yards on feel.
That's how a baseball hitter, it's a home run or a picture throws
at ninety hundred miles an hour. You launch off that back foot and most
of us are up here and we're thinking, it's just like, that's not
going to get you very far. And if it does, it will once
in a while, but again kind of randomly, and it doesn't really in
any consistent way solve the issues that golfers have, which are to be more
balanced, stay centered center plus center. It's going to equal center. That's
going to take you much further. And those are things that are so in
our control. We are in control of our body and our mind and our
breath. That's all you really have. And when you're out on the golf
course, it's really all your have. You have your body, your mind,
and your golf club. That's it. You know, you can't you
can't look at your ab, you can't call your coach, you can't put
your swing jacket out, you can't do any of that stuff. So it's
really a very natural thing. And this is where what I call my golf
teaching is about a mastery school self mastery, And it's not really that hard
to get centered and relax and connect it and move in a proper sequence.
Sequencing gives us natural temple. Sequencing starts from our lower body, and from
being centered and keeping that centeredness, then we have tempo comes out in a
really natural way. So these are the real keys to better golf, not
all this other stuff. And people have been chasing all that other stuff since
I was a little girl, and I think before then, because my dad
every one week he had the new solution, the new thing, this was
it, that was it, that was it, and never did him any
good. And he was speaking to my father, who I dearly loved.
He was never a really good golfer. Once in a while broke a hundred.
I came out with Kia Golf when he was eighty years old, and
for ten years he just improved and improved and improved. He used to sell
my he used to sell my DVDs and my old series with his Companion manuals.
He kept him in his trunk. People would say, how old are
you? He has his full swing. He was lefty, and he was
he was like shooting in the nineties and he was getting into the eighties and
he was in his eighties. Yeah, I mean it was. And he
never improved until I started. He became my best, most devoted student.
And he would always say, it's not because she's my daughter, and it's
because she's a no p J pro and she's a great teacher, and I'm
finally improving. That's what he would say, and then he's selling myself.
Was his trunk, like no kidding. He carried him around with him.
That was in the days when he was still had like a physical DVD and
stuff. But for real, he improved, and he never improved. He
was tweaking forever all the time. And that's pretty much what golfers have been
doing as long as I've ever been alive and even from before I was,
and I see it and I see it through till today and did age you
know what, he didn't. He was eighty nine and he was out righting
his bicycle and he tried to talk on a cell phone. He felt and
he broke his hip. I'm sorry potting in his nineties, but you know,
it was kind of tough after that. Although I helped him rehab.
I must say my fitness helped him rehab, and we did get a back
out on the short game and all. But he was he I played with
him two days before he broke his ship, and he shot in the nineties
and he was eighty nine, so he was pretty good, pretty clear for
a guy he didn't break a hundred up until he was eighty. That's pretty
good. That's amazing. That is amazing, And I'm hoping people are hearing
that and go and yes, it is possible. It is possible to play
the best golf of your life late in life. Well, you can be
more down the metal and more accurate and more consistent, and those are really
the keys. Yeah. Is there a lot of similarity between the sword work
from a keto to swinging a golf club there is if you'll permit me for
minutes, since you asked, well, I do have I have six iron
hares and I whatever be there. But if you can see, so here's
a golf club, and I have a Samurai sword. Here Samurai sword.
You just happen to have the Samurai sword because I practice. It's called the
ido. But I hope people can see there's probably nothing more similar than an
iron and a golf and and a sword. Okay's called their swords irons,
which is really interesting. And the way you hold a sword is like this,
which is the exact way you hold a golf club, except through your
hands are actually overlapping or interlocking. So we just have a little space.
But that V is the same in the V between your forefinger. Yeah,
we have to get our energy through the the you know, the blade of
the sword, which is like the shaft of the golf club, right to
the face of the club. To make impact martial arts is speak to tip
of the sword. But and what's interesting is that this is ninety degrees.
It's completely like this. A golf club has some loft, so it's hard
for us to sometimes to see when the face of the club is actually square.
With this, you really can see. So the backswing, this should
be straight out, and we want to hinge our risks to keep this,
you know, square. I saw a beautiful blimp picture of Michelle we years
ago, right from on top and at the top of her back swing,
this was exactly parallel to the target line on the ground. Okay, it
wasn't all. Trust it's out here. And when we make impact right here,
at the point of impact, you can really see that this needs to
be square. If it isn't, we will slice making it up, or
we will cut across the ball. We have the same words in golf,
which is really interesting. So we need to see that this needs to get
exactly square an impact, it'll keep traveling through. And then we have what
we called you know, the belt buckle should be facing the target, and
I call this a sword cut down the line. This is when your center
is facing the target. I see a lot of people lay en up their
swings. Their neck is twisted or their shoulders aren't quite around or whatever.
And you know, the ball goes over to the right like no, you
know, no wonder And when you finish, you turn your foot and you
get here your hips turn. This is I say, a straight cut.
So I kind of see every every drive would be a sword cut down the
center of the fairway. Every shot to the green is like a sword cut
to the green. Right, we're on target, and we put is rolling
straight to the hole. Sorry, just a little bit limited on space here.
I hope that's people can still understand that. But it's when we have
that very sort of samurai samurai like sharpness, a sword sharpness in our mind,
in our integration, the integration of our left and right sides are lower
and upper body, our mind and our body and everything's working together. That's
the integration, the connection, the key I, the I key. Then
we have our energy going center where we wanted to go, which would be
ideally right down the center of the fairway and right on the green, into
the pin and into the hole. You know, it's it's tough to do
in golf. We got three hundred degrees around or we you know, we
got a lot of and at this one degree and one moment in time that's
coming, you know, so fast on say a drive eighty nine hundred miles
per hour. But even when it's slow on a put, you know,
like to control all of our muscles and all of our thoughts and all of
our emotions and to get this calm, centered online, on balance and to
be right there at the moment of impact and then to continue down the line.
That's what we need to do in golf. And so again I'd come
back to centered, centered, centered, centered, and all this stuff about
even when a putty, when we peek with our eyes, it's subtle,
but that little peeking pulls us a little bit off. It'll put your hands
a little off, It'll just make that little difference, and all of a
sudden, your putter isn't making that square contact much less when we're like moving
or swaying or shifting or moving around. Yeah, so this is why it's
so important to be centered and moving a centered, balanced way. For me,
the biggest difference between professionals and amateurs is balance. You never see a
tour player falling off or kicking back, or you know, like and you
see a lot of amateurs falling off the ball, or you know they'll they'll
use their upper body so much like we am in said, well if all
bad, actually they're going I wonder what happened, Like, how can it
happened. It's like no mystery. Yeah, I went through a lot of
that. Luckily I'm a little bit better at it than I used to be.
So anyway, how do people? How do people get in touch with
you if they want to learn more from you? And we'll also include links
to those articles that you wrote. I'm really excited to be able to do
that. But to find you online and have you speak to them or teach
them, please share with us. Yeah, they can find me at the
Centeredway dot com, center centered ed, the Centeredway dot com, Jamie at
the Centeredway dot com. If they for an email, they go to my
website. I think it pops up to sign up for my newsletter. Be
in touch with me, send me a message. It's another good way.
I actually like to talk to people, So I'm a talker. Yeah,
speaker seven six zero four nine two four six five three at seven six zero
four nine two golf leaving a message, Try reaching me. Find me on
Facebook Jamie Leno zim Run or on LinkedIn Jamie Leno zim Run. And I
also teach virtual lessons through the pandemic. I got really good at zoom.
I've done golf mastery schools, on zoom, I have a golf Mastery school
coming up in Sacramento on October eighth. I believe, and yeah, and
you know, I get around and I'm happy to travel. You know how
students will travel. And I do a lot of speaking and teaching in different
places, so possible to organize, you know, some special events. Golf
Mastery schools are absolutely life change. They can be one day, two,
three days, whatever, but they include all of these principles. And I've
designed golf fitness exercises, swing patterning exercises, some great on course stuff,
and work with trouble shots, how to stay centered and trouble shots, you
know, all these things. So all of that goes into golf Mastery schools.
And also, you know, it's very possible on zoom, I can
see your swing, give me. Aren't just swings. I know exactly what's
going on, can work with you. And again, I have all kinds
of exercises that I've designed. And I should say my book is coming out.
It's in the funny editing process. It will yes, it should have
been out this year, but it's coming soon. It's called The Centered Way,
and it incorporates all these principles. Lots of practices, a lot of
different stories that illustrate these principles. And there's a whole big chapter on Golf
Call, which is a case study, so applying everything in a detailed way
to golf as well as golf peace making, all of those. It's a
lifetime book that is coming out. When the book comes out, please let
me know and I'll let everyone know and put out the link to it.
Even though we don't have you would have been awarded an Excellence in Golf Instruction
Award from Golf Smarter. I think it's much greater that you've got the Excellence
and Golf Award from the LPGA, the PGA SF Pride Golf Tournament. Congratulations,
Jamie. Great to talk to you again. Yeah, wonderful to talk
Thank you very much. Well, first and foremost, I need to apologize
to all of you for a glitch that prevented us all of us from listening
to last week's episode. Hopefully, by now you've realized that the problem has
been fixed and episode nine hundred and thirteen, featuring a conversation with former NORACALPGA
Teacher of the Year Ben Alexander, is available to listen to. Thanks for
your patients and for all of you who wrote in. I truly appreciate your
concern and again from earlier in our conversation with Jamie, I'll leave links to
her articles that she told us about in today's show notes and the blog post.
I was in Portland, Oregon last week, which is part of the
reason why it's so long to correct the episode air. But while I was
there, I got a chance to play at the Oregon Golf Club in West
Lynn. It's a private course, beautiful course, yet very challenging, with
incredible views of Mount Hood and the Willamette River. Thanks Steven Daniels invited me
to join him for a great round. I do want to welcome this week's
Golf Smarter Ambassador, Randy Ericsson from Oraga, California. Now, Randy was
actually my son's soccer coach back in the late nineteen eighties. We haven't seen
each other in decades, but I'm really hoping that we can get out and
play together sometime and reconnect. Thanks so much for your support, Randy.
Randy chose Tony Manzoni's video of the Lost Fundamental as his gift for participating.
I invite you to join our global team of Golf Smarter Ambassadors by calling our
toll free Golf Smarter listener line so that you two can be on the podcast
and receive a free gift of your choice gifts and food, Tony Manzoni's video
of the Lost Fundamental or a box of Oden next one balls with a golf
Smarter logo, or you can get a glove and glove storage compartment from Red
Rooster golf dot com. I'll leave a link in the show notes and today's
blog post, so please write to me and I'll get back to you with
some instructions of what to do and what to say. Also, if you
have any questions, comments, or suggestions for upcoming episodes, dm me on
social media or right to golf Smarter podcast at gmail dot com. And the
other choice is click on the Hey Fred button when you visit golf Smarter dot com