My favorite drill is one that is the manifest station of trust. Let's say
a partner of takes a swing and you say, what was that? All
you're asking for is the number, and it's a number between one and ten?
How much trust did I have in ad swing? And ten is the
best? But anything seven and above you can shoot part if but well,
I never say to my partner, wow, that's a good shot. How'd
that one feel? I asked of one thing? What was that? He'll
say, oh, that was a five? And I don't ever say,
oh, what was that one? A five? No, The whole part
of it is that he must answer. Then I hit balls and what we
say when we're in turnass and stuff and he's sitting there with the ball and
I can tell he's uncomfortable, and I'll just say, hey, man,
swing for ten. Hi. This is Brian Wise from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and
I play at Makeshield Highlands Golf Club. This is Golf Smarter number nine hundred
and two, My Pathway to fin I named Joy and Golf again with writer
of Winning the Battle Within, Michael Boucher. 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 to the
Golf Smarter podcast. Michael, thank you, Fred. This is gonna be
fun. I'm really looking forward to this conversation because you're going to bring in
so many different elements of playing the game, of the mental game, of
writing about the game, and just stories. I just want to hear stories.
I love hearing stories. But the reason we're talking today, strangely enough,
I got an email from a listener who said, I've been listening to
your episodes that you did, you know, bringing back doctor Glenn Alba who
passed away, And I've been listening to him and I realized that the book,
his first book that he wrote, was with my playing partner, Michael
Baucher, and I can't believe it. It's like he had no idea that
that was you. And then of course he bought the book, and um,
it's it's it's amazing that we get a chance to talk to you,
especially after we lost doctor Alba this year. Yeah, I had a wonderful
time doing this book with Glenn, and I was was my idea in the
first place. I went to him really and yes, yes, I was
living in Sacramento at the time, and uh, you know, Scotty McCarn
was around there, and I played in a lot of tournaments in those days,
and I was also working as a as a journalist covering a lot of
golf and I heard about Glenn from Scottie and thought, well, there's a
there's something there, there's a cool book there. And he and I talked,
he being a doctor altball and I sat out and talked, and our
ideas about golf and our ideas about the mental approach to golf really meshed.
And so I said, let's do this and he said okay, And we
had some fun doing it. It was really instructive for me, and I
think it was very helpful for him as well. And I can I can
share that with you because it was fun plenty of time. Glenn was and
very caring, intelligent and into you know, he was a professor at Universe
Specific there in Stockton and had dealt with sports quite a bit. He was
a guy who had an idea here, an idea here, an idea over
here, but he had not really connected them all together into a theme,
into a um. He just he had papers singular papers, kind of like
professors to okay, a paper on this right. And so I saw one
of one of the things that I was able to bring to it was I'm
able to connect all these things plus add some of my own. For example,
his motto, the perfect swing is the one you trust. That's that
was mine and really yes, that's been mine for some time. And I
said, what if we use that and tie all your teachings together with that
as the connector, that is the bridge from one to the other. Because
all of these things from the the practice um a little practice thing ide is
that we had to how you approach a tournament, to the pre shot routine,
to the post shot routine. They were all scattered all over the place.
But that's just the way Glenn was. He had he had he was
like a gold mine. But you had to dig around for the nights and
then you had to put them all together in a bile at the end because
they were really scattered all over the place. But it just happened that our
two skill sets worked out well in this book and we were able to put
something together that I think changed my concept of golf along with I sat for
two hours well more than two, probably four hours in a room with Pete
Carroll and Bill Walsh and me, and we talked. Both four very close
friends. Yeah, both are very close friends with Glenn. Yes, Bill,
Yes, Bill was a mentor to, you know, to the guys.
And Bill and Glenn had come together at Stanford for a period of time
and at a school over there as well, and so they got to know
each other. And then Bill asked And of course for some people, some
of your younger listeners may not know remember Bill Walsh. He was the coach
for the forty nine or San Francisco forty nine NFL team, and he won
three championships and basically one of fourth because a new coach came in with his
exact team and won the Super Bowl next year as well. Plus he was
as mentoring as any coach ever, so many coaches in the NFL had mentoring
under Bill Walsh. And he was one of the kindest people in sports.
I've interviewed a zillion people in sports, and he was one of the kindest
and most thoughtful. Whereas Pete is big, Pete'll sit there like this and
you're going, oh, there's so much energy coming out of this man.
I hope he never runs a third world country would be kind of scary.
But Pete is the kind of guy that and I played lots of sports,
you know, and golf ultimately became the one that I focused last on because
you can play at the longest. But Pete's the kind of guy that you
would ultimately run through a wall for. He is the emotional side of Bill
Walsh, so to listen to them both. I coached basketball and baseball,
softball, even soccer. I didn't even know what I was talking about,
but the people at the high school knew I was a sucker to come in
there and coach says kind and then they heavy coach volleyball. At one point,
I didn't even know the rules, so I had a team mom setting
next to me and I'd say, is that legal? But I had fun
coaching all those years, And right in the middle of that is when I
interviewed these two gentlemen, and I came out of there going, oh,
my gosh, I wish I would have known this information. First of all
when I was playing competitive golf, and then secondly, while I was coaching.
I became, i think instantly the next day, a far better coach.
Than I had been. And it wasn't fred. It wasn't like it
was rocket science. They weren't telling me about the metamorphosis of the seller salary
rum or whatever. It was. Straight on common sense is something both you
and I know, we all know, but maybe quite hadn't put it together
the way, in such a logical sequential eliminate all unnecessary things way. And
I came out of there going sports is such more. It is so more
joyful for me now. I just and golf since then, Whereas I struggled
before and I would get mad at myself and what are maing? Fun?
Now? It's fun? Now, it's just fun. I have different routes
that if I'm playing well, I'm gonna have fun that way. If I'm
not playing so well, there's still a way to have a lot of fun
while you're still focused on the game. I don't mean to just go out
and drink a lot of beer and hoot and holler and pretend you're having fun
to really truly have fulfillment. But those two gentlemen, in that conversation that
I had with them, and then I wrote chapters as if they wrote them,
and they put their name on it. But it came out of that
conversation. So those are those are in the book too, what Bill Walls
feels about it, and what Pete Carroll feels about it. It was just
I was just so lucky to have that kind of access to those men.
And they were disarmed, they were relaxed, They weren't trying to prove it,
you know what I mean? Yeah, Oh, absolutely, everything you
were getting was genuine. And I completely understand because I've been doing these interviews
for such a long time and I've learned so much from some really amazing teachers,
and so I completely get what you're talking about. I've been inspired by
and it become a much better golfer, I think, because now some recently
asked me, are you a good golfer? I said, I'm not a
good golfer, but I'm not bad. But I'm not as good as you,
my friend, I'm not as good as you. And for also for
a point of reference, people who don't aren't familiar with Bill Walsh, but
if you followed football in any way, if you ever watch football and you
hear them refer to the West Coast offense, that's Bill Walsh, right.
And also my son was my younger son was at USC during the Pete Carroll
years. And yeah, and three of the four years that my son was
there, he was living with the starting offensive lineman, so he knew a
lot of guys in the team and he heard plenty of Pete Carroll stories,
which we're not going to get into today, because these guys did go through
walls for that man and never regretted any moments. We're going to take a
time out from our sponsors. Yeah, absolutely, so we're going to take
a pause and we'll be back right after this. I would love to continue
your path of working with Glenn developing this book winning the Battle Within, and
I love the perfect swing as the one you trust was your line and we've
been giving Glenn credit for that the entire time, but now you both get
credit for it. Tell me more about the development of that book and how
it was working with this academic about putting this mental game book together. Well,
he just that the process was. He just gave me a bunch of
his papers and they were scattered all over the place. Like I said,
they had no connection with each other. Yeah, And I wrote the whole
book from start to finish, and a lot of the stories in there are
mine, and I will tell you Fred that in the last As I get
older, I realized that one thing I've done in my career, I've been
a terrible self promoter. And at first you say that in kind of a
humble bringing way, Oh I'm from the Midwest, you can't brag about Then
you realize, no, that sucks that sex for real. You have to
be able to say what you did and let people know. And much of
that book, Winning the Battle Within came from me. It Doc had certain
things that he had for basic stuff, but a lot of it came from
me. But I gave it all to him, wrote it in his first
person as if he was telling it and writing it, but he wasn't.
I did, and he acknowledged that many many times. He would tell you
that right here. But I'm trying at this point to quit being so allowing
myself to be in the shadow all the time and actually take credit for some
of the things I've done. And I don't mean to take credit from him,
because anybody that knows him knows that he just had a great, big
heart and a lot of knowledge about this kind of thing. But for me,
I played you guys grew up in Kansas. As I told you,
I grew up on sand greens. And a sand green is not very big.
It's about as big as your living room. And you when you finished,
you took a big metal raak and each guy would take alternate holes,
like I'd get every fourth hole if I was playing in a foursome, and
you'd rake it from the whole out so that it was nice and grew for
the next players. So the green was always it was just sand. It
was just yes. And then what you would do when you got everybody got
on a green, you would take a what was called a drag, and
it was a piece of wood like this with a handle, and you would
drag it so it would be all smooth out to your ball, and you
would set your ball on the smooth part and put, so you never really
had more than a fifteen foot put. It wasn't really soft sand. I
get. I gotta believe the ball had to be able to roll. Um.
No, it wasn't soft sand. It was always oiled. And in
the summertime Kansas, those iron rakes would get so blast and hot, and
it's so at the sand because we played barefoot. A lot of times.
It's had a whole lot of money. So the first time I played grass
greens, I thought I had died gone to heaven. Oh my god,
you don't have to rake them. It's not hot. This is ridiculous.
And I literally jumped up and down. I was so happy to know that
that was available. Oh my god, but that's I was in a real
icolate little farm area when I grew up. I need to ask one more
question about these sand greens, though, I'm sorry because I'd never heard of
sandgreens before. Um, what would be the comparable speed on a stimpmeter on
a sand green? Are they slow? Are they very slow? Yeah?
So when you got to grass greens, you must have just been blown by
the hole all the time. No. I adjusted to them quickly. Cutting
has always been Yeah, you could just feel it. But what you were
doing sand green is everybody would come over to that dragged area, and if
the first guy made it, you would put your ball right in the groove.
Ball man, he was trying to go down the group. But if
you missed it, you got oh man, how am I going to possibly
make it? See? Then you had to get an angle that didn't hit
his groove, and so there was. It was a whole different technique to
putting, and an actuality. It made you think more, even perhaps than
you do now. But so when I got to be a sophomore in high
school, I won state championship and thought, oh, you know, we're
just playing a lot of sports. And I didn't give one thought to the
mental game, the physical game. I just went on played athletically and played
really well. I think I just had sixty nine, seventy and one easily,
and so I didn't give it a thought. And then I moved to
Seattle, and everybody there was talking about the mechanicals to the game, and
I thought, well, I'm in a big city now. They must be
way cooler than I am, and none of them could play as well as
me. I don't know why that never registered in my head, but I
just thought they were cool. They had better clothes, they had better clubs,
they played on grass greens, and so I started thinking, Okay,
we've got to be mechanical about everything, don't we. Well that screwed me
up big time, as you might expect. And I played in college and
things, but I would go up and down and up and down because I
was way too mechanical in my approach, and I'm better off just playing athletically
and just playing, just playing in the imaginative mind, as we all are,
I think, But I didn't know that at that time. I thought
the more mechanics I could come up with a better and pretty see I'm going.
You know, you imagine a basketball player get to Lebron James go,
okay, Lebron, and you go up for a jump shop. Where is
your left toe pointed? Okay? And think about that till you get one
foot off the ground. Then where's your elbow point You know, he'd be
the tallest unemployed worker in America probably if he thought all that stuff, because
you never make a shot. Golf is not unlike that. It is you
have to get to a place where you're thinking in the imaginative mind, which
is a blend of mechanics and the physicality. But it's mostly physical. Golf
more than people. Most people realize is an athletic game. It's very athletic.
But everybody on TV, all the announcers, they all want to show,
Oh, he got it hung up back there, Bologny. Almost every
bad shot ever hit is caused by you. Know strategy, aim or trust,
And we have this in the book, and the strategy is the key
part, and so trust. The strategy is as you stand back behind the
sheer's ball, you've got to see it in your mind's eye. Where is
that ball going, how high is it going, and what's it going to
do against the wind, and most of all, where do you want it
to land? You've got to look within a foot of where you want that
ball to land, and that's in your mind. That becomes part of your
imaginative mind. So then you then you say, and I go through this
every time I have shots so automatic at this point, in fact, i'd
recommend everybody when you go to practice forget about practice in the mechanics, think
about practicing your preshot routine. And so you get okay, you see the
shot, and then you ask yourself, does this feel right? You know,
because maybe it's between a five iron and six iron, you're gonna bust
a six iron? Are you going to try a feather of five? You
got to make a commitment right there, and do you feel it? For
me, not playing as much as I used to, I bust everything.
It's much easier to swing heart. Then to try to decelerate through the ball.
So you get your strategy and then you have to say are you ready
for this? Do you commit to this? And my answer when I say
yes is I flip the club from my right hand to my left when it's
in the left hand. That means I've committed to this strategy, to this
shot. I can see it, I can feel it. Not only see
it, but I can feel it. So then you get a bolt of
the ball and that's where aim comes into play. And that's that's fairly mechanical
because a lot of people right handers end up aiming off to the right.
That the pros will say, we do that. We do that once every
three weeks we start aiming off to the right. I don't know why that
is, but you do. And you need to make sure you're aligned correctly
because you can take the sweeter swing in the world and if you're aligned wrong,
it's not going to go as well as you think. So that's the
aim. So you got strategy, aim, and then the final thing is,
you know, take a deep breath, get ready to take your swing,
and you have to trust it. Do I trust And I'll tell you
about the coolest drill ever for me and we still use this all the time,
my partners and I. And it's about trust. So that's the SAT
score, strategy, a trust, and you just run through those things and
you know where is there time and space to go? Okay, I really
got to drop my elbow down. I've got to get the lag. Where
is my left knee? Are my hips coming through? You can think yourself
into oblivion if you want to, and if that's cool. A lot of
guys think that's the real mail way to do it. And the truth is
the most fun way is to combine that, but mostly be in your imagine
of mind. But go through the strategy aim trust to start to begin with,
let's take another time out. I love this so much. I love
this conversation so much. We're gonna have more when we come back. Michael,
you're talking about the SAT which Glenn talked about. We had him on
the show talking about strategy, aim, trust, that's yours too. That's
yours too. Those were his ideas, but I put them together so that
it came out SAT. The trust is a big part mine. But sometimes
the two of us would sit and talk or play golf and it would just
meld. We would say yeah, this and that and this, and so
to say whose is what's We hit it off because I think we thought differently
in terms of just I like big picture down There's one reason I I struggled
in biology in school. They come up with the details first, and then
they try to build something, and I go, no, no, no,
no, you gotta think big picture, and then how do the details
fit under that big picture. It's not one's not better than the others,
just the way that I thought, and blind thought in pieces rather than the
overall thing. So it came together. It's just I have. This is
the first time I've ever taken credit for this, but it is the truth
and it was me to a large degree, but in terms of just taking
a lot of what he had and a lot of what I had, and
then making making it makes sense, giving it a form, giving it a
perfect swing. As we start right off with the story of a kid coming
up to an instructor and I made this story up and saying, I want
you to teach me the perfect swing, and the instructor says, well,
which perfect swing? The one Lee Trevino had, the one Tiger Woods had,
the one that Jack Nicholas had or the one Ben Hogan had or the
one Arnold Palmer had. Which one of those perfect swings do you want to
learn? And the only thing these swings had in common really obviously they all
tuck it in at the end. I get that, But they all trusted,
they all trusted their swing. And I believe that the nine percent of
all bad shots, even puts, come because you come out of the top
too fast. Puts, you put too fast, and usually the blade comes
open and you can almost I mean, I don't know how many times I've
seen a player who's not like the King of players that maybe somebody who's up
there for the first time and you've got a six foot putt, I said,
this one's going right. Because they'll come out of the back too fast,
look up open, the blade goes to the right. Some of the
better players will miss left because they're they're doubling over. They know they're they're
miss is right, and so they you know, it's it's like you're afraid
you're going to fade it too much off the downhill line, and a lot
of players will pull off the downhill line trying to It's kind of like that,
but The trust element, to me, is the key to golf.
It is the key to good golf. Do you trust the swing? And
I think you have to build in a pre shot routine, and yes,
you have to trust the mechanics that you've been practicing on the range. But
most of all, this this is so fun. This is to me,
this was the best part of this whole book and everything I well, maybe
one of the best things I learned before you get there was from Pete and
Bill Walsh. I'm sitting there and I've been coaching for years for basketball and
stuff when we mostly had really good teams. But and I asked him,
I said, is there ever a time when you yell at a player you
say yeah, to motivate? And I got that far in the question,
and both of them shouted at me, No, you never yell at a
player in derogative terms to motivate them. And I said, I wish that
you would tell ninety nine percent of high school coaches in America this, because
this is a key important thing that I've always thought. I've never thought you
yelled at a player to motivate them, that's but the irony is fred the
one and I yelled at to motivate them was myself, and I would be
hard on myself going through college. I mean, I grew up in south
side of Kansas City, and the papers sometimes would would compare me with Tom
Watson's the next Tom Watson. Well, that just about buried me six feet
under. I didn't know how to handle that. I'm not Tom Watson.
I'm just some guy out there not even knowing anything about the game, just
playing athletically, and it happened to happen for me, and so I felt
I had this burden of and I didn't have a coach. My dad was
a professional athlete, but he didn't really take any part. And we'd got
play and he'd get real competitive, and so that was good. But he
didn't know any more about the mental game than I did. So it wasn't
really until I did this book that I connected all of the dots for myself
and went, oh, if you don't find joy in this, if you
don't find joy in golf. And you know, you hear all the time
the guys saying, I'm saying, oh, what's the takeaway? What do
you takeaway? He lost, he choked in the playoff, he lost,
but what's the positive takeaway that you have from this? Well, I never
knew there was a takeaway. I just lost the loser. What are you
doing? So I was very very hard on myself, and it wasn't until
I had this wonderful conversation with these guys and with Glenn and with others that
I went, oh, my gosh, this can be fun. And it's
been fun ever since. Why ever, yes, I was gonna say recently,
I was playing with a friend and he had he chanked the ball and
started yelling at himself, and my response was, don't talk to my friend
that way. That I like that. It's yep, as part of the
book is self taught, and I've been pretty during good about that ever since.
And I find that the guys I play with, you know, almost
everybody play with yellow at themselves. Um, they stop within a rounder two
of playing with me, notcause I ask them to just be as they see
that I don't do it. And it's nice because the whole tenor of the
game, the yes, the energy, that's the way to put it.
As a lot more fun and we win a ton of team tournaments. Um,
I think my partner and I up here he's probably seven or handicapped or
something. But anyway, we play scratch and I think we win about half
the tournaments we play, and largely because we're so supportive of each other and
we know exactly how to get the best out of each other, what to
say when it's almost like, I suspect caddies do that with their play.
Good caddies do that with their good players. Yeah, but oh yeah,
I can't wait to tell you about some of the drills that and these were
from Doc. Doc told me about these drills. Okay, we have time
now or should we wait? No, We're going to do it in the
next segment because I'll put that make a note to talk about the drills the
next segment because you kind of dropped a little nugget in there. Your dad
was a professional athlete. Yes, he played football and was a pretty big
guy and fast, really fast, and he was a fullback and he played
for the Lions. But then World War Two came about and everybody got drafted.
Yea. You know, I often thought Ben Hogan would have been considered
by far the best player ever to live, but people forget he was in
the military for four at least four maybe five years in his prime and did
not play, and then he got in that car accident and did not play
for a period. You know, so youly in seven or eight years where
he could have won probably easily twelve thirteen more majors and surpassed Jack and Tiger.
I think there was an argument that he could have been but if you
don't actually do it. Anyway, my dad went into the military and came
out and they weren't paying that much for football players and things like that,
so he became a teacher and coach, and yeah, he was I haven't
lost too many match play, but I lost my dad, so he got
you started playing golf. Yes, my mom was a She was one of
the top five players in Kansas female and she could play and she had the
beautiful swing. My dad because it gets so cold in Kansas in the wintertime,
but he'd go downstairs in the basement and he put this old matt down
and he would hit into a big campus mat. But there were two pipes
up above, so he literally had to stand up in the middle of the
swing to get the club in between the two pipes, and then he would
come down. He would have stand up about six inches, So that was
his swing. When he took it out to the golf course, he would
have this cockamami swing that everybody went what and he would still shoot par under
because he could manipulate. He was great around the greens. So when I
was sixteen or I think, we were playing in the club Championship. He
and I made it two finals, and they had cut off mom and Dad
had cut off one club for me, an old wooden shafted club, So
I played with that all day. I just played with one club. I
still remember the first day, I hit it a drive past my mom.
Yes, and my mom was so bad. My mom was very competitive.
She was mad that I hit a past her. I never let her forget
it for the rest of her life. So my dad and I got into
the club Championship and the first couple of holes he missed short putts and I
won, and I looked at him and I said, Dad, if you
do that again, I'm gonna quit. And so I lost the next two
holes on purpose because he had lost the first two on purpose, I knew
he did, and I said, now we're going after it, and he
beat me on the last hole. I said, well, I didn't mean
it that seriously. But we had a great time. So my dad was
really my dad was the reason Fred that we were very isolated in this little
farm when I first when I was really young, and my brothers and sister's
a lot older, so they were at school. I was all by myself
all day, and my dad would read to me every night from you know,
great books, and so the characters in those books would become my friends
that I played with every day. So I didn't know where love ended in
literature began. So my love for literature truly was even greater than my love
for golf, and that ultimately one out golf was becoming very frustrating and just
the idea of writing and getting involved with all of literature and bringing me back
to those beautiful days when I was younger. So I moved to northern California,
as you know, by Lake Taha, and so I spent all the
time hiking around real trying to relax. To me, like five years I
didn't touch a club to try to relax from the stress I had put on
myself playing golf. And that's why this book was a real turning point for
me as well. And speaking of that, turning point probably the number one
drill in there. I'll tell you about another drill first, and this is
a wild drill. Okay, I promise we were gonna we will do the
drills, but let's take one more time out. Then we'll come back.
We'll do the drills. I've already answered my question about how you became a
writer, why you chose to be a writer. But now we're going to
go into the drills right after we hear what's happened on Golf Smarter Mulligans this
week? Okay, this week on Golf Smarter Mulligans is an episode that originally
was a member's only episode, so it's never been made public before this.
Kennon Nicholson is our featured guest, and Kenny spent decades in the golf retail
or hardware business, working for a retailer called Edwin Watts Golf, which is
now part of the worldwide golf shops across the United States. Edwin Watts Golf
was the very first sponsor of Golf Smarter back in two thousand and six,
and for a number of years, Kenny was on Golf Smarter every week answering
listener questions about equipment and giving away incredible golf prizes. Between two thousand and
seven and two thousand and eight, Kenny and I were partners on another podcast
for Edwin Watts called the Golf Better Podcast, which once the company was acquired,
has now morphed into the worldwide Golf Shops Insider podcast and it still exists,
which I'm kind of proud of. Anyway. There was a different podcast
from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty two called Golf Better, but that's no longer
being updated now the history of Lesson aside. In his return to Golf Smarter,
Kenny and I did an episode called if you like your buddies clubs so
much, buy it from them. If you buy a product that you believe
in, then you're going to use that product until something changes, whether it
be your swing or the product itself, or you put another product in your
hand that is going to be better for you. And here's what I always
tell somebody. If you hit your buddy's driver, and you hit it incredibly
well, and you love that driver and you want to get that driver,
they would always call us and say, hey, I want to buy this
new I'll just say the R eleven I hit my Buddi's R eleven driver,
and I loved it. I hit it perfect. I want one. My
answer to them is, well, buy your buddy a new one if he
wants to sell it, and buy his golf club, because no two are
the same. It's golf Smarter Mulligan's episode two hundred eighteen featuring golf hardware sales
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From wherever you're listening right now. Okay, you're not a you're a writer.
You've written golf books, You've we've talked to some incredible instructors. You've
but you have drills to share with us. I have drills to But you're
still you're still shooting bar these days. I mean, can I ask how
old you are? Michael? Yeah? Okay, how old are you?
Michael? I'm not telling what you can ask. So I just played a
tournament in Sacramento and shot six hundred sixty six of course I hadn't seen before
and pretty much clips the field. So I can still do it. And
I will say that's far under my age. Most I would say, I
shoot under my age. My god, Yeah, I can still play.
I don't know why. I cannot answer why I can still hit it almost
three hundred yards. Um they call h Yeah, they have a name for
me at the Gulf. It's not all that positive because themotomy for being for
being able to do that. So what's the name I was gonna tell I?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, I have to tell you.
Okay, okay. This is part of my plan to become a better self
promoter. I just came out of the new book, a new book last
week. Oh congratulations, great, And it's called Michael Bauker's No Ordinary Days.
And it is a collection of my favorite stories that I did for the
La Times and Real Statists and the Golf magazine lots of other things. And
there are are some golf stories in there, It's No Ordinary Days. There's
also a story in there about how I got involved a little too closely with
the Golden State killer. I did a lot of true crime, which is
a bit worse than cheating at golf. I will say that these were you
know, it's it's a it's a trip. The difference between interviewing Pete Carroll
and Bill Walls and interviewing a serial killer. There's a little bit of a
divide there, a little, but both of them are profound. Okay,
that word works in both cases, and that's probably the only word I can
think of. But anyway, it's Michael Backer's No Ordinary Days. So now
I instant on Amazon. You can't get it, and it is full of
We'll have links in the show notes for this so people can buy that book
since they already own your other book, the one you wrote with Glenn,
the one with ken Well. And one of the reasons I had to write
that one with Glenn, I had just done a book for Simon and Schuster
called Fatal Deception, and it was about giant companies poisoning workers on purpose,
not on purpose, but they knew they were doing it for years. This
is real, this is true story. And ended up testifying in front of
the US in it for a week. On this I got death threats for
this. We were bucking multibillion dollar companies and it was gnarly and I watched
a lot of people die from what these companies were doing, and it was
tough, really tough, and I swore the next book I write is going
to be about golf, because I couldn't handle the emotional stress from what I
had been doing and hearing people say we're going to kill your old family.
That's not a lot of fun. I'd much rather hear somebody say, you
think it breaks right or left at the end. So I went and took
my time writing, helping let me get this straight, working with Glenn and
utilizing his brilliance to write Winning the Battle within so two of the drills.
The first one is, this is the wildest drill I've ever done in my
life. And you have to make sure there's nobody in in rains where you
might get. But you get over the ball and you're all set already,
you got your target, and you shut your eyes and you swing all through
to your finish. That is one of the most difficult things to do.
But what happened with me is that when I shut my eyes, it seemed
like a black background, and where my club went I could see it.
I could see the path of the club like in red, and then it
would come through it was like what track man thing, But you can see
it and you can feel it, and if you trust enough, you'd be
shocked how many good shots you start hitting one after another with your eyes shut.
It's stunning. But you have to trust. Yeah, I know that
that's really true. And so many people I played. I played yesterday with
some gentlemen and neither of them broke a hundred and they just questioned themselves.
They berated themselves after everything, and there was no trust in there at all,
I mean. And one of the things that I brought up, I
said, you know, They're like, well, you know, this is
the most important thing in golf, and I said, I'd put it right
up there with trust, you know, I mean, And we talk about
that a lot. Is trusting it and trusting the line, trusting your setup,
trusting your body to to do what it knows how to do because it
succeeded in doing it. Yes or so thet Well, my favorite drill is
one that that is the manifest station of trust. It is how trust comes
together into the game. And you can use this. We use it in
tournaments. The people that I know that we that have learned this, and
I don't know anybody that doesn't like, yeah, I can use this.
It is when you swing, you go out to range with departner and well,
there's a couple of different grills, but this one's the key one.
And let's say your partner is going to hit three shots. It takes a
swing and you say what was that? And all you're asking for is the
number? And it's a number between one and ten? How much trust did
I have in at swing? How rhythmic was that swing? And ten is
the best you know one you with, I guess, but anything seven and
above you can shoot part if you bought well, but you get a groove
and you begin to learn, okay, that was an eight, and so
a lot of times that's all that's ever said. I never say to my
partner, wow, that's a good shot. How'd that one feel? I
asked him one thing, what was that? And all he's doing is turning
to me and going and you can't go six point five ors, it's just
you know, just number six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
They'll say, oh, that was a five, And I don't ever say,
oh, what was that one of five? No, you know the
whole part of it is that he must answer then I hit balls and I'm
going okay. And what we say when we're in a tournaments and stuff and
he's sitting over the ball and I can tell he's uncomfortable over something, and
I'll just say, hey, man, swing for a ten and that's it,
and you just shut everything else out of your head. You swing for
a ten and you're thinking, you're feeling the rhythm and you don't come out
of the top fast, and boom you hit a ten and you get so
excited when you tune to your partner and you go, yes, that was
a ten, and putting the same way, by the way, and that's
why I had some help. Yeah, you can hit a ten, put
and miss, but it doesn't happen very often. Obviously, longer puts you
of reading the green becomes the critical aspect of it. But basically it is
for every single shot, shipping everything else, and all many times in tournaments,
my partner and I will talk through the whole tournament, well, is
that that was an eight? You go okay, And what we're doing is
reminding each other the whole point of swinging a club is trying to swing to
a ten, and you're not looking at the shot and go that was a
good shot, so that must have been at ten. That's not it.
It's not the result of the shot. It's actually the rhythm and the trust
in the swing. You don't even you could put a wall down so no
one could see where the ball goes and you can still answer that question.
But we do practicing all the time like that. And to me, that's
the single most important thing I learned in this whole book in terms of not
being an intellectual overview, but actually a something you can use as a tool
on the course, off the course, and actually you can use it in
life. You just say, hey, man, I'm swinging for a ten
m I think you show you can say, yeah, that was a ten.
Now yeah this one is a ten. This is a definite. And
you've had I've had shots where the people my playing Barnsill go oh, nice
shot. I'm like, yeah, but I didn't like the swing, Like
the result was great, but the swing wasn't that good. And we would
just say what was that, and you'd jumps the seven and we would know
all of that. What you just had to explain in three sentences. I
know by the number you give me. Oh, you're an editor too.
Or he knows too though, because we've we've worked that out. We know
what a seven is, we know what a seven feels like. We know
as a seven might be a groove high or but or I was had my
blade open but pulled my hand shut just at the last minute, kept it
so it went on the right side of the green but didn't go into the
trees on the right. So seven is where you maybe have to make a
small move to make swing work. But a seven is still really accepted,
and a seven means you still have a lot of trust because you're still trusting
it through there. The other drill that I liked was again, you're with
a partner, or you can do this yourself and you get the ball,
but it's easier with a partner. So I'm set up over the shot,
and just before I swing, he'll say, or she'll say, women,
obviously this is golf is three, they'll say, low draw, and I'm
standing over it, and I've got to swing and I've got to hit this
low draw and I don't have even a second by the time he says that.
She's says that, and I take the club away, and then the
next one might be high fade, and they're gonna mix it up all the
time, maybe two low draws in a row. But you've got to be
able to connect to that right away and figure out how to hit that shot.
And so when you're setting up then in a tournament or just in a
rig it around, you're gonna go, well, I've hit this low draw.
What does it feel to me. I'm going to make the call this
time. Okay, lowdow. We're gonna have this lowdow. I know how
to do that. I've done that on the practice range. So that then
brings out the trust. I go through my preshot routine. I make sure
I'm set up right. I get set up. I already know what kind
of shot I want to hit. I can see it and now I'm thinking.
Then I turn everything off, say swim for a ten, and then
you finish. And if you do miss hit the shot, then we go
through a little process where you stand there and you try not hit anybody that's
walking by. But um, you know, you kind of go okay,
I want to feel. I want to I want to feel at ten.
Okay, I've just replaced that feel of a batcha with a ten. Now
I can go forward. So that's more or less the process. Yeah.
Yeah, We've had Rick Sessenhouse on the show multiple times. Rick was Colin
Moricaua's coach from the time he was eight years old and all the way through
when he you know, um, still I think they're I don't think they're
working together anymore. But Rick would when he was working with Colin as a
young kid, he would say, you know, put down a ball and
he says, all right, what are the three different ways? Are the
four different ways you can make this shot? Don't just give me the same
shot with the same club, So the low fade, the high draw.
You know, he would play situational golf with him. He would teach him
situational golf, which was obviously very effective and it's fun and it's for me.
I can't my shots, but but you know I have my intention.
I know my intention. Sure you can, okay two buckets of balls,
you appreciating two shots? I guarantee it. And what it does is talking
with Bill Walsh and Pete Carroll the other thing they said that was really critical
for me as a coach and as a golfer. They said, everything is
about contingency. You never practice anything that you don't actually use in the game.
Remember the old days in basketball, they'd line up and they throw the
ball up against the backboard. Next guy would grab it. He thought up
against the backboard. They said, when you ever do that in the game.
You never do that in the game. Why would you practice it?
So everything you do in practice has exact and Pete Carroll says, I hardly
ever have to call a time out at the end of the game because everybody
knows what what we're going to do because we go over it so many times.
We practice exactly. Believe what you do. So let's play that to
golf, right, doesn't make sense to hit fifteen straight seven irons. Do
you ever do that on the on the golf course? I hope nope,
nope, Oh yeah, yeah, yo, that's funny. Um, But
by and large you don't. So you try. When you're practicing golf,
it's really easy just to get out there. If you're going to do that
ten times in a row, then rather than thinking mechanics a lot of times,
it's better to think, Okay, I'm gonna how many tens can I
get out of the next five shots? And it doesn't matter what club you're
hitting. I'm swinging for tens and yeah. You can break it down,
say, okay, this practice day is going to be about mechanics. But
I don't think you're going to get much better. I think you will get
better if you say I'm going to swing for tens and yeah, yeah,
and it's more fun. Oh, I guess I'll have no question, no
question. Oh, Michael, this has been so great. I really appreciate
your time and responding to my request after I heard from your playing partner in
Santa Barbara, and really looking forward to sharing the books and reading more from
you and reading your new book too. No ordinary days, Michael Vauper,
thanks so much, Thank you, Fred, and I look forward to the
days when you and I can see it up. That would be fun.
All this episode is being published on the biggest summer holiday here in the United
States, but that wouldn't prevent me from delivering new content each week, especially
what I found to be a fascinating conversation. And as we were chatting some
more after the recording session, Michael said something that could easily have been the
title of this episode, but goes way beyond golf. Of course, you
can pick it apart and dismiss it if you'd like. But in the context
of golf and many other parts of life, I found this two hold true.
He said. The difference between adversity and adventure is attitude. Thanks go
out this week to Brian Wise of Philadelphia, PA for being our newest Golf
Smarter Ambassador. Like so many of our ambassadors, Brian chose Tony Manzoni's video
of the Lost Fundamental as the gift that he receives for leaving a voicemail,
which is all that's required to gain designation of you becoming a Golf Smarter Ambassador.
You know you two are eligible to win one of three great prizes just
by sharing with us where you live and where you play. You can select
Tony's video, a glove and glove storage compartment from Red Rooster golf dot com
or a box of X one balls with a Golf Smarter logo from odin Golf.
I'll leave a link in the show notes and today's blog posts that you
can learn more about these two fabulous partners. Send me an email and I'll
get back to you with some instructions of what to do and what to say,
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