Speaker 1: Golf Smarter number four hundred and forty six, originally published
on July twenty second, twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain
insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the
Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets Old. Our
interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations
like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
Speaker 3: What you really have to have is a relationship with
the target, not the target itself. If you try to
point perfectly towards something, your arm in your hand will shake.
If you try to hold a cup of coffee perfectly still,
you'll spill it. But if you just calmly find a relationship,
it's like looking through a window, and where your hands
end up is kind of like where the window is sitting,
and you're trying to get your hands in a relationship
with that target, not reach toward that target. Just like
firing a gun. You see the target and you're pointing
a gun in relationship to that target, but you're not
actually trying to get to the target. I think that's
another mistake people do is they try to guide things
toward a target. You have no control over that golf ball,
literally zero. So what you've got to do is control
what's within you. And the only thing that's within you
is this balance that comes to finish in relationship to
that target.
Speaker 1: See it, feel it, do it. As told by Jimmy
Demura to Evan denn This is Golf Smarter. Welcome back
to the Golf Smarter Podcast.
Speaker 3: Evan, Hi, Fred, how are you doing today?
Speaker 1: I am so well. I've already got the Texas accent. Wow,
I've talked to you for ten minutes and I am
so well. You're contagious, my friend.
Speaker 3: You haven't heard the real Texas accent. Go to West Texas.
Speaker 1: Oh well. You know, if I ever spend like a
week in Atlanta, which I used to do a lot,
I would have to go down. I would come home
with all y'all. Yes, I love all y'all, and even
I go to New Orleans. It just takes a couple
of days and all of a sudden, I've picked up accents.
It's nuts. Yes, it's been a long time since we've spoken,
but we've continued to promote your power Field Golf DVD
and training booklet on the Golf Smarter website at our
golfers Maart and we have been getting reaction to it.
People find it and they purchase it. We really appreciate
you selling it here.
Speaker 3: All I appreciate you carrying it too.
Speaker 1: Well. Yeah, and it's been what two thousand and nine,
episode two hundred and eleven was the last time you
were on, so there are people who will remember you. Yeah,
though people remember you, but there are a lot of
people who have not heard about power Field Golf, and
I thought it would be great to reintroduce them to
that and talk about what's going on in your teaching
and your method of teaching because I found it very effective.
Speaker 3: Well, I would say the biggest thing Fred that's gone
on since we last talked is my goal is always
to make it simpler because I feel the simpler you
can make the game, the more fun it is. And
you know, get people to understand how to use their
inate abilities rather than trying to imitate or copy somebody else.
And you know, like I was always told, when you
try to paint by numbers, which is what majority of
instruction is, and they try to tell you what positions
to be in that doesn't fit your body. Everybody's different.
We've got five hundred and something paired muscles and we
have to learn how to use them the way that
works best for us, not the way that looks good
with Rory McElroy or Adam Scott or somebody else, because
we're just not going to be able to do that.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, that's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but yet we can find our best game if
we know where to look.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, one of the complaints are the major complaints
of golf is it's too hard, it takes too long,
it's too expensive. So when you're saying make it simpler,
are you talking about making the game simpler or making
instruction simpler?
Speaker 3: Well, really both, but instruction and the way you go
about practicing simpler.
Speaker 1: That's huge.
Speaker 3: Yeah. If you think about if you change the way
you see something, what you see changes. And most people
just see golf in the wrong way. They see that
they're supposed to hit a ball with a golf club
and make it go somewhere, so they're trying to control
the end of the club rather than understanding how that
really happens. It's just like if you tried to focus
on the end of a fork while you're eating or
the end of a fly swatter. While you're swatting a fly,
you'll be very unsuccessful. Go on.
Speaker 1: I am enthralled.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, what I found over all the years, and
it really goes back to what I learned from Jackie Burke,
Jimmy to Merritt, and Ben Hogan and a few others
like Julius Boris, who I was fortunate enough to be
around because they were all good friends with my dad.
And actually Jackie Burke and Jimmy to Merritt, I lived
five hundred yards from the club they owned down in
Houston called Champions Golf Club, and so they were my teachers.
I started playing when I was nine, and as soon
as they saw that I was going to be pretty good,
they started helping me. Well what they started telling me
was and unfortunately I kind of steered away from after
I thought I was really good. I wanted to know
too much. They taught me how simple the game really
could be. But then once I got into probably my
junior year of high school, I started listening to all
these guys. They were talking swing theories and everything else,
and rather than getting better, I got worse like most
people do, and so I went through college doing that,
played college golf major college golf, and then I played
a little bit of professional golf. But I never felt
like I had the same game that I did when
I was fourteen or fifteen years old, because I felt
like I had lost the ability to just feel the game.
And one of the things you and I were talking
to prior to the show we were talking to personally
about was where see it feel it, and a lot
of people call it trust it came from. Was when
I was about fifteen years old, I was playing golf
with Jimmy Demerit and he rarely played. He played like
once a year, and he was in his late fifties
back then, and he asked me to go play one morning,
and so we went out to the golf course. He
didn't warm up or anything. His clubs had dust all
over them, which is in my book, and so we
get out there and he just smokes it right down
the tenth tee. We played the tournament course to a
cypress creek course, and he continued to do that the
whole nine holes, and on the eighth hole I was
even par. He was like five under already, and I
looked at him, I said, mister de merit, I don't understand.
You never touch a club, you don't practice, you don't
do anything. You come out here and you make it
look like it's a walk in the park and there's
no effort to your golf swing. He said, Evan, you
see that green up there. He said, all I do
is I see it, I feel it, and I just
do it. And he said, I don't think about it.
He said, I know what it feels like, and i
know how to control the shot from my hands, and
I'm not thinking. He said, I'm not thinking about where
the clubhead is, or my foot position or anything like that.
So and that's the way he grew up. He rarely
made to feel the game.
Speaker 1: When you rarely make mistakes, you don't have to second
guess yourself. For many of us who picked up the
game later in life and don't play competitively, just love
to play the game, but are always struggling. Every golfer
is struggling to improve. That's all across the board. But
for those of us weekend hacks, you know, we're working
all week, don't get a lot of time to practice.
Would love to practice more, you know, inch out every
hour that we can in the backyard or at a
range or something like that, wherever we can. I don't
see it as being so simple like that. What am
I missing?
Speaker 3: Well, what you're missing is where you focus your energies.
Like I started to say earlier, where most people focus
their energy is on hitting the golf ball and trying
to steer it to a target, so they reach toward
the golf ball rather than swinging toward the target. And
one of the things Jackie Burke told me when I
was probably twelve or thirteen years old was Evan, the
golf ball goes wherever your hands go, good or bad.
So if you understand how to get your hands to
go there, and you have control of the club, then
you have control of the shot. Now it's happening at
a fast pace, you know, the usually you're swinging at
about eighty to one hundred miles an hour. The clubhead
is but your hands really aren't moving that fast. So
it's the clubhead that's moving that fast. But your hands
you can slow them down if you want, to speed
them up if you want to. But the main thing
is once you learn how to control the tool in
your hands properly and direct that energy toward the target
instead of toward the ball. You change everything.
Speaker 1: I like that idea, So let's figure out how to
make it simpler for all of us. What are the
elements that we have to focus on and what do
we have to stop beating ourselves up with that's going
to make well the process simpler.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's first get rid of the things you don't need.
You don't need to know how to put your feet
at a certain width. You don't need to know where
to put the club in your stands. You don't need
to know how to bend your knees. You don't need
to know how to keep your head down. That's one
of the worst ones, is keeping your head down because
that actually gets in your own way of your golf swing.
So think about that. You What you're really trying to
do is have as clear and as clean a path
for your hands to work on as possible. Well, that
starts with balance. Balance is a feeling. It's a feeling
of having a tool in your hands balanced that you
can swing back and forth, not up and down, which
most people swing up, down and out, and that's why
most people slice it. But if you can swing back
and forth with your hands balanced, then the body will
support that action and it will give the illusion of
an eye shoulder turn, a nice hip turn. It'll give
the illusion that your head stayed down when in reality,
your eyes are clearing the way for your hands on
the follow through. So you know, if you really watch
the players on tour, you won't see their eyes stuck
on the golf ball. You'll see them gently guiding toward
the target in front of the hands. So it's like
it's like throwing a baseball. You don't look at the
baseball while you're throwing it. You look toward the target
and you kind of clear the way mentally and visually
for your hand to come through toward that target. Well,
the same thing happens in golf, but you can't do
that until you put your energies, your mental especially that
third eye. If you understand what I'm talking about, toward
the target. In other words, if you look at something
ahead of you in pre shot before you swing, and
you bury that image in your head, then that's where
your hands want to go. So then you hold that
image in your head and you kind of do a
blank stare toward the golf ball, which keeps you from
focusing on the ball. It kind of takes it out
of focus, if you want to say it that way.
So what we're really trying to accomplish is this clear
space for the hands to work in until they finish
their work.
Speaker 1: Why do you use the word illusion?
Speaker 3: The illusion of the golf ball is. What you're really
trying to do is get your mind. You know how
when you stare through somebody, you're kind of daydreaming about something. Yeah,
and you can look right at someone, but you don't
really see them they're right in front of you because
you're daydreaming. That's the I call that.
Speaker 1: I actually call that peeing in the ocean. That look
you get on your face when you're peeing in the
ocean's like exactly.
Speaker 3: That's what you should have on your face when you're
standing over a golf shot and swinging, because that way,
your mind, your mental energy is toward the target, not
at the golf ball. Most people stare at a golf
ball the way if I was looking at you, I'd
be staring at your nose. It does very little good,
doesn't do anything for me. You've got to be thinking ahead,
not right in front of you. And that's why most
people hit at the golf ball because that's where all
their energy, mental and physical is directed toward.
Speaker 1: This is a complete coincidence, but two of the last
three episodes of Golf Smarter we're on target oriented golf.
We even had JB. Holmes, caddy talking about the work
that he's done with Colin Cromac who's in the UK,
and Colin was on talking about his whole program of
target oriented golf. You sound like you're a believer.
Speaker 3: Well, okay, that's a small part of it again, just
like process is a small part of the picture. A
process is extremely important. Target oriented is very important. But
if you don't have good balance of the tool in
your hands, if you don't have the idea that you're
clearing space for those hands to work in, if you
don't have the idea that you know that your vision
is toward that target, then it doesn't matter if your
target oriented. If you don't understand the whole process. Just
like if you have a process but you don't understand
that all that energy has to be directed toward the target,
then neither one work. They have to go together. You
have to have both process and target to go along
with understanding what gives you the best opportunity to get there.
So it's not just one or the other. It's actually
a combination of things. But the one the phrases I
like to use is it's balance, control, and vision if
you don't have good balance. And when I mean balance, I.
Speaker 1: Was going to ask you about that because my biggest
issue is with the driver. It's the only club that
I like. Fall out after I swing my driver because
I'm probably swinging it too hard, but no other club, No,
keep going.
Speaker 3: It's typically not because you swing it too harsh because
you swing out of balance. You fall because you're out
of balance.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: And when I say out of balance, balance is not
at the feet. The feet are there to be soft
and to allow the hands to work freely. The balance
is in the hands. To imagine you had a medicine
ball in your hands, a ten pound medicine ball with
a couple of handles on it. You know, you see
those ones with the handles on it, and you're swinging
that medicine ball back and forth, just like you would
a golf swing, kind of underneath you, and you're trying
to throw it into a wall. Okay, if you throw
it out away from you. You're going to fall over
toward out away from you. If you just use it
along your body and you find a place that's easy
to release it in front of you, that's where your
best golf swing is. In other words, what you're doing
is you're reaching down the target line or the ball
line rather than actually, let me put it a different
way so you can kind of get the visual. If
you had two lines. You had a line from the
ball to the target, and then you had another line
from your hands to the target. The ball to the target,
your hands have to reach out to go down that line.
The line from the hands to the target is a direct,
easy to balance line. If you swing that line, the
golf club works properly. If you swing down the ball line,
everything's messed up, everything's off balance.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is making so much sense to me, especially
thank you for telling me I'm not swinging too hard
because it like, Yeah, you.
Speaker 3: Can swing as hard as you want to if you're
in balance, if you're efficient. Another good word is efficient.
If your hands are working efficiently in front of your body,
then that club is working efficiently too, and you can
swing with as much effort as you want to as
long as you don't swing out of balance and out
of balance. If you were to put your hands the
left hand to the left of you, right hand of
the right of you, where you feel like if you
were holding two five pound medicine balls up in your hands,
that's as far as you can swing in balance straight.
Speaker 1: Are you saying I'm trying to do this? Am I
putting my arm that straight?
Speaker 3: Without straightening your arms where you're relaxed and comfortable, hands
are in a like at a handshake distance. Okay. You
never extend your arm fully out to shake someone's hand.
You extend it with a slight bend in your elbow
and a relax in your shoulder. And so if you
think of handshake distance on the left side of you
or right side of you, or in front of you,
as long as you swing within that, you are in balance.
In other words, your hands work at a certain distance
from your body most efficiently. Once you try to reach out,
If you take your hand right hand or left hand
and you reach out away from you, you'll feel your
body go the opposite direction to keep you from falling over. Okay,
And that's what you experience when you swing the golf
club that's out of balance in your hands. When your
hands are out of balance, so is the golf club.
And not only that, it slows the golf club down
because your body has to shut down in order to
keep you from falling again. It can't work faster, it
actually works slower. So your best golf swing, your most
efficient golf swing, actually feels slower even though it's actually
working faster.
Speaker 1: And is that the control part of balance control, vision, well.
Speaker 3: Control is actually how you hold it in your hands.
You put pressure from your palms out, then you're not
controlling the club the right way. So think about it
like your your fingers or your hands become a vice
on the club and you find where that vice is
and you hold it up, not pushing out, So you're
using your finger muscles more in toward toward the sky,
and you're balancing that club just like you would balance
a plate or something out in front of you.
Speaker 1: And you lost me, what do you mean pushing up?
Speaker 3: Okay, pushing and not pushing up, holding up, holding up.
So like you if you had a platter and you're
holding a platter right in front of you that's full
of food, say, or wine glasses or something you're not
going to push out with your palms because the whole
thing's gonna tip over.
Speaker 1: Right right, Okay, I got the visual.
Speaker 3: Going hold up with your fingers. You grab the two
sides and you hold it up with your fingers. If
you imagine that's the way you hold a golf club,
then now you have control of that tool. And the
way Hogan showed me that one was he shook my
hand and he showed me in a handshake. And I'll
never forget that feeling because you could feel how firm
his fingers were yet how soft his arms were.
Speaker 1: That's awesome that you can say.
Speaker 3: And actually that brings up a great point because everybody says, well,
Hogan said hold the club lightly. That's absolutely false what
he said. And because I asked him that question when
I was about sixteen years old, I said, I can't
hold the club like that, and he said you shouldn't, Son,
and he used a few expletives to go along with it.
And after he got through berating me about it, he said,
here's how you hold it. You hold it like you
mean it so no one can take it away from you.
But you don't squeeze it with your palms. You use
your fingers to control it, not your palms. And he
said that means that all your pressure will stay constant
throughout the golf swing, because now you've got a control
that you can use. Rather than if you're pushing with
your palms, your fingers come loose. Try to hold anything,
push out with your palms and try to tighten your fingers.
You cannot do it.
Speaker 1: Right. Why is it that everybody wants to quote Hogan?
Was he a teacher or was he just an amazing player?
Speaker 3: Actually, Jimmy Demarrett was his teacher. He was an amazing player,
but he had a major flaw in his golf swing
that cost him early in his career and he had
to do a lot of strength training over in order
to overcome it. And that was that he swung out
toward the ball a little bit. And so that's why
his swing looks flat because it was an end to
out swing and when it wasn't working quite right, it
turned into a snap hook. And if you talked to
him who knew him later in life, he could not
keep from hitting that snap hook because of that. As
he got weaker, and the best swing in any if
you had talked to Sam sneid Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson,
any of the greats of that era who had the
absolute best off swing of that era, or maybe ever.
They would all tell you. Jimmy de Merritt that swing
was so simple and so strong it was unbelievable. Why Well,
because he was very efficient in the use of his hands,
and he had great balance of the tool in his hands,
and he had great vision toward the target. And that's
where I use vision. Vision is really where your mind's
eye is. When your mind's eye is only on hitting
a ball, guess what, that's what you're going to focus on,
and that's where everything ends. And that's why you can't
control the direction. But when you have your vision toward
the target and you're feeling it just like it's part
of you, that shot, the shape of that shot with
your hands, like it's part of you. Now you've got
complete control of it as long as you have good
balance and good control of the tool.
Speaker 1: This brings me back to and the reason I asked you,
was Hogan a teacher, because you said earlier, we don't
want to try to have Rory McElroy swing. We don't
want to have Adam Scott swing. But then you were saying,
we want ben Hogan's swing.
Speaker 3: No, I said, we do not want ben hogan swing,
want his control. Ah ah, we want his control, we
want his balance. But that's only going to be what's
personal to us. If and I'll put it in a
way that might simplify it. There's a reason some people
will never be good golfers and others will be great golfers.
It's actually the way their hands work. Some people have
a natural balancing and control ability in their hands that
others don't, and a lot of it's in training. If
you start out young and you do something, let's say
like volleyball or basketball, and you're using your hand a
completely different way than you would for golf, you're not
going to be as good a golfer. You rarely see
a good basketball player that's a good golfer, and the
reason is is they're pushing instead of pulling. Even though
they're using their fingers, they're still pushing and whereas in
golf you're really pulling with your fingers. The other thing
that everybody loses sight of is that, you know, we're
all built differently, Like my flexibility is not nearly what
it was forty years ago because I've got some arthritis
issues in my back, so my limits of range of
motion have decreased quite a bit. So now I have
to be careful that I stay within my balance. My
current balance, not what I could do when I was
fourteen fifteen years old. And that's what a lot of
people try to swing imitating making shoulder turns hip turns, which,
by the way, when you try to make a shoulder
turn or hip turn deliberately, you're now your body is
out of sequence. If your hands don't lead it, then
you have lost the sequence of the motion. It'd be
like trying to turn your hips while you're walking and
trying to lead with your hips instead of your feet.
If you've ever done that, you know it's awkward.
Speaker 1: Yes, I definitely know it's awkward because I was like, oh, shoot,
I've not been I've been not been turning my hips
on my back swing, and then I try to remember
it in the back swing, and all of a sudden,
everything is now nothing's worth well.
Speaker 3: It gets you totally off focus of what's really important.
If you narrowed everything down to the ability of your
hand to do the work, then you can find your
best off swing instruction is not really that important. The
only thing you need someone is someone who can guide
you to help you find that right balance and that
right motion the first time that fits you. And once
you've done that, you're pretty much on your own. You
can self teach from that point on.
Speaker 1: And that should be a goal.
Speaker 3: That should be very much a goal what a lot
of teachers do. And it's not their fault. It happened
many many years ago, back in the forties and fifties,
when the club pros back then weren't making any money
and they thought the best way to have an extra
income was to keep people on the hook for lessons,
and so they were baffling them with bs and they
were telling them all these things that now have become
the godlike that. You're supposed to turn your supposed to
turn your shoulders, You're supposed to do this, You're supposed
to do that, supposed to bend your knees, supposed to
stick your butt out, supposed to keep your spine straight.
None of those are comfortable. If they're not comfortable, they're
not right.
Speaker 1: So that takes us to right kind of right back
to where we were starting, is about teaching being too
complex to the status of teaching today. And now you
can find teachers on the web, I mean any you
can get personalized instruction on the web. Is this a
good thing?
Speaker 3: No, because you know the way I related, It's like
trying to find a good contractor to come work in
your house. You got about a one in five or
one in ten chance of doing it. And same thing
with teachers. And again it's not a slam on them.
It's just that they have not been educated. And if
they're not educated properly, then they're not doing you any good.
You're better off to just go with what you know,
then go to somebody who you know. The typical thing
you hear is well I got worse. You'll hear that
eight out of ten times. And actually that was a
study done by the PHA of America about fifteen twenty
years ago, and they found that fifty percent of the
people got worse, thirty percent stayed the same, and only
ten to twenty percent improved from lessons. That's not a
very good stat and of course they didn't want to
publish it because they knew how bad it was. That's
why they're always trying to find a better way. But
they don't know where to go. Because what we said
in the very beginning is when you see something a
certain way, then it's the old adage of you know,
if you try to do the same thing over and
over again, you're you know, you're still going to end
up with the same outcome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nothing is insanity, right.
Speaker 3: Definition of insanity. And so unless people start seeing the
game differently, they're not going to improve. They're just going
to be out there hacking balls, trying all these gimmicks
that don't work. They just will never work because they
don't fit you personally. You have to understand how your hands,
your hand eye coordination works and how to focus on
that target, which I again I love target oriented, but
it doesn't do any good if you don't understand what
it is you're orienting toward the target. If you're orienting
the golf ball toward the target, that's like trying to
tell the golf ball where to go, and it's got
no brain. When you find a golf ball with a brain,
let me know, then I'll believe the golf ball you tell.
Then you got to use what the sense of eye,
hand coordination you have.
Speaker 1: So it's best to find a teacher that you can
work one on one with and he can help you
with your hand, he can touch, he can be there
with you. Then trying to find someone who's just looking
at your videos of your swing, right, and.
Speaker 3: Again, what you want is, which is rare. You're going
to have to find someone who understands feel and eye
hand coordination, not someone who's teaching you ball position, club
head position, backswing, the backswing. If the backswing were important,
you wouldn't have players like Jim Furick on the tour.
You wouldn't have like Craig Stadler on the when he
played and played great. You wouldn't have even had Jack
Nicholas if it was about backswing, or Arnold Palmer. What
separated them from the rest was their ability to focus
on where they were going, not what they were hitting.
Speaker 1: Should we be looking at down the line at the
target when we swing the club, No, you.
Speaker 3: Have to it has to be a mental picture of
the target, and it has to be what you really
have to have as a relay relationship with the target,
not the target itself. So imagine that if you put,
if you pointed at something, if you try to point
perfectly towards something, your arm in your hand will shake.
If you try to hold a cup of coffee perfectly still,
you'll spill it. But if you just calmly find a relationship,
like it's like looking through a window, and where your
hands end up is kind of like where the window
is sitting, and you're trying to get your hands in
a relationship with that target, not reach toward that target.
So in other words, you see it in the background,
just like firing a gun, you see the target. You're
pulling a trigger in relationship to that target, pointing a
gun in relationship to that target, but you're not actually
trying to get to the target. I think that's another
mistake people do, is they try to guide things toward
a target. You have no control over that golf ball,
literally zero. So what you've got to do is control
what's within you. And the only thing that's within you
is this balance that comes to a finish in relationship
to that target.
Speaker 1: I think the name of this episode, and I want
to pursue this even more, is go with what you know.
Speaker 3: Exactly and learn to understand how your body functions balance
and control and vision in relationship to balance and control
and vision in relationship to that tool and focus from
the hands to the target, not the club to the target,
not the ball to the target. Okay, So once you
build the relationship between your hands, your eyes and that target,
the club just becomes a tool in your hands, like
a hammer, a shovel or anything else. It's just a
tool you're holding on to. We understand the tools. We
have this inate ability to understand where things are. It's
just like if you ever watch anybody that it does fencing,
sword fighting, you'll see they don't focus on the end
of the sword. They focus on their target, and they're
always and so they're just feeling it in their hands,
how to get the end of that to the target,
and they never see the sword itself.
Speaker 1: One of your things that we talked about before and
i'd love to talk about again in the power field
golf is all the stress that's put on your body
in the golf swing, and how your program is designed
to help remove or eliminate or even reduce the stress
on your body.
Speaker 3: And okay, well let's let's talk about it. And everybody
remembers Michael Johnson the runner.
Speaker 1: Right sure, Okay, so does everybody here. Oh it's just me.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, So most people remember Michael Johnson the runner.
Why was he so good at what he did? He
was very efficient in his motion, so there was very
little stress on his body. That's why he never got injured.
And then you watch other runners who put out a
lot of effort, probably had more ability than Michael Johnson did,
but he was so efficient he could beat them. They
were so inefficient that they injured themselves. It's the same
thing with a golf swing. If you're efficient with the
use of your hands and you allow your body to
simply react to their use, you're using minimum amount of
effort to create maximum amount of power and control.
Speaker 1: It's it's starting to make sense to me here and
I'm and I'm going over you know, as you're talking,
I'm starting to realize how much, way, too much thought
that's going into every swing that I'm taking, and I'm
overdoing everything and not getting the results that I know
I can.
Speaker 3: Well, that's what I hear from most people is they're
just trying too hard to control something they have no
control over. You know, there's another old saying, give up
control to gain control. Give up control of all those
things that you have no control over and then gain
control of the things that you can control and go
back to the word process. Well, if we understand balance,
control and vision as that being the total that we
need to play our best golf. We just have to
have our best balance, our best control, our best vision,
which is totally different than somebody else's, then we have
now gotten our best process too to go with it.
Speaker 1: So now that we're feeling stronger, we're feeling better, we're
feeling balanced, we you know, and we're not thinking as much. Right,
there's still a lot left to better scoring, is there not?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yes, there is. Now you can focus on your
imagination and that's the one. Once you've got balance, control
and vision, vision is just simply understanding the relationship to
the target. Now, imagination is how you shape your hands work,
how you shape that vision in relationship to the target.
So if you want to hit a high fade, a
low draw, if you want to hit a flop shot,
all you have to do is imagine how you're going
to do it with your hands first, and everything else
will fall into place. Then it's up to you to
really expand your imagination to see where your limits are
on the shots you can create.
Speaker 1: Expand on the idea of imagination with your hands first,
that really hit me.
Speaker 3: Well, think about it, like if you've ever watched you
ever been to a sushi place or a what do
they call it, well, like Kobe steakhouse or whatever it's called,
where they sit there and they do all kinds of tricks.
Speaker 1: With the not Benny Hannah, Benny Hannah.
Speaker 3: Okay, what yeah, exactly, But what they what they're doing.
What they're doing is they're using their imagination to create
all these illusions with the tools by simply using their
hands differently. So imagine he's slicing the left and then
he's doing with his left hand and on his right
hand he's coming over the top with the right. Well,
that's a fade and a draw, you know, that's all
that is. And so it's your Your imagination is your
limitation really and other than physical. Once you get past
the physical. If you have physical ability to control a
golf club, then your imagination is what separates the best
from the rest.
Speaker 1: Do you find golf as a creative sport?
Speaker 3: Oh very much, so, very very much. So. That's why
Tiger at his peak was so good, because he was
more creative than anybody else, and he trusted his creativity.
You see guys that look great swing in the golf club,
but they have no creativity. They never win. You can
go back to Gene Lttler, didn't win much, had a
beautiful golf swing. I could name dozens of them if
I could remember their names, but you know, over the years.
I mean Tom Weiscoff is a great example, one of
the best golf swings of all time. Had no imagination
or very little. So you know, he didn't win. He
won one British Open in a few tournaments. He was
not considered a great player. He was considered great potential.
Speaker 1: Someone mentioned on the show that you know, we're talking
about creativity and you mentioned Tiger is that but Tiger
never took a shot that he didn't practice a thousand
times in his mind, and so you're saying that it's
going to be that he didn't take every one of those,
like the two hundred yard shot from the bunker over
the water, around the tree, landing softly.
Speaker 3: On the green, not a thousand times. Yeah, he probably
did that for the first time that day and he
just felt it. He felt it was right and he
felt he could do it.
Speaker 1: So there's confidence obviously.
Speaker 3: Yes. I don't know if you remember there was a
shot Jack Nicholas hit at Firestone back in the probably
late sixties early seventies where he took a like an
eight iron up over a tree right in front of him.
It looked impossible out of the rough and landed it
softly on the green at that sixteenth I think it is,
at par five, and ended up winning the tournament because
of that shot, And it was just his imagination. He
knew he could do it where no one else probably
would have even attempted it. They would have been chipping out.
Speaker 1: And most of us weekend bums. We're playing out of fear.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. You're playing to your weaknesses rather than
to your strengths. You're trying to stay away from trouble
rather than embracing your abilities. Hmm.
Speaker 1: I like that. So how do we change our mindset
on that?
Speaker 3: Well, it all starts with changing your whole perception of things.
If you start seeing things from your hands, you can
start understanding your limitations. Until you understand your limitations, As
long as the golf ball controls you, you don't control
it really, So it's all about again imagination balance, control,
and vision. And if you can bury that in your brain,
that balance, control and vision are the keys to your
best golf, then all you've got to do is find
your best balance, your best control, your best vision, and
you know where your limitations are. So if you're not
capable of hitting a shot two hundred and fifty yards
over a cree, then you lay up to that creek.
If it's just out of your realm of possibility, you
play to your straints rather than trying to hit the
hero shot. But you understand when you have the ability
to do something and you don't have to back down
from it. So if you can hit it two fifty
over a creek and it's no big deal, then you
can go for that shot. That's the way Tiger played.
He played to his straints and knew when he could
go for something. He never was afraid of it. Today
he looks almost like he's afraid of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what would your assessment? I mean, he can't It
seems like he can't put together two good rounds in
a weekend.
Speaker 3: Well, the reason is that he's changed his golf swing
too many times, trying to find the perfect swing, which
is fool's gold. I mean, you just can't. Like I
was telling you earlier, when I was young and I
got away from what Hogan, Burke and de Merit taught me,
I started trying to improve my golf swing. It got worse,
get better. I tried to change my grip. It was
the worst decision I ever made. And it took me
a year to get over that one. And so you know,
all I can tell people is find your best, tweak
it a little bit, to try to get better balance,
better control, and use your vision better. But don't try
to change the world in your golf swing. And understand
your limitations. Because I don't think Tiger understands his limitations.
He thinks he can do all these things. And again
he's It's like something that if you go back to
the era of Nelson of Rockefeller, the guy that was
worth a billion dollars, like in the thirties or forties,
someone asked him said when are you going to be
rich enough? And he said never. Well, it's like asking
the golfer when are they going to be good enough? Never?
So we're always after this illusion of improvement, and that's
when we destroy ourselves. When we learn to be comfortable
with who we are and our abilities, then we can
play a lot better.
Speaker 1: So what I'm getting your saying is that Tiger, we've
seen the best of Tiger.
Speaker 3: Probably unless he goes back to finding his best balance,
his best control, and his best vision. Right now, he's
trying to make golf swings. He's not playing golf shots.
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. And the boy they golf needs him, Oh
oh yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean he can still win with what he has.
He can't dominate with what he has because he is
so talented. I mean, it's just you can't replace that talent,
that it, that it factor. You just can't replace it.
He's destroyed it himself. No one else has.
Speaker 1: And you think he's just tweaking. He's overtweaked himself. He's
just tried too many things.
Speaker 3: And yeah, he didn't have to have a perfect golf swing.
If I go back and look at at quotes from
Nicholas over the years, he never changed his golf swing.
Even though everybody said, well you got to fry flying
right elbow, you got this, you got that. He said,
I don't care. I beat y'all, don't.
Speaker 1: I That's what I say to my friends, and like,
come on, let's play the fronties days. No, I'm not
playing the fronties. That's for girls. That's the lady like, yeah,
you're gonna shoot part there? No, yeah, then shut up,
let's go. And it's gonna be more fun because you're
gonna score lower because you can you can hit your
wedge and the green as opposed to hitting a hybrid,
and you're gonna have much more fun.
Speaker 3: Come on, Yeah, that's true. And that's the other thing too.
People have to learn how to how to play the
golf course where they can enjoy it. A lot of
a lot of guys just go right to the back
tee and don't think about it, and they think, well,
I got to keep up with Joe because he's a
good player. You don't. You don't play it from where
you're comfortable, not from where he's comfortable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure I'll play with you there, but
I don't have to. I mean, do you really have to?
Are you that good? If you're that good, then you
know then and you feel like you it's a discussion
I have it seems like almost every round and they
think I'm a whimp. It's like, okay, I'm a whim.
I don't care.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's right, as long as you enjoy the experience.
I mean, when you get right down to it, you've
got to learn to enjoy the experience. You cannot enjoy
the experience when you're thinking about every golf swing and
details of it.
Speaker 1: You know, and.
Speaker 3: Information overload is a great term for today's instruction. It's
all information overload if you simplify. That's why I said
in the beginning my goalhole goal has been year after
years to get it simpler, not more difficult. I'm trying
to find ways to get it down to the lowest
common denominator for my students and anybody I talk to,
so that way they can really enjoy the experience if
it's lowest common denominator and all they need to know
is how to hold that club properly, how to keep
it balanced as good as possible during the golf swing,
and how to keep their vision on where they're going
and be as efficient toward that target as they can.
Then they're going to enjoy the game and they're not
going to have to think very much.
Speaker 1: Let's start wrapping this up by talking about your power
field golf DVD, training, grip and booklet. Why should the
golf Smarter community. What's the value for them? What are
they going to learn? What are they going to take
away from Well, I think.
Speaker 3: What they're going to learn is simplicity, and they're going
to learn how to see it differently, see the game differently.
They're also going to get to see some really cool
stuff as far as shot making. They're going to get
some good stories about some of the people I learned
from growing up, like the Merit and Burke and Hogan.
They're just going to get a better understanding how to
find their best game. And it's not perfect because you
can't put everything in a book in a video. It's
really hard, but it at least sets them on the
right path so that they can start thinking in a
lot simpler fashion rather than being buried with all these
thoughts of is my left elbow straight? Is my wrist
at this position? Is the club head or the club
between my feet and the right spot or my feet right?
You know, all those things that are holding them back.
They can just get rid of those. And what I
tell people is, don't add to what you're doing, take
away from what you're doing, and replace it with something simpler.
Speaker 1: So who should buy this? Who should have this of course.
Speaker 3: Literally everybody all the way to Tiger Woods, because Tiger
needs it as much as anybody to the beginning golfer.
Because the more you can simplify, the more you can
enjoy the experience.
Speaker 1: That's huge. Just simplify and enjoy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, process of elimination rather than a tion.
Speaker 1: M interesting. Hey, Eban, it's been great to talk to you,
reconnect with you. It's been a long time. I'm so
glad that you had the time and agreed to come
back on golf Smarter. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3: Well. I enjoyed it too. It's always good. I love
talking it because I just want to see people get
better and enjoy the game. I don't need to teach them.
If people want to come see me, great, but that's
not my idea. My idea is to allow them to
go experience it for themselves and self teach. They really
don't need the teachers as much as they think they do.
Speaker 1: And it said powerfield golf dot com, right, that's it.
You can tin more about you and if they want
to book some book some lessons with you, talk to
you more. Powerfield golf dot.
Speaker 3: Com right, yep ebin at powerfield golf dot com.
Speaker 1: That's your email address, that's my email address. Eban is
e b e n.
Speaker 3: E b e n. That's correct, all right, buddy.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you again. Really enjoyed. I continue.
Speaker 3: It's been my pleasure and I hope a lot of
people get something good out of this.
Speaker 1: M