The Sand Trap (24 page)

Gord had never fit any of the golf molds. He
was the lowest handicap senior golfer in the club but was mostly
invisible, coming out only on Saturdays with the same group of
friends and on club championship day when he won his preferred
parking spot as the club senior champion. Bruce knew that Gord’s
family went way back with the club; they were maybe even original
members over seventy years ago. Gord never took part in any of the
golf course politics and never complained about slow play or the
rules, or bad golfers, or the winter kill on the greens or
anything. He was gracious, polite and with a good career at the
University, seemed to have the game in proper perspective.

Now Gord was trying to change that. That
caused Bruce to think very hard before he answered Gord’s question.
There was no question that Gord could have the game to pull
something off. He was already a picture perfect golfer, the result
of endless lessons as a child and teenager. If anything, his swing
was too good, too mechanical, and too technically perfect. Bruce
had seen too many golfers who were too preoccupied with the
mechanics of their swings. Golfers who spent endless hours with
swing trainers, plane fixers, videos and mirrors, all in search of
the swing some commentator or reporter from the golf channel would
say, “All of you young kids out there – watch ‘such and such’s’
swing – that’s what you want to look like.” Sometimes Bruce
wondered if that might have been his own problem. At least his
obsessive study of the game and the swing had led to the job he had
today. But he also knew now that golf was much more than a swing.
The quest for the perfect swing was more a fabrication of the golf
instruction industry including golf magazines and the fillers
between tournaments on the golf channel, than it was the reality of
the game. The only issues as far as Bruce was concerned were what
happened when the club head met the ball. How the head reached
there and what it did afterward was largely irrelevant. Of course
he taught the members of his club the classic swing rules and
positions. To most of them form was more important than result so
he was glad to teach them how to look good. In his own mind though,
he believed something else; that golf was being taught all wrong
and a generation of young golfers would pay for it. He never voiced
this at the club or he would have been called a nut and probably
ruined his chances of moving up to head pro when the current one
retired in a few years. But he knew there was something most golf
instructors were missing. Whenever he suggested to his fellow
teaching pros that golfers like Arnold Palmer, Chi Chi Rodriguez,
Lee Trevino and even Canadian Gary Cowan would never have made it
today since some teaching pro somewhere would have tried to pound
their swings out of their brains, the response was “They were
exceptions, and besides, how could you ever teach those
swings?”

He never raised the story of the golfer who
most fascinated him. Canadian Moe Norman was one of the most
successful golfers in the complete history of golf anywhere.
Seventeen holes in one, fifty-two tournament wins including the
Canadian Amateur six times and the Saskatchewan Open in 1964 and
held numerous eighteen-hole records. Despite the fact he was
inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame in 1995, it was not
until after his death in 2004 that the golf world started to write
about him and Bruce thought there was even a movie on the way. He
had a very unusual swing and was a very odd man as well, so efforts
to teach his “one plane swing” had never gone very far, despite the
fact that Sam Snead once referred to him as the most accurate ball
striker alive in golf today. No club golfer wanted to look like a
“stiff armed troll” as one observer once called him. Bruce
constantly asked himself the question as to why a swing like
Norman’s won everything it touched and a swing like Gord’s only
secured him a name on the trophy wall in the clubhouse. This might
be his opportunity to find out.

After thinking for a moment, he answered
Gord’s question with a question.

“How hard are you willing to work?”

“I will dedicate the next year to whatever I
need to do to bring my game to the whatever-level needed. A year
from now I want to be in the qualifiers for the Champions’
tour.”

Bruce showed no surprise. “If, after the
summer, I feel you are a hopeless cause will you leave me
alone?”

Bruce needed time to assess if Gord had more
than a good swing.

“Yes. But it might not mean I would give up.
Just give up on you.”

“Fair enough. One last question. Can you
afford me?”

They both laughed and with that conversation
started the process of trying to turn an obscure Canadian senior
Club Champion into the next Champions Tour hero.

“I’ve got some other lessons today so
practice what you want today and we will start tomorrow morning,
and every day, at 7 am on the municipal range, not here at the
club. I’ll have some things to tell you tomorrow, but here’s my
first rule – you won’t play another game of golf until I tell
you.

Gord raised his eyebrows at the municipal
part and that playing order, but he didn’t say anything.

“Agreed?” Bruce offered his hand.

“Agreed.”

And they cemented their contract with a
handshake.

Gord spent most of the morning on the range
at the course practicing a variety of shots before heading in the
afternoon to a meeting with his lawyer about the terms of the
divorce that Gail’s lawyer had sent over. It was not complicated.
Despite the fact she had cleared most things out of their house
that was theirs, the proposal her lawyer made was for a 50-50
split. He had fleeting thoughts of trying to decide which kid each
would keep. It would probably work out that he would keep the place
in Anguilla and she would keep the house or at least the proceeds
from the sale. She had a larger pension coming than he did so
pension splitting was not likely to be an issue and, since she left
him, he hoped that she would be civil. He was sympathetic with her
issue though. While he had been faithful to her, he had never been
the husband she had hoped for when they married thirty years ago.
With the onset of menopause she suddenly wanted those years back –
the years where she was alone while he was either travelling,
golfing or playing music – the years that two children and her own
career had sucked from her – the years that diluted the beauty that
was once there as the newly-wed twenty-one- year-old. Gord thought
she had aged gracefully and beautifully, but that suggestion one
night led to a dish throwing episode. He could see now they had
fallen out of love and he was resigned to her search for a better
life and he was happy for her.

But he hadn’t really thought about where
that left him. They had friends, but they were mostly ones Gail had
cultivated and were not likely to take his side in any of this. The
kids would be sympathetic and scrupulously fair, but ultimately
leave them both alone. He’d already learned that once you leave a
job, you leave the people. And the only person he ever had any
contact with at the Agency was Richard. He was truly alone for the
first time in his life that he could remember and he wasn’t sure if
he liked the feeling or not. He would figure that out in the next
while. But for now there was the lawyer – and his plan to become
one of the top senior golfers in North America.

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Bruce and Gord met at the range at the
appointed 7 am. Gord was full of energy and ready to get started.
He was a morning person and he had already done his hundred
sit-ups, hundred push-ups, and his Tai Chi and was already
digesting a breakfast of steel cut oatmeal and green tea. Bruce was
not a morning person, had not yet had his traditional bacon and
eggs, and was clutching a Starbucks grande. He looked at Gord and
could suddenly understand why Gail found him so annoying.

Gord looked at Bruce’s tired face. “If you
don’t like the morning why are we meeting at 7 am? And why here at
the public municipal range and not the club?”

“As for the time, I have other students and
other duties than you that fill up my day. Besides, I know the
owner here and he’ll let you practice as much as you want with some
anonymity. I think it might be better if we answered fewer
questions about what we are doing together. People will think we
are both nuts.”

The fact was Bruce had not slept all night.
He had sat at his desk and his computer the whole night, going over
ten years of notes he had made from the courses and teaching
seminars he had attended over the years. His decision to go to the
municipal course and make Gord agree to not play were just
instinctive thoughts he had yesterday when he realized that Gord
was serious and that no ordinary set of lessons would get the job
done. Ever since he had started teaching he had the notion that
most current golf instruction was off base. He had put together two
things to come up with his own theory. First, he had isolated what
he thought were the key elements in the swing of the greatest ball
strikers in golf history. Others had done this before for
individual golfers, but he just listed down one side of a page the
supposedly individual golfer key swing characteristics that he
could gather from the books. This was harder than it had first
appeared. There were over five thousand books listed on
Chapters/Indigo on golf and while he hadn’t read them all, his
library included books written about every great golfer that ever
lived. He had even bought “Golf for Dummies” – not a bad book for
beginners he thought. Unfortunately at the end of that exercise he
realized why there were five thousand books. There were as many
swing characteristics as books and some were even contradictory.
The only common characteristic was that they all hit the ball well.
Swing plane was a good example. From Moe Norman’s one plane, to a
Faldo classic plane to a Couples or a Furyk over the shoulder two
plane swing, swing plane didn’t seem to matter at all since the
masters of any particular plane all managed to hit the ball pretty
well. There was grip; some were strong, some weak’ some overlap,
some interlocking. He did not even want to start on the variations
in putting style. He was particularly fond of Sam Snead’s croquet
style putting. It was too bad the PGA banned the style.

A swing scheme only started to take shape
after he listed on the other side of the page the “tips” or even
instructional strategies these many golfers provided at some point
in their careers. This proved much more difficult despite the fact
there were over one thousand instructional books available on line
and most were of the ghost penned “Golf my way” variety. Many of
these “tips” he garnered from the golf magazines or other
journalists who had interviewed or spent time or observed a
particular golfer. It was abundantly clear that most good golfers
really didn’t know what they did right and someone else had to
interpret for them. It was only after reading some articles that he
understood what Norman was doing with his swing. It was those two
lists he had accumulated with over a decade of reading and studying
that he now had spread out on his desk. Somewhere in the
intersection of swing characteristics and instructional tips were
the keys to taking a guy with a perfect, Faldo like, swing to a
much higher level of playing than a three handicap. So he persisted
and after considerable notes and study, he figured that once you
parceled out the standard instruction that was handed out in books
like the ‘Dummy’ book there were several things that separated the
good from the great. It was 4 am before he had designed his
strategy for Gord.

“Ok Gord, let’s get started. Take out a
7-iron. For the next three weeks you can leave the other clubs in
your car.”

Slightly amused but now curious, Gord
complied and took his new Callaway RAZR X 7-iron out of the
bag.

Bruce continued.

“The fact of the matter is you have a swing
and scores that most golfer in our club would die for. I know your
swing well and most teaching pros would call it picture perfect and
they would just tweak a thing or two to get you playing better.
Well I’m no Sean Foley and you’re no Tiger Woods, but I think just
tweaking won’t do it. You'll have to change a few fundamental
things and practice them until you erase fifty or so years of
muscle memory.”

He paused. “You still with me?”

“I know what muscle memory is Bruce.”

“Ok. I have only three things I want you to
change. You don’t have to know the theory behind what I am asking
you to do, just do it until it becomes second nature. I wouldn’t
risk teaching these things to a beginner at the club, but I think
for someone like you with a great swing already they will be what
you need to dramatically improve your game.”