A Mostly Harmless Putting Tip for the 4th of July

Just got back from fireworks at Orchard Park Middle School--quite the scene!--and was tinkering around with my putting on the actually-pretty-fast carpet in our living room, and I may have figured out something cool. Here it is:

Problem: I tend to be a feel putter, who likes to set up correctly, pick as precise a target as possible, and just trust my body to get the ball to it. (That trust is partly the product of 1000s of putts on The Rail--a metal-yardstick-type training device--during winters in western NY from the late '90s to the early '00s, but that's another story.) Lately, however, I've been overthinking my putts. I'm getting too aware of what different body parts are doing during my stroke and trying to control the putter face too much in the midst of the stroke. I haven't trusted my lines and have started trying to steer the ball into the hole instead of just rolling it toward my target. In particular, I've been having a lot of trouble while getting ready to pull the trigger to begin my putting stroke with quieting my mind and trusting my body.

Solution: A new pre-putt routine and a new triggering image. Yes, "image"--not words. What I was doing tonight is looking very closely at my target and trying to identify a specific point on it that I'm aiming for. Once I've established that point, I try to keep a clear image of it in my head as I move my eyes from it back to the ball. Once my eyes get to the ball, I start my stroke. Look, visualize, putt. Very simple.

Results: The difference between last night and this one was amazing. I was missing all over the place yesterday, overcompensating like crazy from putt to putt. I was pushing, pulling, you name it, even when I tried the exact same putt over and over. Tonight, I was making everything I was looking at. And I was putting from a different length and angle each time. Even my misses were closer and the pace of my putts was better. I'd say I went from making less than 40% of the 8- to 10-footers I was practicing yesterday to over 80% tonight.

Caveats: Every putt I tried tonight was relatively straight. I haven't figured out the breaks in the new house to my satisfaction, but whichever way the ball was curving on a given putt, it wasn't more than an inch over those 10 feet. So this visualization trigger may just work on short and straight putts. I have to take it to a putting green to see how well it transfers to different kinds of putts, particularly those where the line is dependent on the speed.

Tentative Conclusions: That said, I have to say I'm really excited about this new pre-putt/trigger routine. I was big into The Inner Game of Golf as a teenager and I like to think what I've come up with is in tune with that book's advice. Maybe what the looking/targeting part of the routine does is force you to use the part of your brain that handles aiming without you actually having to do any calculus yourself. Maybe focusing on the visualization part--along with the standardized/automatic nature of the actual trigger itself--serve to keep your verbal/intellectual consciousness quiet and keep the right parts of the brain active in that crucial fraction of a second before you start your putting stroke.

OK, so this is starting to sound like Zen and the Art of Getting the Little White Ball in the Damn Hole even as I'm writing it, but I really do think if you have a putter you trust, if you know how to take a stance that's comfortable to you and helps you keeps your eyes over the ball and your head still during the stroke, and if you've practiced that stroke over and over and over with something like The Rail that gives exaggerated feedback on the effects of even very tiny mistakes, then you really can be very zen. As some band once said, "I don't think so!" And if this routine helps you not think but "use the force," I think it may help your putting. I'll let you know if it helps mine!

Golf History has taken a new turn

The world has changed, if only just a bit: Y E Yang wins the PGA championship, the first Asian to win a major golf championship.

The nose knows

Can you do this with your nose?

On Race, Gender, and Golf

It's kind of weird to see the crying question making national headlines. I'm used to the back-and-forth between Morgan Pressel and the golf press corps on her tearitudinality, not so much Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. Seriously, what's the big deal about a few tears?

I'm tempted to follow Tiger Woods's own lead and say a similar thing about Kelly Tilghman's banter-gone-bad with Nick Faldo last Friday on the Golf Channel (both Geoff Shackelford and the Golf for Women blog have posted an edited version of the clip in which she drops the "lynch him in a back alley" bomb). But then I noticed that not only is Tilghman getting criticized for the comment itself, for a wishy-washy apology, and for getting off easy with only a 2-week suspension, but also that Tiger himself is taking almost as much heat for (through his agent) accepting her apology, calling this a "non-issue," and declaring "case closed."

As if. People everywhere are trotting out the usual scripts and entering into the usual debates: intent vs. effect; context vs. symbolism; conscious vs. unconscious racism; identifying black vs. identifying multiracial vs. identifying postracial vs. identifying antiracist; insensitivity vs. hypersensitivity; "playing the race card" vs. "sanctioned ignorance"; blame vs. taking responsibility; and so on. It's like Ethnicity/Race Studies 101 out there in Blogoramaville these days, although of course many more instances of unconscious stereotyping and ignorance in the golfy media with respect to race and gender are not getting the CNN effect. Any ideas why this is so?

Given how oddly Tilghman's comment rings (most lynchings were very public spectacles) and Woods's response sounds, I'd love to see them announce when both return to the PGA at the Buick that they are embarking on a joint research project, studying works like W. Fitzhugh Brundage's Under Sentence of Death (North Carolina, 1997), Jacqueline Goldsby's A Spectacular Secret (Chicago, 2006), Sandra Gunning's Race, Rape, and Lynching (Oxford, 1996), Grace Hale's Making Whiteness (Pantheon, 1998), Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection (Oxford, 1997), Jonathan Markovitz's Legacies of Lynching (U of Minnesota, 2004), Anne Rice's edited collection, Witnessing Lynching (Rutgers, 2003), Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck's A Festival of Violence (Illinois, 1995), and Christopher Waldrep's Lynching in America (NYU, 2006), and collaborating on a Golf Channel/First Tee-produced documentary based on their research. If these products of Duke and Stanford put together and promoted something of use to the educational community, then the lessons learned can go beyond the media's rapid spin cycle.

[Update 1/13/08: Jennifer at Mixed Race America has a great, thoughtful post on the very issues I gesture toward--and bypass--in my 3rd paragraph.]

Usagi

Family Friday

Elephant family:



Machine family:

And by "Bamboo," I Meant...

Not for your scores to soar like the heroes and villains of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. More like your spirits, or something like that.

Minea Blomqvist got it--her 31 on the back vaulted her into the top 40 heading into the weekend of the Longs Drugs Challenge and gives her a great shot to keep her card for 2008. Paula Creamer got it--she was +5 with 5 holes to go, but birdied three of them to get into the top 50. And Maria Hjorth certainly got it--despite taking a quadruple bogey late in her first round, she bounced back into the top 15 with a 69 on Friday. Even Morgan Pressel's two bogeys down the home stretch to drop her to +5 minimized the damage enough that she squeaked past her second consecutive cut line.

But two of my favorites just didn't get it. Mi Hyun Kim got the doubles early on and WDed. And Ai Miyazato was done in by an early double and two late ones. She started off with birdies on 2 of her first 3 holes, but then a double and two bogeys put her at +7 with the tougher front 9 left to play. After gutting out a bunch of pars and a birdie, she was right at the cut line with 3 holes to play when disaster struck. The dreaded double double.

At least they get to rest for the Samsung World Championship. Unlike Annika Sorenstam, who just declined the sponsor's invitation to join the 20-player elite field. There are various ways of interpreting Sorenstam's decision--doing the right thing (by taking a stand against last-second entrance criteria changes), showing up Michelle Wie (who WDed from Annika's tournament under strange, and to many suspicious, circumstances earlier this year and who has come under loads of criticism for accepting the sponsor's invitation that was given out in the spring), setting an example for Wie--but my read is that she just doesn't feel that her body and her game are up to beating Lorena Ochoa. She wants to take her on on her own schedule, not Samsung's.

And given that Ochoa is sitting pretty at the Longs Drugs--1 shot behind leaders Lorie Kane and Karrie Webb and 1 shot ahead of Se Ri Pak, Juli Inkster, and Suzann Pettersen, not to mention the 22 other players within 5 shots of her on a course where anything can happen--maybe Sorenstam is right to defer such a challenge until the 2008 season.

At least she has that option. Virada Nirapathpongporn needed a great round on Friday just to make the cut and couldn't produce one. Katie Futcher lucked in on the cut line but needs to move in the opposite direction on the weekend if she wants to avoid joining her fellow Super Soph at the final stage of Q-School. We'll see if Shigeki Maruyama can do the same in Texas. He's fallen back to 6th place and although he has a little more time to claw his way back into the top 125 on the PGA money list and secure his card for 2008, playing more like he did on the front than the back Friday over the weekend would do him a world of good.

Chinoiserie Thursday

Notes Toward a Prolegomenon To All Future Golf/Academia Analogies

Yeah, I'm kind of proud of that title.

Nap Time

bzzzzzz yum

our infrastructure

kansas shoes

Back to the LPGA! Language Politics and Women's Golf

Thanks to Hound Dog, I just came across this smart blog post from a young Californian on the Futures Tour, Gina Umeck. First, you should read it to see what the kids are learning at UCLA these days. Second, you should read it to see how a pro golfer writes about the reception of players for whom English is not a mother tongue. Third, you should read it because, really, how many golf bloggers ever cite Chomsky on linguistics? Despite the occasional perhaps unintended irony (America as "big brother," hmmmm....) and perhaps understandable stylistic tic, Umeck is taking on an important issue and deserves the widest possible audience. Hopefully Julieta Granada and Ai Miyazato will address the topic on their blogs.

Speaking of audiences, I hope there's a good one at the course and on ESPN2 to see if the Pink Panther (Paula Creamer) can outplay Se Ri Pak and Mi Hyun Kim at the Pink Panther's tournament in Ohio this week. As has been his wont for the past year, Hound Dog has a fine tournament preview.

Sadly, No! Does TolkienWatch...

...so we don't have to!

Weird Bug

All right, this has never happened before in my personal history of blogger weirdness! I just "published" this rather suggestive post but it's not showing up on the Mostly Harmless main page--only in its tags or when you link to it directly.

Have I accidentally created a kind of reverse-vampire post? Or a ghost post? Anyone have a clue what's going on? Because I don't!

[Update: First this post didn't show up. Then I changed the settings slightly--just the number of posts to show on the first page, no big deal. Then, lo and behold, both the raincoaster one and this one are showing up on the main page. I have no explanation!]

This Begs for the Berube Treatment

I get an email newsletter from a guy who runs a hedge fund. No idea why. He says he sends it out to over a million people a week. Maybe he's hoping Congress someday allows the middle class to invest in hedge funds and is trying to build a potential client list. Who knows? Anyway, one of the nice things he does is send out articles by George Friedman of Stratfor for free to us. That, and summarize debates among investment analysts, bankers, and academics--you know, the capitalist priesthood--over how to interpret the global economy.

So anyway, in his most recent essay that popped up in my inbox, Friedman uses a poker metaphor of dubious merit to explain why Iran and the U.S. have been publicly negotiating with each other in recent weeks. Strike one. And along the way he repeatedly refers to the Bush administration as "crippled." Strike two. Feel free to read the essay to find the third strike.

I think the WAAGNFNP needs to get apocalyptic on Stratfor. This is a job for the Chairman-for-Life! If only there were some means by which he could transmit his words to us over teh intertubes....