Graham Averill is turning 50 this year and he’s crazy. Instead of buying a motorcycle or getting a tattoo, he’s decided to try to get really, really good at golf. He started this project in March as a 13-year-old handicapper, trying to get to zero in a year. He is now 11.2. Welcome to his midlife crisis.
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon, but I’m jealous of college kids. Specifically, college kids who play Division 1 golf and dominate my algorithm with their practice sessions. You know what I’m talking about. They make short videos that start with, “This is how a D1 golfer practices…” and then take you through their four hour practice session where they fine tune every damn aspect of their game. I’m happy that these kids get to live their best lives, but if I could spend some of their free time on myself as a vampire, I would.
Time is limited and I’ll be the first to admit that practice is the first thing to sacrifice when I’m putting together a schedule, especially since I’m trying to play more rounds. Sometimes I feel like “just practice” is a cop out and I should be out there playing 18.
“You don’t have to feel guilty about exercising when you’re focusing on the things you’re working on,” Hahn told me. “Playing in a band doesn’t do you much good unless you’re also working on the technical side of things.”
I’m still trying to affect the changes that Hahn put in place and build on that foundation, so yes, practice is key. Fortunately, with Hahn’s help, I’ve gotten a lot better at making my limited practice time count. Here’s a look at a typical hour-long practice session as I try my hardest to hit zero.
A bucket of balls
If I can, I’ll go straight from the gym to the course, but that doesn’t happen often, so most days I have to spend 5-10 minutes at the start of practice doing weird things that make me look like I’m in an 80’s Jazzercise video. After removing the leg warmers, I work through a bucket of balls, but this process looks completely different than it did just a few months ago. With my coach’s guidance, I stopped spending hours just shooting and hitting balls on the range and started focusing on very specific aspects of my game.
The specifics vary depending on what Hahn wants me to incorporate, but right now I’m dialing in my setup with my long irons and driver, trying to create a shoulder tilt so that my body forms an inverted “K” at address, with the shoulder of the lead slightly higher than the shoulder of the drive. My natural setup is the opposite, with a lead shoulder that is lower than the trail shoulder, which makes it hard to spin and results in a drag. Lifting my shoulder and hips off the lead opens up my body, allowing me to get deeper into my back hip in the turn and create an inside-out swing path. It has also drastically improved my starting line, eliminating my bad pull.
Each range session also includes partial swings with a shortened finish with my wedges. This simple movement seems to lock my swing into solid mechanics and helps me compress the ball with all of my irons.
I’m a red-blooded American dude who likes big trucks and 90s rap, so naturally I dedicate a portion of the bucket to my driver. But instead of sending it full swing, I work with a progression of 25% swing where I focus on the club release and 50% swing where I pay attention to the club path and ball flight. I’ve also been playing with the pause drill, where I pause at the top of the backswing for a split second, which seems to help me sequence the downswing. I still have some driver issues that I’m working out, but breaking the swing this way during practice has given me a lot more consistency with the big club on the course.
This may sound like a lot, but it doesn’t take much time. Some days, I can’t even get through a whole bucket of balls.
Small ball
After the range, I move to the practice green to work on my short game, focusing on chip shots from close range. But instead of taking easy shots from the collar, I treat myself like a dick and launch balls on thick inclines and drastic slopes. Why? Because that’s where my ball seems to land. I’ve had windy holes in the past where it would take me three tries to get my ball out of the thick of it, just four feet from the green. Practicing these hard kicks regularly has helped me out of more trouble in the past few weeks than I can count. After I’m done torturing myself with painful lies, I’ll play a quick up-and-down round where I snap off the collar and try to pass a nine-hole putt.
Putting
Putting? No, I don’t practice putting. Not really. By the time I get to what is probably the single most important part of the game, I’m usually out of time. As a result, I’m losing a shocking amount of strokes to a scratch player once I get to the green. Crazy that I’m not getting better at what I’m not practicing, right?
What can I say? I’m not perfect. I know I need to spend more time on the art of ball rolling. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to miss another four-foot birdie putt, so I’ll work on it. I promise.
But putting isn’t the only hole in my game that I don’t practice. Fairways longer than 20 yards are difficult to make at my club and there are no practice bunkers either. I also absorb sand shots. Is it crazy that I’m thinking of building a sand bunker in my backyard?
I am a work in progress and can still improve on this whole practice. For example, I built a really great kicking bay in my backyard and have a quality mattress under my porch. Since joining a golf club in March, I have barely used those facilities in my backyard. Sure, going to the range and putting on a legit green is better, but why am I not hitting balls for 20 minutes at the end of every day in my backyard? Why don’t I take 10-minute breaks during the workday? How much better could I get if I added these low lift practice sessions to my regular day?
I would like to find out.
Hit me up in the comments and let me know if there’s a practice schedule, or special workout, that works for you.
Dig deeper into one golfer’s struggle to get better at golf in middle age and read last week’s Scratch by 50, where Graham learns to stop aiming for the flag sticks.
