Scott Mayer is a PGA-certified teaching professional who works at Nonesuch River Golf Course in Scarborough. He has written two instructional booklets, A Golfing Philosophy to Play A-Round With and Golf is a Concept and produced an instructional video, The Fundamentals of the Mind. In the spring of the 2004 he was named the State of Maine Teacher of the Year by his peers. Throughout the summer he will be providing me – a 16-handicapper with a propensity for banana slices – with a weekly golf tip. I’ll hit the range or practice green to put the tip to practice, then I’ll write about my experience with it – what worked, what didn’t, etc.
Relative to how I expect to be playing golf at this point in time, I may have played the worst round of my life Saturday afternoon.
I had driven to Massachusetts and back earlier in the day, so it would’ve been easy to blame stiffness.
But, I really didn’t feel stiff. Instead, I felt like I had gone to the course directly from Dick’s Sporting Goods, where I had just purchased my first complete set of sticks. It was ugly.
When I scrambled to make par on the first hole by sticking a lob wedge to two feet, though, I thought that the boost of confidence might carry over. Nope. I tripled the next hole and had lost three balls by the time I walked off the fourth green.
At this point, I contemplated walking off the course (something I once did without telling my playing partners). I wasn’t having fun, and my swing felt terrible. If I wasn’t topping the ball, I was rocking the kind of slice that makes people throw up.
The only thing that kept me out there was my chipping and putting, which, thanks to Mayer, is as good as it’s ever been.
I did start to feel comfortable with my swing toward the end of the round, but there was no consistency. For that, I sought out the advice of you-know-who.
We concentrated on tops and slices. This week, we’ll break down the topped shot. Next week, we’ll focus on my lifelong nemesis, Mr. Righter-than-Right.
Mayer’s take on topped shots:
“There are several reasons people top shots. One of the things that’s directly related to centerdness of hits and solid shots is watching the golf ball or watching the contact. A good drill is just to witness contact. Watch the club hit the ball as if your life depended on it. You think you’re doing it when you’re not. People looking up in anticipation of their results is a big part of it. You need to be more task-oriented and complete the task before you look for the results.
But the biggest thing is standing up out of your shot or coming out of posture, losing your angle in the golf swing. It’s not just looking at it, it’s maintaining your posture.
When you look up or stand up, if you look at the gap between my right shoulder and my chin, what happens to a lot of people is when you take this club back you’re making that gap bigger. And what you’re supposed to do is close the gap and wait until the rear shoulder runs into the chin and that right shoulder pulls the body up to the finish. What a lot of people do is they get about halfway down on the backswing and their chin leads to that gapped finish. So closing that gap of the right shoulder and chin on the follow through and letting that shoulder pull the body up to the finish is an important aspect of not topping it.
Another thought is to keep your nose behind the golf ball through impact. When the chin leads the gap to the finish the nose is moving typically vertically and laterally. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re lifting out, but the nose is moving. You’re not looking up, but you’re lifting up.
So, pretend you have a string that connects the nose to the golf ball, and you want to keep that string tight but you don’t want to break it …
There are really only two aspects of the golf swing, the amount of “down” you have and the amount of “through” you have. Obviously if you’re topping the golf ball you’ve got plenty of through, but not enough down and just the mere thought of swinging more down and trying to hit the back of the ball into the ground is a good practice drill. Good players and good strikers of the golf ball hit down on it and pinch the ball between the ground and the club face and the divot comes after the ball.”
CJ’s take:
As we worked our way through these different ideas, Mayer stopped to laugh at how much information he was throwing at me – that’s not the way his lessons typically work. He knew it would be impossible for me to absorb everything and put it together in the form of a perfect swing.
I mean, there was just no way I was going to be able to focus on the ball, while letting my shoulders lead my chin through and pretending there was a string connecting my nose to the ball. Never mind hitting the back of the ball into the ground.
It’s not that I don’t think these ideas work, it’s just not that easy to keep them all in order while you’re going into your backswing.
So, my suggestion is this: practice each idea individually on the range and find what works best for you. And then practice it some more. That way, next time you start topping the ball mid-round, instead of contemplating walking off the course, you’ll have a quick-fix idea to draw on – you won’t need to completely re-adjust your swing.
For me, it was the “hitting the ball into the back of the ground” thought. For some reason, this just stuck more than the rest. The more I thought about it, the more my body seemed to agree that it was the right thing to do.
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