DATE: 03/23/2008 04:21:49 / MOOD: like playing 36 holes

It’s All in the Hips

www.onthegreencomic.com

Remember the golf coach Chubbs from Happy Gilmore trying to get Happy to relax by saying—“It’s all In the Hips, It’ all in the Hips”.
As a 54-year old golfer, “It’s all in the Hips” had a much different meaning. For me it was about pain. I would do stretches that my trainer gave me and it would help alleviate the pain, but the pain would come back.

The other day I was getting ready to do a strength training session with my trainer Pauliina and I said to her that I noticed that my hips haven’t been hurting over the past two months and I was wondering how much it had to do with the fact that I hadn’t trained in awhile. She felt that while it was true I hadn’t trained in a while, that my hip issue wasn’t connected to me not lifting weights, but something else.

As we continued to discuss it, I had a big ah ha moment. I remembered watching the Lee Trevino/George Lopez special that was on the Golf Channel in January. It was there that Trevino, in giving George a golf lesson, talked about the take away and the shoulder turn. He said that most amateur golfers turn their shoulders incorrectly. Instead of turning their shoulders around their hips, they turn their shoulder with their hips. He suggested that Lopez should have a flatter shoulder turn and keep the club in front of his chest during the entire turning process.

Trevino comments made a lot of sense to me, so I proceeded to make the change. He also talked about keeping the club in front of your chest and not behind you. These two changes enabled me to make greater contact and more powerful drives. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the suggested change would also produce a change in the pain level in my hips.


I am now swinging more in alignment with my body. I laughed out loud when I realized this. Pauliina also went on to suggest that by swinging this way that I was also working on strengthening my core. She said” I don’t know much about golf, but out of the two swings you are showing me, the newer swing looks less painful. I now find it easier to transfer weight and follow through more. As golfers get older in age one of the first thing that goes, is the follow through. Most of us cut the swing off because of flexibility issues, and various pains in the shoulder, back and hips. Trevino’s instruction changed a lot of that for me.

While Chubbs may be right about it “All being in the Hips”. I can truly say the pain is no longer all in my hips.

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DATE: 03/10/2008 02:18:38 / MOOD: i love golf

Commitment To Change

Today I realized that one of the major stumbling blocks to changing anything is the lack of total commitment to the process. A few days earlier I took a golf lesson from Jimmy. Jimmy is a local pro, at Westchester golf course. What’s great about Jimmy as an instructor he never gives you more than you need at the moment. I hadn’t taken a lesson from Jimmy in over a year, but I started having some difficulty with my take-away and decided to go get a check up.

Jimmy immediately recognized the problem and gave me some adjustment to make in my take-away and particularly in the area of were the club head was at during the mid way point of the swing. I had been flying the club head open and then working hard to square it back up on the follow through. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time it didn’t. It was causing my right elbow to chicken wing and some erratic plane adjustment to occur on the way down.

After making the adjustments I was really striking the ball well on the range, I went to the course a few hours later and again was striking the ball well. It wasn’t until the 3rd day that I started to have real problems. I was in a small skins game and playing at 8 AM in the morning. I am not really a morning player, but I wanted to play with my companions, as well as, play Rancho, which is a good public course in L.A.

From the 1st tee until about the 12 the, I couldn’t hit anything off the Tee. I just kept toping it. I finally patched something together and got through the rest of the round, and even managed to win a few skins in the process. Later on the same day I went to Penmar a local 9-hole course near my house with my son Pharoah. It was there that I realized that I wasn’t totally committed to changing the aspect of my swing that Jimmy and I had worked on 3 days earlier.

As I made a commitment to focus on the lesson, an ease and relaxation came over me. I could feel the position of were I wanted the club and also realized a few things that I wasn’t doing on the take away. The main awareness had to do with how uncommitted I had been with the swing change. I was sort of faking it and not fully connected to one of the main requirements of change-commitment.

Change requires you to totally let go of what you’ve held to be sacred and dear up until that point. If you try and do a switch you have moved away from the energy that surrounds change, and in my case, a world of confusion. I had so many swing thoughts going through my head that I couldn’t hear my heart at all. The heart is the generator for the change Process. If your heart is not in it, it is nearly impossible to really have an effective change process. The heart produces the luvv and courage you need to manifest the change.

Golf and life are very much connected. The golf course presents tremendous opportunities to learn, develop and adjust. Businesses that try to change, but who are really just making choices and not decisions on how they do things, very rarely make effective changes.

What I realized on the course regarding my swing was that I was going to either have to fully commit to the change or not. What wasn’t going to work was me making different choices on each swing and in some cases, have several different swing thoughts gong through my head at the same time. All that would lead to was continued frustration and doubt.

Once I became solid in my direction, made a decision, the easier it became to listen, follow directions and acknowledge that learning required doing.

There is no middle grown with change, either you’re in or you’re out. If you are making choices, then you are not making the decisions that are needed for change.

What changes are you waiting to commit too.

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DATE: 03/07/2008 17:47:29 / MOOD: like playing 36 holes

Muscle Memory and Golf

Today as I reached the 9th hole of my local golf course (Penmar by the
Sea), my buddy Dave, after hitting a tremendous drive (for us a
tremendous drive is 240 yards), turned to me and said, “Match that!”
Usually when that happens, I find myself tensing up and not hitting a
good shot. I had not hit an exceptional drive up until that point. As I
stepped to the tee, I then tuned into a visual memory and a physical
memory, otherwise known as Muscle or Motor Memory. I “flipped” through
my golf pages to a month earlier when I watched a great piece on the
golf channel- with Lee Trevino and George Lopez. Trevino was working
with George on rounding his turn and flattening his shoulder. This was a
great picture for me and I’ve used it ever since.

As I stepped to the tee I took a few practice swings with that visual
concept and without thinking, and knocked my drive 10 yards past Dave.
All the research out there says that repetition is vital to sports and
especially golf. I am sure that if most golfers had 8 hours a day to
practice their swings, even swings that were awkward, ugly and not
exactly on plane, that they would score better. Basketball player Larry
Bird’s shooting form was unorthodox, but he could knock them down. He
also took 1000 shots a day. Given that most of us don’t have the time,
patience, ability, or discipline to practice that many hours, here are a
few ways to do accomplish a repetitive golf swing.

Things to do to assist your Muscle or Motor Memory skills.

Step 1: Watch your favorite golfer, Tivo him or her and see what you can
learn.
Step 2: Find your rhythm on the course. Many of us jump at the ball.
Step3: Practice your golf movements at home without your club. Try and
get your body to remember the movement you want on the course.
Step 4: Enjoy the day and don’t take yourself too seriously. In fact,
this may be the #1 place to start.

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DATE: 03/07/2008 12:25:17 / MOOD: i love golf

Did Aliens Create Golf?
My Google search suggest they did

  By Jerome Green
   www.onthegreencomic.com

Golf has long been a pastime of many people and probably some aliens prior to the official birth of golf on planet earth. History tells us that on May 14, 1754, twenty-two “Gentlemen of Honor, skillful in the ancient and healthy exercise of Golf,” founded the Royal and Ancient Golf club of St. Andrews-which is the worlds most celebrated golf course. Golf was played much earlier that that according to Mapsworld.com/golf/history. According to their reports golf was played in medieval Europe. The aim was to drive a ball from one place to another with the fewest amounts of strokes. They go on to say that Historians have traced the game back to the 15th century. Then the Netherlands and England chime in for Credit.

I am suggesting that Aliens invented golf. Lets take a fanatical trip into the game of golf.  When the Aliens played golf the balls were much larger than the ones we see now. Why aliens?  Why not? Do you think that 22 guys could get together, map out the rules and all of sudden play the game of golf? If the Historians can’t agree on what region on the planet really was the birthplace, why not look beyond the planet into the galaxy. The idea had to come from beyond their reach, beyond their minds. It was planted there from a memory of playing golf around the universe.

Why not Google?

How else could you explain this game that requires you to hit a small ball towards a small hole and if you don’t do it just right you get frustrated, chastise yourself and the higher your score the worse you’ve played?  Who else could evoke such a luvving curse on a planet other than Aliens? I wondered about this so I went to google and entered Aliens and golf. I got back some very interesting searches. One was from answers.yahoo.com. Where the question was—What do you think Alien Space Visitors would think if they landed on a Golf course during a tournament? The best answer was-

“Get off your high horses!!! Grown earthlings with a bag of sticks hitting a ball into the woods over and over and spending most of the time raking the grass, looking for it. They would send us back to planet Nomulligans”.

Then I clicked on the next search that led me to Youtube and a video-Golf Aliens UFO-Aliens teaching golf. It was pretty neat how they took their own shadows and made themselves look like aliens. Or were they really aliens? The music was cool and it confirmed that I wasn’t the only one that has this Alien and golf theory. My search continued and I clicked on another youtube video.   

I then found this very sick attempt to tie in UFO’s into golf. This guy had his pants down and hit a golf ball and then his buddy stuck his golf club up his butt.  Luckily he had underwear on. I don’t think the alien community would want any association with this video. In fact, I am sure there will be an abduction of the guys who made this video and the Aliens would transform them into groundhogs for such a poor attempt at humor.

Then I found one of the best answers to my question.  A company that designs and sells alien golf shirts and merchandize with a political twist to it. The name of the company is Ring my Belle Designs and they have a very cool concept. They picture Aliens as we envision them, green with funny faces, and then appoint political topics to them. The largest theme is “equal rights for aliens” with the reference being this countries obsession with illegal Aliens, specifically from Mexico and South America.

Finally, I found an awesome site-www.suckatgolf.com. It provided some awesome insights. First of all according to the National Golf Federation only 22 percent of all golfers break 90.  They put together a site for the 78% of everyone else out there who struggles to score better than 100. There theme “Chasing a white ball 50 yards at a time”.

King James band the game in 1457 because the game, along with soccer became so popular that people started neglecting archery, a primary military exercise. He knew that the game and its addictive qualities would eventually be the downfall of his country as a world power.

I have no doubt that while twenty-two men at St. Andrews introduced golf to us earthlings as a formal game; it was the Aliens who invented the game as the first reality show (that is another story) on the planet. The show by the



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