of golf and life

My wife is at a MOPS meeting this evening. The boys are asleep. I probably should be doing something productive.

I hate productive.

So for right now, I am choosing to blog instead.

Hmm...OK, blogging. I'm blogging. With the "blog" and the "ing" and the other little "g" in the middle that mysteriously disappears when you separate those two phonemes.

I would be greatly assisted in this effort if I had something noteworthy about which to blog. But as it turns out, mostly what I'm thinking about right now is golf.

Yep. Golf.

So today I went to the driving range when I had a free hour. And I noticed an interesting pattern. When I was hitting my hybrid clubs (basically, replacements for the 3 & 4 irons which are notoriously difficult to hit well), the ball went fairly consistently straight. Yeah! Pretty much the same thing with my 5-wood (which is somewhat anachronistically labelled, in that such clubs no longer contain any actual product from a tree).

But I digress.

So when I pick up my 8-iron, does it go straight? No. No it does not. Instead, it goes at about a 40 degree angle to the right of where I'm aiming.

Frustrating? Yep. Mind you, clubs like the 8-iron, with their high degree of loft, are supposed to be among the most accurate of clubs, the easiest to hit straight. But do these particular laws of physics assist me? No. They are stubborn and oppositional, worthy of curses too profane for repitition in the blogosphere.

So then I'm back to trying to figure out what's going wrong. Am I forgetting to start my downswing using my hips? Possibly. Am I releasing early enough? Another possible error. Am I failing to release completely? Could be the case. Keeping my elbows too far apart and opening the clubface? Maybe.

So I work on all of these things individually with some success. But it seems like one breaks down when I'm working on the others. So what is called for is applying all three interventions at once -- which, when you're still trying to master them individually is a virtual impossibility.

What this leaves me with, sadly, is an inconsistent iron game. And basically having to accept this predicament while I work on these skills individually, strengthening them by themselves so that they feel automatic, so they can be combined with the other skills.

Sigh.

This is one of those ways that golf so closely mimics life at times. There are times when it's easy, and a small change produces big results. Then there are times when you have to accept that you are where you are, to strengthen small things without immediate results -- hoping for a payout in the future.