I started hooking when I was in junior high school. Seemed perfectly natural at the time… my mom was a hooker and all the good players hit a hook. My dad, on the other hand, hit a slice. (I didn’t want anything to do with his golf game.) Besides, right to left ball flight went further, and for a scrawny 8th grader, distance is everything.
For 30 years that’s all I knew… the hook and all its ugly relatives: The hideous snap hook. The pull hook. The high, flippy hook off the back foot. And, his ugly second cousin, the push.
I played with all these characters, and I developed a decent game. But now, all these years later, my coach is introducing me to a fade. Because as Lee Trevino put it, you can talk to a fade, but a hook won’t listen.
Now I know what Trevino was talking about. It’s amazing see the ball land so softly and behave so well. Long par threes are much less intimidating. Pin positions I’ve struggled with for years, seem ripe for the picking. And entire golf courses look more promising. Especially those with firm, unreceptive greens.
Of course, I’m not completely reformed. Not yet. You can’t undo 30 years of habit with a few buckets of balls and a couple rounds of golf. Forget-About-It! this is like training a rat terrier to behave like St. Bernard. It’s going to take time and a 60-lb bag of positive reinforcement.
Luckily, I have a coach/friend/teaching pro who’s willing to keep an eye on my progress. Andy provides encouragement. Repeats himself frequently. And prevents me from falling back into my old style of hook and hope golf. I can’t imagine making this change without his help. It’s just too easy to get discouraged… the old swing still creeps in, and when combined with my new set-up, produces a disastrous double-cross that makes my old hook seem downright friendly.
I figure it’ll be winter before the power fade is a fully ingrained, go-to shot for me. Then I’ll hang up my clubs for four months and hope I find it again, come spring.
Until then, I have to be careful… I don’t want the fade to deteriorate into a weak slice. And there’s the issue of hitting the old hook when I really need to. Will it be there for me?
So far, the signs are good. My short-iron play has already improved, but the process is going to test my patience like never before. Whenever I get really frustrated, I’m just going to think of Charles Barkley. Then my effort doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
Tags: changing your golf swing, fix your hook, golf instruction, golf swing instruction, hitting a fade. golf swing changes, how to change your golf swing, swing tips
