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346 Chapter 15
My uncle, the master of prestidigitation, had seen nothing. His failing
eyesight made it impossible for him to watch his ‘lucky dunk’. But the ball
never lies in golf – and when Harry, Irwin and Jake reached the 15th green,
Harry’s ball reappeared – nestled snugly at the bottom of the hole. He has the
plaque on his wall at home to prove it.
Harry is, was, a natural. A schoolyard legend in Brooklyn. When I
picked up the game a few years ago – after a hiatus of 25 years – I did not
have my uncle’s untutored, unstudied magic upon which to draw. I
struggled. I wish that I could say that all that my coach Constanza and I had
to do was fix what was broken. But that would assume that we really had
something with which to work. As it turns out, there is nothing natural or
magical about the golf swing.
Constanza’s first attempt at helping me to create a repeatable,
effective swing failed. My body had a default position – developed from
years of playing baseball, tennis and football – that ran counter to the
requirements of a repeatable golf swing. 10 So we started again.
First, we began with my address. We kept my feet planted and still –
throughout the swing. Second, we remained focused on my address. Now I
stood straight and bent slightly at the hips, ‘eyes over the ball’, ass out. Only
the slightest flex of the knees was allowed. For the untrained body, this exercise
was hard: For all the tension (work) lay in my lower back, glutes, hamstrings
and quadriceps. Third, we remained focused on address. My hands would now
hang down, relaxed, before I initiated my takeaway with my left shoulder.
Fourth, we began to work on undoing the flatness of my swing. Here’s a truth
about the body: It will lie to you. It could never lie to Stansi. So while it
seemed to me (on the course) that my backswing was vertical – and though
it even appeared okay on videotape – Stansi could see on the range what I could
not. My shoulders, arms and hands were not where they were supposed to be. So
we worked on my takeaway – a solid feature of my swing. Now, however, my
arms and hands came up and away from my sternum and my wrists cocked at
the top. It felt – and looked – from my perspective on the range – entirely wrong.
But again, the videotape does not lie. They were where they were supposed to
be. We worked still more on my finish: hips and chest turned toward the target,
arms relaxed behind my head, weight posted firmly on my left side
Solution. Success. Not so fast. After many, many months, we had
reprogrammed my body and my brain so as to create a repeatable swing. But
after a year of hard academic work and almost no golf, my defaults returned
with a vengeance. And so we started again – keeping what was still good:
remembering to stay rooted and quiet in my lower body, turning along the
same axis back and through the ball to a proper finish. Constanza, my
teacher, could apply her keen eye and understanding of golf theory to the
10
For more on the problems of default positions (and how one resets them), see
C Sunstein Infotopia (2007); R Thaler & C Sunstein Nudge (2008).