Golf Smarter number four hundred and forty six, originally published on July twenty second, twenty fourteen.
Welcome to Golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets Old. Our interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
What you really have to have is a relationship with the target, not the target itself. If you try to point perfectly towards something, your arm in your hand will shake. If you try to hold a cup of coffee perfectly still, you'll spill it. But if you just calmly find a relationship, it's like looking through a window, and where your hands end up is kind of like where the window is sitting, and you're trying to get your hands in a relationship
with that target, not reach toward that target. Just like firing a gun. You see the target and you're pointing a gun in relationship to that target, but you're not actually trying to get to the target. I think that's another mistake people do is they try to guide things toward a target. You have no control over that golf ball, literally zero. So what you've got to do is control
what's within you. And the only thing that's within you is this balance that comes to finish in relationship to that target.
See it, feel it, do it. As told by Jimmy Demura to Evan denn This is Golf Smarter. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast.
Evan, Hi, Fred, how are you doing today?
I am so well. I've already got the Texas accent. Wow, I've talked to you for ten minutes and I am so well. You're contagious, my friend.
You haven't heard the real Texas accent. Go to West Texas.
Oh well. You know, if I ever spend like a week in Atlanta, which I used to do a lot, I would have to go down. I would come home with all y'all. Yes, I love all y'all, and even I go to New Orleans. It just takes a couple of days and all of a sudden, I've picked up accents. It's nuts. Yes, it's been a long time since we've spoken, but we've continued to promote your power Field Golf DVD and training booklet on the Golf Smarter website at our golfers Maart and we have been getting reaction to it.
People find it and they purchase it. We really appreciate you selling it here.
All I appreciate you carrying it too.
Well. Yeah, and it's been what two thousand and nine, episode two hundred and eleven was the last time you were on, so there are people who will remember you. Yeah, though people remember you, but there are a lot of people who have not heard about power Field Golf, and I thought it would be great to reintroduce them to that and talk about what's going on in your teaching and your method of teaching because I found it very effective.
Well, I would say the biggest thing Fred that's gone on since we last talked is my goal is always to make it simpler because I feel the simpler you can make the game, the more fun it is. And you know, get people to understand how to use their inate abilities rather than trying to imitate or copy somebody else. And you know, like I was always told, when you try to paint by numbers, which is what majority of instruction is, and they try to tell you what positions
to be in that doesn't fit your body. Everybody's different. We've got five hundred and something paired muscles and we have to learn how to use them the way that works best for us, not the way that looks good with Rory McElroy or Adam Scott or somebody else, because we're just not going to be able to do that.
Unfortunately, that's true.
Yeah, but yet we can find our best game if we know where to look.
Yeah. Well, one of the complaints are the major complaints of golf is it's too hard, it takes too long, it's too expensive. So when you're saying make it simpler, are you talking about making the game simpler or making instruction simpler?
Well, really both, but instruction and the way you go about practicing simpler.
That's huge.
Yeah. If you think about if you change the way you see something, what you see changes. And most people just see golf in the wrong way. They see that they're supposed to hit a ball with a golf club and make it go somewhere, so they're trying to control the end of the club rather than understanding how that really happens. It's just like if you tried to focus on the end of a fork while you're eating or the end of a fly swatter. While you're swatting a fly, you'll be very unsuccessful. Go on.
I am enthralled.
Okay, well, what I found over all the years, and it really goes back to what I learned from Jackie Burke, Jimmy to Merritt, and Ben Hogan and a few others like Julius Boris, who I was fortunate enough to be around because they were all good friends with my dad. And actually Jackie Burke and Jimmy to Merritt, I lived five hundred yards from the club they owned down in Houston called Champions Golf Club, and so they were my teachers.
I started playing when I was nine, and as soon as they saw that I was going to be pretty good, they started helping me. Well what they started telling me was and unfortunately I kind of steered away from after I thought I was really good. I wanted to know too much. They taught me how simple the game really could be. But then once I got into probably my junior year of high school, I started listening to all
these guys. They were talking swing theories and everything else, and rather than getting better, I got worse like most people do, and so I went through college doing that, played college golf major college golf, and then I played a little bit of professional golf. But I never felt like I had the same game that I did when I was fourteen or fifteen years old, because I felt like I had lost the ability to just feel the game.
And one of the things you and I were talking to prior to the show we were talking to personally about was where see it feel it, and a lot of people call it trust it came from. Was when I was about fifteen years old, I was playing golf with Jimmy Demerit and he rarely played. He played like once a year, and he was in his late fifties back then, and he asked me to go play one morning, and so we went out to the golf course. He
didn't warm up or anything. His clubs had dust all over them, which is in my book, and so we get out there and he just smokes it right down the tenth tee. We played the tournament course to a cypress creek course, and he continued to do that the whole nine holes, and on the eighth hole I was even par. He was like five under already, and I looked at him, I said, mister de merit, I don't understand. You never touch a club, you don't practice, you don't
do anything. You come out here and you make it look like it's a walk in the park and there's no effort to your golf swing. He said, Evan, you see that green up there. He said, all I do is I see it, I feel it, and I just do it. And he said, I don't think about it. He said, I know what it feels like, and i know how to control the shot from my hands, and I'm not thinking. He said, I'm not thinking about where the clubhead is, or my foot position or anything like that.
So and that's the way he grew up. He rarely made to feel the game.
When you rarely make mistakes, you don't have to second guess yourself. For many of us who picked up the game later in life and don't play competitively, just love to play the game, but are always struggling. Every golfer is struggling to improve. That's all across the board. But for those of us weekend hacks, you know, we're working all week, don't get a lot of time to practice. Would love to practice more, you know, inch out every hour that we can in the backyard or at a
range or something like that, wherever we can. I don't see it as being so simple like that. What am I missing?
Well, what you're missing is where you focus your energies. Like I started to say earlier, where most people focus their energy is on hitting the golf ball and trying to steer it to a target, so they reach toward the golf ball rather than swinging toward the target. And one of the things Jackie Burke told me when I was probably twelve or thirteen years old was Evan, the golf ball goes wherever your hands go, good or bad.
So if you understand how to get your hands to go there, and you have control of the club, then you have control of the shot. Now it's happening at a fast pace, you know, the usually you're swinging at about eighty to one hundred miles an hour. The clubhead is but your hands really aren't moving that fast. So it's the clubhead that's moving that fast. But your hands you can slow them down if you want, to speed
them up if you want to. But the main thing is once you learn how to control the tool in your hands properly and direct that energy toward the target instead of toward the ball. You change everything.
I like that idea, So let's figure out how to make it simpler for all of us. What are the elements that we have to focus on and what do we have to stop beating ourselves up with that's going to make well the process simpler.
Okay, let's first get rid of the things you don't need. You don't need to know how to put your feet at a certain width. You don't need to know where to put the club in your stands. You don't need to know how to bend your knees. You don't need to know how to keep your head down. That's one of the worst ones, is keeping your head down because that actually gets in your own way of your golf swing. So think about that. You What you're really trying to do is have as clear and as clean a path
for your hands to work on as possible. Well, that starts with balance. Balance is a feeling. It's a feeling of having a tool in your hands balanced that you can swing back and forth, not up and down, which most people swing up, down and out, and that's why most people slice it. But if you can swing back and forth with your hands balanced, then the body will support that action and it will give the illusion of
an eye shoulder turn, a nice hip turn. It'll give the illusion that your head stayed down when in reality, your eyes are clearing the way for your hands on the follow through. So you know, if you really watch the players on tour, you won't see their eyes stuck on the golf ball. You'll see them gently guiding toward the target in front of the hands. So it's like it's like throwing a baseball. You don't look at the
baseball while you're throwing it. You look toward the target and you kind of clear the way mentally and visually for your hand to come through toward that target. Well, the same thing happens in golf, but you can't do that until you put your energies, your mental especially that third eye. If you understand what I'm talking about, toward the target. In other words, if you look at something ahead of you in pre shot before you swing, and you bury that image in your head, then that's where
your hands want to go. So then you hold that image in your head and you kind of do a blank stare toward the golf ball, which keeps you from focusing on the ball. It kind of takes it out of focus, if you want to say it that way. So what we're really trying to accomplish is this clear space for the hands to work in until they finish their work.
Why do you use the word illusion?
The illusion of the golf ball is. What you're really trying to do is get your mind. You know how when you stare through somebody, you're kind of daydreaming about something. Yeah, and you can look right at someone, but you don't really see them they're right in front of you because you're daydreaming. That's the I call that.
I actually call that peeing in the ocean. That look you get on your face when you're peeing in the ocean's like exactly.
That's what you should have on your face when you're standing over a golf shot and swinging, because that way, your mind, your mental energy is toward the target, not at the golf ball. Most people stare at a golf ball the way if I was looking at you, I'd be staring at your nose. It does very little good, doesn't do anything for me. You've got to be thinking ahead,
not right in front of you. And that's why most people hit at the golf ball because that's where all their energy, mental and physical is directed toward.
This is a complete coincidence, but two of the last three episodes of Golf Smarter we're on target oriented golf. We even had JB. Holmes, caddy talking about the work that he's done with Colin Cromac who's in the UK, and Colin was on talking about his whole program of target oriented golf. You sound like you're a believer.
Well, okay, that's a small part of it again, just like process is a small part of the picture. A process is extremely important. Target oriented is very important. But if you don't have good balance of the tool in your hands, if you don't have the idea that you're clearing space for those hands to work in, if you don't have the idea that you know that your vision is toward that target, then it doesn't matter if your
target oriented. If you don't understand the whole process. Just like if you have a process but you don't understand that all that energy has to be directed toward the target, then neither one work. They have to go together. You have to have both process and target to go along with understanding what gives you the best opportunity to get there. So it's not just one or the other. It's actually a combination of things. But the one the phrases I like to use is it's balance, control, and vision if
you don't have good balance. And when I mean balance, I.
Was going to ask you about that because my biggest issue is with the driver. It's the only club that I like. Fall out after I swing my driver because I'm probably swinging it too hard, but no other club, No, keep going.
It's typically not because you swing it too harsh because you swing out of balance. You fall because you're out of balance.
Okay.
And when I say out of balance, balance is not at the feet. The feet are there to be soft and to allow the hands to work freely. The balance is in the hands. To imagine you had a medicine ball in your hands, a ten pound medicine ball with a couple of handles on it. You know, you see those ones with the handles on it, and you're swinging that medicine ball back and forth, just like you would a golf swing, kind of underneath you, and you're trying to throw it into a wall. Okay, if you throw
it out away from you. You're going to fall over toward out away from you. If you just use it along your body and you find a place that's easy to release it in front of you, that's where your best golf swing is. In other words, what you're doing is you're reaching down the target line or the ball line rather than actually, let me put it a different way so you can kind of get the visual. If you had two lines. You had a line from the ball to the target, and then you had another line
from your hands to the target. The ball to the target, your hands have to reach out to go down that line. The line from the hands to the target is a direct, easy to balance line. If you swing that line, the golf club works properly. If you swing down the ball line, everything's messed up, everything's off balance.
Okay, this is making so much sense to me, especially thank you for telling me I'm not swinging too hard because it like, Yeah, you.
Can swing as hard as you want to if you're in balance, if you're efficient. Another good word is efficient. If your hands are working efficiently in front of your body, then that club is working efficiently too, and you can swing with as much effort as you want to as long as you don't swing out of balance and out
of balance. If you were to put your hands the left hand to the left of you, right hand of the right of you, where you feel like if you were holding two five pound medicine balls up in your hands, that's as far as you can swing in balance straight.
Are you saying I'm trying to do this? Am I putting my arm that straight?
Without straightening your arms where you're relaxed and comfortable, hands are in a like at a handshake distance. Okay. You never extend your arm fully out to shake someone's hand. You extend it with a slight bend in your elbow and a relax in your shoulder. And so if you think of handshake distance on the left side of you or right side of you, or in front of you, as long as you swing within that, you are in balance. In other words, your hands work at a certain distance
from your body most efficiently. Once you try to reach out, If you take your hand right hand or left hand and you reach out away from you, you'll feel your body go the opposite direction to keep you from falling over. Okay, And that's what you experience when you swing the golf club that's out of balance in your hands. When your hands are out of balance, so is the golf club. And not only that, it slows the golf club down because your body has to shut down in order to
keep you from falling again. It can't work faster, it actually works slower. So your best golf swing, your most efficient golf swing, actually feels slower even though it's actually working faster.
And is that the control part of balance control, vision, well.
Control is actually how you hold it in your hands. You put pressure from your palms out, then you're not controlling the club the right way. So think about it like your your fingers or your hands become a vice on the club and you find where that vice is and you hold it up, not pushing out, So you're using your finger muscles more in toward toward the sky, and you're balancing that club just like you would balance a plate or something out in front of you.
And you lost me, what do you mean pushing up?
Okay, pushing and not pushing up, holding up, holding up. So like you if you had a platter and you're holding a platter right in front of you that's full of food, say, or wine glasses or something you're not going to push out with your palms because the whole thing's gonna tip over.
Right right, Okay, I got the visual.
Going hold up with your fingers. You grab the two sides and you hold it up with your fingers. If you imagine that's the way you hold a golf club, then now you have control of that tool. And the way Hogan showed me that one was he shook my hand and he showed me in a handshake. And I'll never forget that feeling because you could feel how firm his fingers were yet how soft his arms were.
That's awesome that you can say.
And actually that brings up a great point because everybody says, well, Hogan said hold the club lightly. That's absolutely false what he said. And because I asked him that question when I was about sixteen years old, I said, I can't hold the club like that, and he said you shouldn't, Son, and he used a few expletives to go along with it. And after he got through berating me about it, he said, here's how you hold it. You hold it like you mean it so no one can take it away from you.
But you don't squeeze it with your palms. You use your fingers to control it, not your palms. And he said that means that all your pressure will stay constant throughout the golf swing, because now you've got a control that you can use. Rather than if you're pushing with your palms, your fingers come loose. Try to hold anything, push out with your palms and try to tighten your fingers. You cannot do it.
Right. Why is it that everybody wants to quote Hogan? Was he a teacher or was he just an amazing player?
Actually, Jimmy Demarrett was his teacher. He was an amazing player, but he had a major flaw in his golf swing that cost him early in his career and he had to do a lot of strength training over in order to overcome it. And that was that he swung out toward the ball a little bit. And so that's why his swing looks flat because it was an end to out swing and when it wasn't working quite right, it turned into a snap hook. And if you talked to him who knew him later in life, he could not
keep from hitting that snap hook because of that. As he got weaker, and the best swing in any if you had talked to Sam sneid Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, any of the greats of that era who had the absolute best off swing of that era, or maybe ever. They would all tell you. Jimmy de Merritt that swing was so simple and so strong it was unbelievable. Why Well, because he was very efficient in the use of his hands, and he had great balance of the tool in his hands,
and he had great vision toward the target. And that's where I use vision. Vision is really where your mind's eye is. When your mind's eye is only on hitting a ball, guess what, that's what you're going to focus on, and that's where everything ends. And that's why you can't control the direction. But when you have your vision toward the target and you're feeling it just like it's part of you, that shot, the shape of that shot with
your hands, like it's part of you. Now you've got complete control of it as long as you have good balance and good control of the tool.
This brings me back to and the reason I asked you, was Hogan a teacher, because you said earlier, we don't want to try to have Rory McElroy swing. We don't want to have Adam Scott swing. But then you were saying, we want ben Hogan's swing.
No, I said, we do not want ben hogan swing, want his control. Ah ah, we want his control, we want his balance. But that's only going to be what's personal to us. If and I'll put it in a way that might simplify it. There's a reason some people will never be good golfers and others will be great golfers. It's actually the way their hands work. Some people have a natural balancing and control ability in their hands that
others don't, and a lot of it's in training. If you start out young and you do something, let's say like volleyball or basketball, and you're using your hand a completely different way than you would for golf, you're not going to be as good a golfer. You rarely see a good basketball player that's a good golfer, and the reason is is they're pushing instead of pulling. Even though they're using their fingers, they're still pushing and whereas in
golf you're really pulling with your fingers. The other thing that everybody loses sight of is that, you know, we're all built differently, Like my flexibility is not nearly what it was forty years ago because I've got some arthritis issues in my back, so my limits of range of motion have decreased quite a bit. So now I have to be careful that I stay within my balance. My current balance, not what I could do when I was
fourteen fifteen years old. And that's what a lot of people try to swing imitating making shoulder turns hip turns, which, by the way, when you try to make a shoulder turn or hip turn deliberately, you're now your body is out of sequence. If your hands don't lead it, then you have lost the sequence of the motion. It'd be like trying to turn your hips while you're walking and trying to lead with your hips instead of your feet. If you've ever done that, you know it's awkward.
Yes, I definitely know it's awkward because I was like, oh, shoot, I've not been I've been not been turning my hips on my back swing, and then I try to remember it in the back swing, and all of a sudden, everything is now nothing's worth well.
It gets you totally off focus of what's really important. If you narrowed everything down to the ability of your hand to do the work, then you can find your best off swing instruction is not really that important. The only thing you need someone is someone who can guide you to help you find that right balance and that right motion the first time that fits you. And once you've done that, you're pretty much on your own. You can self teach from that point on.
And that should be a goal.
That should be very much a goal what a lot of teachers do. And it's not their fault. It happened many many years ago, back in the forties and fifties, when the club pros back then weren't making any money and they thought the best way to have an extra income was to keep people on the hook for lessons, and so they were baffling them with bs and they were telling them all these things that now have become
the godlike that. You're supposed to turn your supposed to turn your shoulders, You're supposed to do this, You're supposed to do that, supposed to bend your knees, supposed to stick your butt out, supposed to keep your spine straight. None of those are comfortable. If they're not comfortable, they're not right.
So that takes us to right kind of right back to where we were starting, is about teaching being too complex to the status of teaching today. And now you can find teachers on the web, I mean any you can get personalized instruction on the web. Is this a good thing?
No, because you know the way I related, It's like trying to find a good contractor to come work in your house. You got about a one in five or one in ten chance of doing it. And same thing with teachers. And again it's not a slam on them. It's just that they have not been educated. And if they're not educated properly, then they're not doing you any good. You're better off to just go with what you know, then go to somebody who you know. The typical thing
you hear is well I got worse. You'll hear that eight out of ten times. And actually that was a study done by the PHA of America about fifteen twenty years ago, and they found that fifty percent of the people got worse, thirty percent stayed the same, and only ten to twenty percent improved from lessons. That's not a very good stat and of course they didn't want to publish it because they knew how bad it was. That's why they're always trying to find a better way. But
they don't know where to go. Because what we said in the very beginning is when you see something a certain way, then it's the old adage of you know, if you try to do the same thing over and over again, you're you know, you're still going to end up with the same outcome.
Yeah, nothing is insanity, right.
Definition of insanity. And so unless people start seeing the game differently, they're not going to improve. They're just going to be out there hacking balls, trying all these gimmicks that don't work. They just will never work because they don't fit you personally. You have to understand how your hands, your hand eye coordination works and how to focus on that target, which I again I love target oriented, but it doesn't do any good if you don't understand what
it is you're orienting toward the target. If you're orienting the golf ball toward the target, that's like trying to tell the golf ball where to go, and it's got no brain. When you find a golf ball with a brain, let me know, then I'll believe the golf ball you tell. Then you got to use what the sense of eye, hand coordination you have.
So it's best to find a teacher that you can work one on one with and he can help you with your hand, he can touch, he can be there with you. Then trying to find someone who's just looking at your videos of your swing, right, and.
Again, what you want is, which is rare. You're going to have to find someone who understands feel and eye hand coordination, not someone who's teaching you ball position, club head position, backswing, the backswing. If the backswing were important, you wouldn't have players like Jim Furick on the tour. You wouldn't have like Craig Stadler on the when he played and played great. You wouldn't have even had Jack
Nicholas if it was about backswing, or Arnold Palmer. What separated them from the rest was their ability to focus on where they were going, not what they were hitting.
Should we be looking at down the line at the target when we swing the club, No, you.
Have to it has to be a mental picture of the target, and it has to be what you really have to have as a relay relationship with the target, not the target itself. So imagine that if you put, if you pointed at something, if you try to point perfectly towards something, your arm in your hand will shake. If you try to hold a cup of coffee perfectly still,
you'll spill it. But if you just calmly find a relationship, like it's like looking through a window, and where your hands end up is kind of like where the window is sitting, and you're trying to get your hands in a relationship with that target, not reach toward that target. So in other words, you see it in the background, just like firing a gun, you see the target. You're pulling a trigger in relationship to that target, pointing a gun in relationship to that target, but you're not actually
trying to get to the target. I think that's another mistake people do, is they try to guide things toward a target. You have no control over that golf ball, literally zero. So what you've got to do is control what's within you. And the only thing that's within you is this balance that comes to a finish in relationship to that target.
I think the name of this episode, and I want to pursue this even more, is go with what you know.
Exactly and learn to understand how your body functions balance and control and vision in relationship to balance and control and vision in relationship to that tool and focus from the hands to the target, not the club to the target, not the ball to the target. Okay, So once you build the relationship between your hands, your eyes and that target, the club just becomes a tool in your hands, like a hammer, a shovel or anything else. It's just a
tool you're holding on to. We understand the tools. We have this inate ability to understand where things are. It's just like if you ever watch anybody that it does fencing, sword fighting, you'll see they don't focus on the end of the sword. They focus on their target, and they're always and so they're just feeling it in their hands, how to get the end of that to the target, and they never see the sword itself.
One of your things that we talked about before and i'd love to talk about again in the power field golf is all the stress that's put on your body in the golf swing, and how your program is designed to help remove or eliminate or even reduce the stress on your body.
And okay, well let's let's talk about it. And everybody remembers Michael Johnson the runner.
Right sure, Okay, so does everybody here. Oh it's just me. I'm sorry.
Okay, okay, So most people remember Michael Johnson the runner. Why was he so good at what he did? He was very efficient in his motion, so there was very little stress on his body. That's why he never got injured. And then you watch other runners who put out a lot of effort, probably had more ability than Michael Johnson did, but he was so efficient he could beat them. They were so inefficient that they injured themselves. It's the same
thing with a golf swing. If you're efficient with the use of your hands and you allow your body to simply react to their use, you're using minimum amount of effort to create maximum amount of power and control.
It's it's starting to make sense to me here and I'm and I'm going over you know, as you're talking, I'm starting to realize how much, way, too much thought that's going into every swing that I'm taking, and I'm overdoing everything and not getting the results that I know I can.
Well, that's what I hear from most people is they're just trying too hard to control something they have no control over. You know, there's another old saying, give up control to gain control. Give up control of all those things that you have no control over and then gain control of the things that you can control and go back to the word process. Well, if we understand balance, control and vision as that being the total that we
need to play our best golf. We just have to have our best balance, our best control, our best vision, which is totally different than somebody else's, then we have now gotten our best process too to go with it.
So now that we're feeling stronger, we're feeling better, we're feeling balanced, we you know, and we're not thinking as much. Right, there's still a lot left to better scoring, is there not?
Oh? Yes, there is. Now you can focus on your imagination and that's the one. Once you've got balance, control and vision, vision is just simply understanding the relationship to the target. Now, imagination is how you shape your hands work, how you shape that vision in relationship to the target. So if you want to hit a high fade, a low draw, if you want to hit a flop shot, all you have to do is imagine how you're going to do it with your hands first, and everything else
will fall into place. Then it's up to you to really expand your imagination to see where your limits are on the shots you can create.
Expand on the idea of imagination with your hands first, that really hit me.
Well, think about it, like if you've ever watched you ever been to a sushi place or a what do they call it, well, like Kobe steakhouse or whatever it's called, where they sit there and they do all kinds of tricks.
With the not Benny Hannah, Benny Hannah.
Okay, what yeah, exactly, But what they what they're doing. What they're doing is they're using their imagination to create all these illusions with the tools by simply using their hands differently. So imagine he's slicing the left and then he's doing with his left hand and on his right hand he's coming over the top with the right. Well, that's a fade and a draw, you know, that's all that is. And so it's your Your imagination is your limitation really and other than physical. Once you get past
the physical. If you have physical ability to control a golf club, then your imagination is what separates the best from the rest.
Do you find golf as a creative sport?
Oh very much, so, very very much. So. That's why Tiger at his peak was so good, because he was more creative than anybody else, and he trusted his creativity. You see guys that look great swing in the golf club, but they have no creativity. They never win. You can go back to Gene Lttler, didn't win much, had a beautiful golf swing. I could name dozens of them if I could remember their names, but you know, over the years. I mean Tom Weiscoff is a great example, one of
the best golf swings of all time. Had no imagination or very little. So you know, he didn't win. He won one British Open in a few tournaments. He was not considered a great player. He was considered great potential.
Someone mentioned on the show that you know, we're talking about creativity and you mentioned Tiger is that but Tiger never took a shot that he didn't practice a thousand times in his mind, and so you're saying that it's going to be that he didn't take every one of those, like the two hundred yard shot from the bunker over the water, around the tree, landing softly.
On the green, not a thousand times. Yeah, he probably did that for the first time that day and he just felt it. He felt it was right and he felt he could do it.
So there's confidence obviously.
Yes. I don't know if you remember there was a shot Jack Nicholas hit at Firestone back in the probably late sixties early seventies where he took a like an eight iron up over a tree right in front of him. It looked impossible out of the rough and landed it softly on the green at that sixteenth I think it is, at par five, and ended up winning the tournament because of that shot, And it was just his imagination. He knew he could do it where no one else probably
would have even attempted it. They would have been chipping out.
And most of us weekend bums. We're playing out of fear.
Yeah, that's right. You're playing to your weaknesses rather than to your strengths. You're trying to stay away from trouble rather than embracing your abilities. Hmm.
I like that. So how do we change our mindset on that?
Well, it all starts with changing your whole perception of things. If you start seeing things from your hands, you can start understanding your limitations. Until you understand your limitations, As long as the golf ball controls you, you don't control it really, So it's all about again imagination balance, control,
and vision. And if you can bury that in your brain, that balance, control and vision are the keys to your best golf, then all you've got to do is find your best balance, your best control, your best vision, and you know where your limitations are. So if you're not capable of hitting a shot two hundred and fifty yards over a cree, then you lay up to that creek. If it's just out of your realm of possibility, you play to your straints rather than trying to hit the
hero shot. But you understand when you have the ability to do something and you don't have to back down from it. So if you can hit it two fifty over a creek and it's no big deal, then you can go for that shot. That's the way Tiger played. He played to his straints and knew when he could go for something. He never was afraid of it. Today he looks almost like he's afraid of it.
Yeah, what would your assessment? I mean, he can't It seems like he can't put together two good rounds in a weekend.
Well, the reason is that he's changed his golf swing too many times, trying to find the perfect swing, which is fool's gold. I mean, you just can't. Like I was telling you earlier, when I was young and I got away from what Hogan, Burke and de Merit taught me, I started trying to improve my golf swing. It got worse, get better. I tried to change my grip. It was the worst decision I ever made. And it took me
a year to get over that one. And so you know, all I can tell people is find your best, tweak it a little bit, to try to get better balance, better control, and use your vision better. But don't try to change the world in your golf swing. And understand your limitations. Because I don't think Tiger understands his limitations.
He thinks he can do all these things. And again he's It's like something that if you go back to the era of Nelson of Rockefeller, the guy that was worth a billion dollars, like in the thirties or forties, someone asked him said when are you going to be rich enough? And he said never. Well, it's like asking the golfer when are they going to be good enough? Never? So we're always after this illusion of improvement, and that's
when we destroy ourselves. When we learn to be comfortable with who we are and our abilities, then we can play a lot better.
So what I'm getting your saying is that Tiger, we've seen the best of Tiger.
Probably unless he goes back to finding his best balance, his best control, and his best vision. Right now, he's trying to make golf swings. He's not playing golf shots.
Wow. Wow. And the boy they golf needs him, Oh oh yeah.
I mean he can still win with what he has. He can't dominate with what he has because he is so talented. I mean, it's just you can't replace that talent, that it, that it factor. You just can't replace it. He's destroyed it himself. No one else has.
And you think he's just tweaking. He's overtweaked himself. He's just tried too many things.
And yeah, he didn't have to have a perfect golf swing. If I go back and look at at quotes from Nicholas over the years, he never changed his golf swing. Even though everybody said, well you got to fry flying right elbow, you got this, you got that. He said, I don't care. I beat y'all, don't.
I That's what I say to my friends, and like, come on, let's play the fronties days. No, I'm not playing the fronties. That's for girls. That's the lady like, yeah, you're gonna shoot part there? No, yeah, then shut up, let's go. And it's gonna be more fun because you're gonna score lower because you can you can hit your wedge and the green as opposed to hitting a hybrid, and you're gonna have much more fun.
Come on, Yeah, that's true. And that's the other thing too. People have to learn how to how to play the golf course where they can enjoy it. A lot of a lot of guys just go right to the back tee and don't think about it, and they think, well, I got to keep up with Joe because he's a good player. You don't. You don't play it from where you're comfortable, not from where he's comfortable.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure I'll play with you there, but I don't have to. I mean, do you really have to? Are you that good? If you're that good, then you know then and you feel like you it's a discussion I have it seems like almost every round and they think I'm a whimp. It's like, okay, I'm a whim. I don't care.
Yeah, yeah, that's right, as long as you enjoy the experience. I mean, when you get right down to it, you've got to learn to enjoy the experience. You cannot enjoy the experience when you're thinking about every golf swing and details of it.
You know, and.
Information overload is a great term for today's instruction. It's all information overload if you simplify. That's why I said in the beginning my goalhole goal has been year after
years to get it simpler, not more difficult. I'm trying to find ways to get it down to the lowest common denominator for my students and anybody I talk to, so that way they can really enjoy the experience if it's lowest common denominator and all they need to know is how to hold that club properly, how to keep it balanced as good as possible during the golf swing, and how to keep their vision on where they're going and be as efficient toward that target as they can.
Then they're going to enjoy the game and they're not going to have to think very much.
Let's start wrapping this up by talking about your power field golf DVD, training, grip and booklet. Why should the golf Smarter community. What's the value for them? What are they going to learn? What are they going to take away from Well, I think.
What they're going to learn is simplicity, and they're going to learn how to see it differently, see the game differently. They're also going to get to see some really cool stuff as far as shot making. They're going to get some good stories about some of the people I learned from growing up, like the Merit and Burke and Hogan. They're just going to get a better understanding how to find their best game. And it's not perfect because you
can't put everything in a book in a video. It's really hard, but it at least sets them on the right path so that they can start thinking in a lot simpler fashion rather than being buried with all these thoughts of is my left elbow straight? Is my wrist at this position? Is the club head or the club between my feet and the right spot or my feet right? You know, all those things that are holding them back.
They can just get rid of those. And what I tell people is, don't add to what you're doing, take away from what you're doing, and replace it with something simpler.
So who should buy this? Who should have this of course.
Literally everybody all the way to Tiger Woods, because Tiger needs it as much as anybody to the beginning golfer. Because the more you can simplify, the more you can enjoy the experience.
That's huge. Just simplify and enjoy.
Yeah, process of elimination rather than a tion.
M interesting. Hey, Eban, it's been great to talk to you, reconnect with you. It's been a long time. I'm so glad that you had the time and agreed to come back on golf Smarter. Thanks so much.
Well. I enjoyed it too. It's always good. I love talking it because I just want to see people get better and enjoy the game. I don't need to teach them. If people want to come see me, great, but that's not my idea. My idea is to allow them to go experience it for themselves and self teach. They really don't need the teachers as much as they think they do.
And it said powerfield golf dot com, right, that's it. You can tin more about you and if they want to book some book some lessons with you, talk to you more. Powerfield golf dot.
Com right, yep ebin at powerfield golf dot com.
That's your email address, that's my email address. Eban is e b e n.
E b e n. That's correct, all right, buddy.
Well, thank you again. Really enjoyed. I continue.
It's been my pleasure and I hope a lot of people get something good out of this.
M