eye of the tiger

I went to Orange County this weekend for a mini camp at David Leadbetter's golf academy in Irvine. A girlfriend and I spent 3 hours each day swinging, learning, adjusting and hitting lots and lots of golf balls. I'm embarrassed to note that I was really sore after the first day. I'm still a bit sore today.

I've played golf off and on for about 15 years. I was introduced to golf in my childhood though. My dad and his brothers loved golf and my dad joined a country club (he was sooo not the prototypical country club type) when I was an adolescent. Also my gramma was a huge golf lover. She coached high school women's golf and watched professional golf on tv voraciously after she stopped playing herself. So I've known the golf fundamentals for most of my life, which helped a great deal when I finally decided to give the game a try in my mid-twenties.

Because I knew the basics and I was actually able to make contact with the ball pretty consistently early on, I never took any golf lessons. I'd take some advice from people I played with (but because I'm stubborn, it had to be presented in a Leila-friendly manner in order for me to listen), but mainly I'd just figure things out by trial and error.

So maybe it will come as no surprise that I've had my posture all wrong the entire time I've played. I've been sitting back on my heels instead of playing over the ball. Turns out that I'm going to need to strengthen my lower back in order to play with the correct posture. Also, as I've known for years, I swing mainly with my arms instead of getting the power of my body involved. I have a lot to think about and try to fix in my long game.

There is some good news. My instructor was very impressed with my pitching. I've always had a decent short game (when I was a kid I would go golfing with my dad and he would hit all the drives and long shots for me so that I could play pitch-n-putt but the greens). And it was nice to get a gold star on that portion of the class.

I'm excited to get out next weekend and see how I play post-camp. Michelle Wie, watch out!