Learning to Play Golf #5: The golf bug

Christopher X. Shade has been GOLF.com's technology executive producer for nearly two years, but he'd never picked up a golf club in his life before this spring, when he and his wife, Paige Sellers, signed up for lessons at Chelsea Piers, a multi-tiered driving range in Manhattan. He is writing about their attempts to learn the game in a series of articles on GOLF.com.

T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land said that April is the cruelest month, and I'll just add "for golf" to the end of that because we're anxious for the weather to warm up so we can get out to a course. We've got the golf bug. The Georgia weather for the Masters was sunny and breezy, and bright and colorful. At least it looked that way on TV in our cramped apartment in New York City. Here the weather's been pretty darn dismal. There have been spells of warmer days here and there to momentarily dispel the gray chill, but those warmer days never seem to be the ones that we have on our calendar to walk over to the Chelsea Piers driving range to hit some balls.

Paige and I have had five lessons from the teaching pro John Hobbins at Chelsea Piers Golf Academy. We're getting a whole lot better. Making contact with the ball. Turning our attention to the nuances in our swing motion, good and bad. And I'm anxious for my swing to be everything I want it to be for this, my first season playing the game.

There are other signs of April — we saw a club out on the Astroturf fairway. Thrown in frustration? Someone upset that there was no Tiger-Phil finish in Augusta? Reminds me of the video where Top 100 Teacher Charlie King shows us how to throw a club. Paige was the one to spot it: "Hey, look at that club out on the fairway. Somebody threw it out there."

John said, "Yeah, that happens frequently."

"That's exactly what I feel like is going to happen if I loosen my grip."

"With your death-grip? Not a chance!"

Though she has a death-grip, Paige's swing is getting better. It's less exaggerated. She says she's doing better on a 9 iron than a seven. For the large part of a lesson, John had her swing on probation: only waist-high swings. This was to help her change the somewhat horizontal turn of her shoulders (like a carousel) into a tilted plane (like a Ferris wheel). This is a refrain we've often heard. Paige and I both have this issue, and it seems to be common for new golfers. John held up two quarters, holding one flat and the other upright on top of it. The top quarter, he said, is the rotation of your shoulders. The bottom one is the rotation of your hips.