The Old Goat Project

We had been clear about the concept of working from the ground up – starting with putting, progressing (I presumed) through chipping and pitching, and then to the full swing.

Lately, Tom Staskus (the teacher in this little drama) has taken me from putting right into a swing that’s as close to full as it needs to be right now.  It’s not out of sequence at all – we’re still on the ground. It’s all in the feet, man.

If the feet aren’t working, the hips aren’t turning, the weight’s not shifting from the back leg to the front, and therefore it’s impossible that your arms and the hands that hold the golf club are working in synch with your body. It’s like a slow dance with a loved one, Dr. Tom says. Don’t force it, just go with it. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

When I feel that feeling in the longer swing, the teacher says, I’ll be able to find the same rhythm in the short-game swing.

“Not bad, kiddo,” Staskus said after a recent session. “I like the pace we’re going.”

It’s too easy, in severe middle age, to stop trying to learn, to stop seeking out the people who have something to teach us. Golf, in this case, is the subject of choice, and relearning how to learn is at least as important, in the greater scheme, as hitting a golf ball.

He calls me “kiddo” and I have to laugh. I’m older than he is. But you take your mentors where you find them, and you learn your lessons as well as you are open to the teaching of them.

The Project: To break an old goat’s bad habits and rebuild a reliable, repeatable golf swing for writer Bart Potter.

The Task: Huge.

The Student: Lateish-50s; 6-foot-4; loves golf, hates playing bad golf; USGA handicap index 26.0.

The Teacher: Tom Staskus, 52; PGA professional since 1998.

Short-term Goal: To break 90.

Long-term Goal: To shrink the student’s handicap index to 18 or lower.

The Timeframe: However long it takes.

 

THE DISHEARTENED, disenchanted golfer back in late 2010 had had it. He was done.

He was off golf, through with it, ready to turn to more worthy endeavors – unless something radical was to happen. Did he have the time, the patience, the guts, to do what it takes to make a real change in his golf game?

He was about to find out.

Call it The Old Goat Project.

The golfer in question, if there was any doubt, is the name of the proprietor of this Website. He never, in three years writing a newspaper golf column and another year as a blogger, wanted his (my) game to be the subject matter. There’s nothing interesting in a golfer’s navel-gazing or, worse, trying to be funny about his own golf game.

Funny as it might be.

The Old Goat Project grew out of an offer by Tom Staskus, a PGA professional, accomplished player and dedicated teacher of golf, to work with me to rebuild a game – and chart the progress here.

“This is the hardest sport there is,” Staskus says, “no doubt about it.”

We launched the project, and for several months we met regularly at the golf learning center where Staskus did his teaching. Life intervened — professional changes and schedule challenges for the student, a new entrepreneurial venture for the teacher — so for a year we worked barely at all. The student’s golf swing did not benefit from the neglect.

Now, we’re back at it. Staskus now owns the golf learning center — read more here — and is thus busier than ever. But we’re doing this thing.

In this space, we’ll first recap those early lessons, where good work was done. Stay tuned as we bring it into real time.

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We met for our first session on Dec. 9, 2010. I’d been instructed to bring my golf bag, but we didn’t come close to using the whole of it. We started with the putter, because we’re working from the ground up, Staskus says – putting, then miniature swings, and only down the road longer swings.

The first thing Staskus did was look at my putter – to see if the instrument might be any impediment to the player being the best putter he can be.

We looked at my putting “routine,” which is distinguished by never looking the same way twice. We firmed up my setup, got me standing a little closer to the ball at address (which had the effect of making my putter flatter to the ground) and worked on stillness in my core over the ball, which is harder than it sounds.

Staskus likes it simple – good balance and a squared clubface through the ball. What works in putting works in chipping and works in driving the ball.

There are many paths to the plunk of the ball hitting the bottom of the hole. My teacher doesn’t plan to dictate to me all the hows and whys – however comfortable I was in my old ways, he wants me to get comfortable in new, better ways that work for me.

Staskus’ message, if I can extrapolate from one lesson, is uncluttered by too much golfish geek-speak.

“If I have to try to groove a lot of different moves,” he says, “that’s just too much thinking for me. I like something very simple.”

When Staskus works on his own game, it’s so he can compete and win. He plays for money.

I’ll never play for real money, but I do keep score, every round, and I know what my partners shoot, even if we’re not going head-to-head. For me, The Old Goat Project is not about winning more, though it’s hard not to believe Staskus can help a guy be tougher in a competitive setting.

I’d like to get to a place where I can get out of my head in this most inward of games, to think the right thoughts by effectively thinking no thoughts at all.

If that sounds a little woo-woo, we do have concrete goals for The Old Goat Project. The short-term target is to break 90 for the first time. It’s a threshold I get damnably close to, on a good day, and if that was all I was after I wouldn’t bother with bothering Staskus.

A better, more lasting goal is to make steady incremental reductions in my USGA handicap index. Staskus says I’m selling myself short by setting 18 (bogey golf) as a rough goal: he says he can get me well below that.

If we get there, I’ll say, Tom, you’re a better teacher than I could have imagined.

Staskus is in for the long haul – four or five lessons won’t make a dent. We might do 40 or 50.

“You can’t do anything in life that doesn’t take work,” he says.

The story of a flaky old goat, unwilling to settle for bad golf for the rest of his life, might resonate with somebody out there.

There’s nothing I can do about being flaky and old. What I do about the golf over the life of this project promises to be fun, at the very least, and fun is not a word much associated with my golf game for a very long time.