It’s the biggest cliché you’ll hear when a man is contemplating the onset of retirement: ‘At last, I can spend my time playing golf.’ I was no exception when I stopped full-time work. The trouble is that I’m not very good at the game. I’ve been playing on and off for a few years now, more off than on, which means that after a couple of months’ off my game is back where it was when I started. I liked playing more abroad than at home, perhaps because foreign golf clubs seemed less stuffy. Not that it did my game much good: playing in Spain once, I fell into a lake when unwisely trying to retrieve a ball I had just miss-hit into its waters. That was fairly typical.
When I mentioned my yearning to be a better player to my PR chum Nigel, he leapt into action and swiftly fixed up a couple of days of golf tuition (in Spain again), courtesy of an enterprising new internet company called yourgolftravel.com which organises golf package deals all over the world. So it was that I found myself at a resort near Almeria called Desert Springs, a newish development with a pleasing architectural style, all pinks and yellows with a vaguely Moroccan feel to it.
It also boasts a lovely golf course where I was scheduled to play two rounds in two days with its young professional Alfonso Castineira, a talented enough golfer to have won the Spanish Tour qualifying school last year (take it from me, that’s good). For some reason, he seemed just as happy to accompany a duffer like me as compete with Europe’s best, which he undoubtedly could.
First, he took me to the driving range and told me to hit a few balls. After studying my swing for a few minutes, he came up with a revolutionary suggestion: ‘Hit the ball.’ When I asked him what he meant, he pointed to the marks on the grass by my feet. ‘You’re hitting the earth before the ball,’ he explained. ‘Try hitting the ball instead.’ So I did. It was a revelation.
After studying my swing for a few minutes he came up with a revoultionary suggestion: 'Hit the ball.'
Off we went round the course, with Alfonso studying my full repertoire of shanks, hooks, fluffs and other horrors in between hitting drives of such length and beauty that I couldn’t even see where the ball bounced, so far did they go.
On the range next morning, Alfonso started remodelling my swing, then took me to the video room where he filmed my stance and swing, inviting me to see for myself where I was going wrong. After some more remedial work, he did a nifty before-and-after on a split screen, and I could see the difference already.
Much emboldened, I marched off to the first tee to put my new skills into practice. My first tee shot dribbled a couple of feet. On the second tee, I hit an air shot (i.e. missed it completely). A few holes further on, I took out my five-wood for my second shot, just short of a clump or rocks. I hit the ball with great power but much too low. It struck a rock twenty yards away and rebounded straight back at us with such speed that Alfonso had to take evasive action. Unbelievably, my next three attempts hit the same rock, a succession of balls ricocheting all over Andalusia. This wasn’t looking good, but Alfonso was all encouragement, keeping up a stream of sensible tips and advice about how to play each hole. If I hit a shot not very well but more or less in the right direction, his comment was, ‘Good miss.’ It’s actually quite a good philosophy. He himself positively relished finding his ball in an awkward spot, so that he could improvise a rescue shot which more often than not landed only a few feet from the hole.
When we finally finished (I’d long since given up marking my score), I thought that was that, but Alfonso had other ideas. After a beer and a quick lunch, it was back to the range for more coaching: drop your right shoulder a little, take the club back at a slightly different angle – oh, and don’t forget to hit the ball. It sounds complicated but Alfonso kept it simple. And for my last fifteen minutes, I started hitting the ball consistently quite a long way and roughly in the right direction. We’ll soon see if my new swing translates from Desert Springs in the sun to North London in the wind and rain.
