My Story
Improve your golf swing
Hi, you probably don’t know me. That’s because I’m neither a golf swing expert nor am I a professional golfer. My name is Doug Byrd and I am, like many of you, a simple golf student who loves this game. Like many of us, I have been playing at this game for a long time and trying to get better at it. I started getting interested in golf in the 1960’s when I was in high school back in northern Virginia. They had built a new country club in our neighborhood called the Mt. Vernon CC. When the course opened, they invited Sam Snead to christen the course by playing a round with the club pro. The word got out that the club needed some kids to volunteer to hold the ropes during the round so I eagerly volunteered. When the day came, Mr. Snead staged a 1-iron exhibition for the crowd and then shot 67 that day and I was hooked. We had a large family and not a lot of money so my ability to play golf was limited so it wasn’t until I graduated from college that I had the opportunity to really play golf. During all these years I never lost the desire to get good at this game and always hoped that, someday I would get that chance. My golf journey began in Panama while in the military. Later, I was stationed in the Monterey, CA area where I lived off and on for a number of years. Since then, I’ve lived in various parts of the US and finally retired here in Southern California at the age of 74. It’s been here that I’ve finally had the opportunity to take a deep dive into learning more about this game and to get seriously better at it to the point where I often find pleasure in shooting my age or better. As students, we all have to connect the dots of learning the golf swing in our own way and, after 50 years, I was fortunate enough to boil down an enormous amount of golf instructional information into a template that even I could understand. To begin with, I have come to realize that the golf swing is easier to accomplish by understanding that the golf swing is comprised of a single continuous connected motion and that trying to learn how to swing a golf club effectively is easier when focusing on a single overall motion rather than trying to piece together a series of motions or moves.
THE STORY OF AN ORDINARY GOLF STUDENT’S JOURNEY TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMENSE SATISFACTION DERIVED FROM ACHIEVING A LEVEL OF EXCELLENCE IN GOLF
Once we first learn how to hold the club and then to set up to the ball and align ourselves to the target, we are ready to proceed with our continuous swing motion to send the ball on its way. The simpler our swing concept is, the easier it is to learn. The legendary Jackie Burke Jr. famously summarizes the golf swing motion): Golf is a round game. It’s a round ball, a round cup. You don’t swing up and down. As his dad taught him, he describes the way to swing the club is to swing the club around your body then point the club at where you’re going & then put the shaft on your neck. Mr. Burke is 100 years old, he was a friend and competitor to Ben Hogan. He won 16 times on the PGA tour, including two majors, the 1956 Masters and the 1956 PGA. He is also a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame. He has advised several tour players along the way, including Tiger Woods.
In my own game, I developed a template for visualizing and executing the golf swing that has helped me tremendously. While practicing on the range, I visualized myself standing on the bottom of of a glass sphere and swinging around the inside walls of the sphere. In other words, it was a way of applying a 3D version of concept of swinging in a circle—a virtual sphere so to speak. It worked. In the beginning, I found near immediate success applying this spherical concept to my putting game and to my short game. It took me a little longer to apply my long game to the virtual sphere only because it takes longer to gain consistency through repetition—especially on the course. In past years, the quality of my game could be pretty sporadic. It was satisfying to find my game improving with each round using the virtual sphere template.