RSS
Home
Six degrees of Tiger Woods
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Ed Bowe, Director of Instructor Training ESPN Golf Schools and the
Director of Instruction at Amelia Island Plantation
Columbia University recently conducted an experiment that validated the notion of six degrees of separation on a global scale. It seems that the advent of the Internet has truly made it a small world, after all, and the tuition costs at Columbia are large enough to prove it.
To anyone reading this, it means one simple thing: we're all just five friends of friends removed from shaking hands with Tiger Woods. Last week, while riding a plane to Phoenix, I cut that number down to two.
I wound up seated next to Ed Bowe for a three hour hop, and immediately made note of the plethora of golf magazines the guy had in his posession. We started chatting about golf, and it quickly became apparent that Ed operates in golf circles most of us only read about or see on TV. Ed co-founded ESPN's Golf Schools with his brother-in-law, Hank Haney, and is currently the Director of Instructor Training for them. He also is Director of Instruction at Amelia Island Plantation.
Ed was on the pro circuit, en route for the PGA Tour, when he injured his right wrist in the third and final phase of Q-school. He took a job teaching to get through the winter, studied under a master along with a host of other now-famous teachers, and never looked back.
I was terribly happy to have someone "inside the ropes" to bounce ideas off of. As a longtime golf fan I have all sorts of ideas about the PGA Tour and what it has become, and I was pleased to have some of my opinions validated. We traded thoughts, discussed current players, and tallked a smattering about Tiger. Like me, Ed is a fan of Timothy Gallwey's writings, and pointed me towards some other golf-related reading I'm looking forward to getting through.
The most relevant point we discussed, however, was a practice tip Ed picked up from Tom Lehman back when Ed was still working towards his Tour card. Lehman and Ed met at a tournament, and after chatting a while, Lehman invited him to come practice with him the next day. Ed was expecting that they'd meet at a local course or driving range, and was surprised when Lehman directed him to a large ball field complex at a local high school.
When Ed arrived, Lehman had set his bag out 150 yards away, and was painting it with approach shots. Lehman invited him to join in, and so Ed, who had never had to shag his own balls before, set his own bag out at 50 yards, and started making approach shots. Lehman looked over and laughed, "First time practicing this way, eh?" he chuckled. Then, with some grit in his voice, "Let's move 'em back to 280 and let it rip."
Ed was mortified, because he didn't want to spend the rest of the day chasing errant shots. But after a bad shot, he found that having to shag his own balls really forced him to bear down and focus on getting the next shot right. "At the range," Ed told me, "it is easy to hit a bad shot, pull another one out of the tray, and fire with reckless abandon. When you know you have to go and find each and every one of your balls, you make every shot count. You find a way to will it back online."
Or, if you're me, you find a way to lose two sleeves of balls while practicing, too.
But seriously, if there is one thing I'm guilty of, it's blowing through a bucket of balls like it was a time trail, often hitting the same bad shot repeatedly. The only place in San Francisco I can think of to try this out is the practice area at Lincoln, simply because all of the other spaces wide open enough are also usually loaded with people. Most everything I read says to practice like you are actually playing, and nothing simulates that more for me than tromping all over hill and dale looking for stray balls.
Ed and I also talked a little about ESPN Golf Schools, and their partnership with Callaway. They have a program called the "3-club Tour" which is predicated on the notion that when it comes to scoring, your driver, wedge and putter are the three most important clubs in your bag. The school is a 1-day program, and costs $525 to enroll. The catch is, you get a $400 Callaway Gift card as a bonus. So if you've been looking for a new Callaway driver you could pick one up at Golfsmith for $400, or spend an extra $125 and get a full day's instruction to boot.
If you think that sounded like justification, trust me, I know. If there is one thing I can do, it is justify a way to save money on golf by spending more money on golf. It all adds up in the end, right? Just don't ask me to introduce you to Tiger. I still have one degree of separation to overcome there myself.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
.JPG)
