Free Refills

Jerry and I played our first round two weeks ago. As I described in my piece from that day, I tried to prepare myself mentally and emotionally for the experience, in order to assure that I would have fun. Did it work?

It did not. I did not have fun.

Now, I did have a good time spending a few hours with my friend Jerry. I also enjoyed my time at the golf course itself, a nine-hole course not far from where I live that nonetheless feels like it’s 50 miles out into the country. The place had a great energy. I’ll certainly go back.

But I did not enjoy the actual playing of the game. In my piece on mental preparation, I wrote that what I was looking for was that at least some of my shots look like actual golf shots, which to me means proper shot trajectories with something like the distance I believe I should be able to expect, given my size. I wrote that I expected that I’d hit a few that met those criteria, and many others that would not. It never occurred to me I’d literally fail to hit a single shot with the power I should easily be able to muster, and how much that would matter to me.

Please keep in mind that I’m not comparing myself to some impossible ideal, like how far the pros hit, and then excoriating myself for falling short. I watch high school kids two-thirds my size easily out-hit me. This power should be well within my reach.

How deeply that lack of power troubled me has forced me to acknowledge that unlocking my power is the single most important thing for me with respect to my improvement as a golfer. As shot after shot after shot fell short of where I think I should easily be able to reach, be it a nine-iron that didn’t even travel 100 yards or a five-wood that barely went 150, I got more and more and more frustrated. A shot going off line was just something I noted and then let go of. But as the round went on, the lack of distance made me want to take my clubs and smash them, one after another, into the trunks of the majestic cottonwoods that grow along the creek that runs through the middle of the course.

Okay, fine, well, besides that: How did it go? What else can I report?

Well, as Jerry pointed out in his pieces about the experience, we both struggled mightily with our short games. During our practice sessions, we usually hit our chips and pitches somewhere between “pretty good” and “lights out,” but during the round, we both failed to execute almost every chip we tried to hit. Why the disconnect? Well, it was interesting to note that both of us were clearly tight. We both found a pretty dramatic difference between practicing and playing. Bringing what we’ve accomplished on the practice green to an actual round turned out to be more difficult than simply showing up. We discovered that learning to navigate the space of playing will be a process all its own.

A positive: except for a meltdown on the ninth, I left every single green with two putts or fewer. That felt pretty good. A couple of times, I even drained nice mid-range putts. It’s worth pointing out that we basically haven’t practiced putting at all since we started this process. Though practicing putting is in many ways the most efficient use of time with respect to improving your score–turning just a few three-putts per round into two-putts isn’t very hard to accomplish–we have felt to this point that our development has best been served by building our short games as our foundation, and then moving out to the range. (Did that approach work? Consider this: Jerry said he now feels comfortable grabbing any club from his bag. That’s a huge improvement.)

Were there any other upsides? Jerry already spoke positively of the pleasure of the experience, but I’d like to turn the focus for a moment to his results. He played just over bogey golf for the round, and that includes two holes out of the first three where unlucky bounces put him up against tree trunks with no choice but to punch the ball a few yards out. He’s already within shouting distance of the sub-90 round he’s looking for. And as for me, if we leave out that meltdown on nine, I was averaging out to double-bogey golf. I have been talking about the goal of breaking 100, but it’s worth remembering that a useful intermediate goal is to simply shoot lower than a double-bogey-per-hole 108. I’ve never once done that well. That intermediate goal is clearly within my reach.

I’m going to wait until next week to dive deeply into my experiences with the round Jerry and I played last Friday. Today, leading in to that conversation, I want to follow up on the issue I raised two weeks ago, that the sports we choose to engage in are not neutral to how we perceive our growth as athletes and people.

In my piece from two weeks ago, I offered parallel hypothetical situations in tennis and golf–a sequence of eleven shots, five of them excellent and six of them poor–and noted how the outcomes could be completely different. You could win your service game in tennis with that sequence. On a par five in golf, that sequence nets you a sextuple bogey. It’s fair to say the rules of one of the games is relatively forgiving and the other completely the opposite.

And let’s face it: you’d be very likely to come out of those respective sequences with very different feelings about what just occurred.

It’s worth asking: how differently should you feel?

I wish the answer were cut-and-dried. My first inclination was to say, No, it shouldn’t feel different, but as I delve deeply into it, the question seems more complicated. For the purposes of our project, the question hinges on another question, not obviously related: what do we mean by improvement?

Consider: I currently am practicing my golf swing and tennis serves quite a lot, and I noticed that I had a very different relationship to how I performed in the two different arenas. When practicing my tennis serve, I’m pleased when a serve goes in. I allow the misses to fall by the wayside. Sometimes, depending on my goals (when I’m practicing for power, say), I even welcome them. In golf, on the other hand, I noticed that I wasn’t judging myself by my successes, I was judging myself by my failures.

Now, from the perspective of scoring golf, that kind of makes sense. If I’m playing a round, each of those “bad” shots counts toward my score. If my goal is to get “better” at golf from a scoring perspective, then it makes sense to focus on consistency of shots and on working to improve my worst shots.

But that’s a pretty narrow view of improvement, and it fails to take into account that practice doesn’t really work that way. “Failure” is how we learn. What did I do that produced the result I didn’t want? What did I do that produced the result I did? Can I repeat it? We get better by learning from “failure.” That’s the way practice works.

By judging myself on my bad shots rather than my good ones, all too often I was failing to notice the very real improvement at the top end of my ability. I could hit one really good drive and six weak ones and all I’d be thinking was, “That’s six holes I’d be starting from the rough.” But that thinking is a problem. Instead, I should be noticing about the good one that I couldn’t hit one that good until recently. My scoring in a round might be improving only a very little, but I’m improving. The practice is bearing fruit. So I need to be conscious that I’m not letting the structure of the game keep me from noticing just how effective the work really is.

Indeed, if I look at my game as a whole, what do I see? Well, my worst shots are as bad as they ever were, but they occur far less frequently. My medium-quality shots are much improved–they’re underpowered but they go straight, which almost never used to happen. And my best shots are hugely improved. They’re rare, but every once in a while I hit a shot and say, Yes. That is what I am capable of.

What’s interesting is that, notwithstanding everything I just said, and despite the mental and emotional preparation, described in last week’s piece, that I did ahead of our round on Friday, I did not have fun playing Friday’s round. Somewhat to my surprise, I learned that there are still other issues I need to address before I have fun playing golf.

Another piece about clay court tennis. Still paying off that karmic debt.

Until this year, if you’d asked me one word to describe clay court tennis, I probably would have said, “Boring.”

But this year, as I watched matches from the whole clay court season on into Roland Garros, it no longer seemed boring. Just different. I noticed how far back players stand in relation to the baseline, better able to deal with the high bounce of a deep, heavy top-spin ball. Playing deeper from the baseline narrows the potential angles of a player’s shot, meaning that clay court tennis is more of a straight-through-the-court style than the sharp angles seen on grass or even hard courts. Also, the players’ distance from the net amplifies the importance of the drop shot.

This is all very interesting. So why did clay court tennis seem boring? I must have been failing to see its particular beauty, I thought.

But then it occurred to me that there was a fallacy in my thinking, namely, that the way it is now is the way it has always been. I had to remember that when I was watching tennis as a kid, we were just a handful of years past the wooden racquet era. The game didn’t have nearly the power and pace that it does now. As much as the modern clay court game demands consistency, it’s entirely possible that the clay court matches I watched back then really were boring–endless rallies in which winners were impossible, making the game more about fitness than shotmaking. Is it any wonder that I preferred the rapier slashes of grass court tennis?

This piece is pretty much completely about clay court tennis. It’s a mere five days until the U.S. Open starts, which makes this piece totally non-topical. Like I said Monday, I’ve got some karmic debts to repay.

What did it mean, anyway, to say that a court was slow? “Fast” I could figure out with a tennis ball and a lawn–throw the ball along the lawn and notice that it doesn’t bounce as high, notice how it kind of slides along the ground. Simple enough.

But no one ever gave an explanation of the physics behind a clay court, and I didn’t have a clay court to test things on. I tried bouncing a tennis ball on dirt, but all I ever saw was erratic.

Keep in mind that when I started watching tennis, there was no Google to look things up on. I don’t even know how one would have found this information back then. Check out every tennis book in the library and hope that one of them decided to delve into the sport’s physics?

Last year, I finally turned the full power of my imagination to the problem, and I came up with an explanation that made sense. When the ball hits the court, it pushes clay particles along with it, which means that friction actually increases as the ball makes contact with the ground, so instead of simply rebounding like on hard courts or sliding like on grass, the ball brakes a little while it’s in contact with the clay. Also, because the friction makes the ball bite into the court more, the ball compresses more during its time on the ground, which generates more upward force as it rebounds, which accounts for the higher bounce.

When I finally found a published explanation, it turned out I was close to correct. There’s one other thing that contributes to the higher bounce on a clay court: the clay is a mere two millimeters thick, and underneath the clay is a layer of limestone. Limestone returns more of the ball’s vertical energy than does the acrylic surface that tops a hard court.

Anyway. Finally equipped with a proper model, and with enough tennis experience to be able to imagine how playing on such a court would be different, I finally began to be able to see, to really see, what set clay courts apart. It no longer seemed stupid that clay court tennis was slower. It just seemed different.

Growing up, Wimbledon was always my favorite, so I didn’t like the French, because the French was Wimbledon’s opposite. Wimbledon was fast, the announcers explained to me; the French was slow. Not that I could actually see that difference, mind you–to my seven- or eight-year-old eyes, it all just looked like tennis. For all the talk of grass being “fast” and clay being “slow,” what I really could see, watching as a kid, was that my favorite players, John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova, swashbuckling serve-and-volleyers both, tended to do less well at the French, which struck young me as outrageous.

I remember that when the French rolled around, it seemed like I was watching a bunch of players I’d otherwise never heard of. “Clay-court specialists,” the announcers called them, and I scoffed at the idea. If you weren’t competitive at Wimbledon, how seriously was I supposed to take you?

Back then, I had no concept that nearly half the season was played on clay. (I doubt I really understood that there was even such a thing as a “professional tour.”) There wasn’t a lot of tennis on TV back then. We didn’t have cable, and so whatever tennis I saw would have been whatever they showed on weekends on one of the three commercial broadcast channels. I’d surely never heard of tournaments in Monte Carlo or Madrid or Rome. “Tennis courts,” to me, were like the courts I saw at the swim-and-tennis club my parents got a pool-only membership to: hard courts. Grass courts and clay courts were specified as such on TV because they were exotic and rare. It never occurred to me that clay would have been (and is) the preferred surface for two whole continents of people, and for them, the hard courts of North America would seem a world apart.

Grass was cool. How was it possible to even play tennis on grass? And yet they did it. But clay? Are you kidding? I thought it was fairly ridiculous to play tennis on fucking dirt.

I drafted thousands of words during the French Open and Wimbledon, but I never created the finished piece (or pieces) I envisioned. With the French, Wimbledon and even the Olympics long over, and with the U.S. Open starting next week, the topicality of those pieces has in some ways faded away completely.

In other ways–particularly in some of the themes I explored in those drafts–that topicality rises up again. That’s one reason I’m going to be finishing and publishing some of those pieces over the next week.

There’s another reason, too. I had a vision for more substantial pieces than anything I’d written in a long time, but my perfectionism got in the way of finishing those pieces in the days immediately following the tournaments. Well, an important aspect of Free Refills is that I get to live and write about and publish about my process as it happens, and this (the drafting but not publishing) is something I’ve lived with all summer. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have a karmic debt to clear, and now’s the time to do so.