Golf: A Game of Opposites

Posted on August 30th, 2010 in Golf Articles by admin

Golf is both a fascinating and challenging game.  Those of us that play it sometimes love it and sometimes almost hate it.  But we keep coming back.  Part of that is the challenge of trying to master this sport.  It seems sometimes, just when we think we’ve got it, it jumps up and humbles us.

 For me, and this may be the case for you as well, I learned the game of golf as an adult.  I didn’t play it as a youth or a teenager.  In fact, I was in my 30’s before I really took the game up.  And it hooked me from the beginning.  But here is one thing that it took me a while to really understand.  And even to this day, I don’t always remember this.  But to me golfing is somewhat a game of opposites.  Let me tell you what I mean by that.

 I played a number of sports when I was young, baseball, football, basketball, and a little tennis.  But when I started playing golf as an adult, it was the first sport that I wasn’t able to naturally master pretty quickly.  I was and am reasonably athletic, so it was a bit frustrating to me.  But as I studied the golf swing and worked on how to get better at this game, I discovered something interesting.  At least for me it was both interesting and helped me to start understanding the game a little better. It’s the concept of being a game of opposites.

 Golf is a game of opposites in that most things that I had learned as an athlete worked exactly the opposite in golf.  For example, swinging the golf club easy makes the golf ball go farther.  In playing baseball, I always attacked the ball when batting.  But for the golf swing, one of the keys was to relax and swing easy.  And when I do that, the results are amazing.  The harder or faster I swing, the uglier (and shorter) my golf shots are.

 Here is another example of this concept.  To make the ball go to the left, you need to hit it to the right.  What do I mean by this?   Well, most of us amateur golfers fight a slice.  And we are constantly trying to develop the draw as our primary golf shot.   How do we do that?

 To develop a draw (I am speaking from a right handed golfer’s perspective) the swing path for the golf club needs to come inside to out.  If all other things in the golf swing are correct, it will generally produce a nice draw shot.  For the right handed golfer, this means we are actually hitting the ball starting out slightly to the right to end up with the golf ball going slightly to the left.  Seems opposite doesn’t it?

 There is more of this in the game, but I think that you get the general idea.  And the bottom line for this is that when I remember these little “opposites”, my golf game is much better.

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About the Author:
About the Author
David Stargel loves writing about golf and is the owner of several golf related web sites.  He is also known as The Golf Nut.  You can find all kinds of  golf equipment at his web site at:  www.the-golfer.biz
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