Finally got together with my teaching pro, after 2 months of suffering through a swing that consistently produced hooks and straight pulls (except when I was trying to compensate for them).

After doing some long-needed video, I’ve now gotta suffer from a ton of pushed shots and even occasional slice.  I don’t think I’ve worried about a slice since I was a kid.  But the good shots are becoming more frequent, and stronger.

So the moral is: Consult your local pro.  Soon, and often.

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I was out a few weeks ago with a friend.  I was on the 4th fairway– dead-center, 90 yards from the pin– and I started to explain Dave’s clock-face visualization: essentially, if you imagine the face of an alarm clock, the position of your hands in your backswing can be anywhere from 7:30 (for very short) to 9:00, to 10:30, to high noon (or midnight, depending on your optimism/pessimism quotient).

Anyway, after explaining to my friend that a 90-yard shot should probably be a 10:30 backswing with a gap wedge, I proceeded to airmail the green by a good 20 yards.

My friend, barely suppressing outright guffaws, suggested that maybe I should’ve set my alarm a little earlier.

Anyway, as the accompanying photo portrays, my progress is often slow going.

And uphill.

I’m lucky I enjoy this game so much.

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All this for the plot of my novel-in-progress, Risa and the Dog, and the Aspen Two-Million Winner-Take-All.

I’ve been a little surprised at how few really good suggestions I’ve garnered, when I’ve asked around for help.

So here’s one, courtesy of the late Andre the Giant: just strangle the guy to death.

You might recall the P.G. Wodehouse golf stories.  In one of them, a bunch of Roaring 20′s gangsters are playing a friendly round (with their bodyguards following at a discreet distance), and they come upon a dead body on one of the greens.  (I think he’d been gunned down, mob-style.)

Anyway, the corpse is in somebody’s line, so the gangsters very calmly solve the problem by declaring the stiff casual water.  Hence: a free drop.

That won’t work in the book.  I can’t have people getting wiped out on the 12th fairway of the Aspen Municipal Golf Course.  We have pretty relaxed law enforcement, but we still frown upon outright murder.

So I’ll have to keep looking for ever-yet-more-novel ways to cheat.  If you have any ideas, please drop me a line.

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What a surprise.

(Cartoon, as always, thanks to Steve Morrison.)

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So I’ve been spending a lot of time (actually, most of my time) working on the new book, RISA AND THE DOG…, and what reading I’m doing is basically research into ways you can cheat in a golf tournament.

So I was gonna write a blog post explaining what I’ve been doing, and went to Flickr.com to find a photo.

So I type in “golf cheat” and “cheat golf”, and all I find are cartoons and photos of Tiger Woods.  Aren’t we over that yet?

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And it’s supposed to snow all through the weekend.

So what else is new?

The picture on the right, by the way, was taken in a more-pleasant time.  I couldn’t even consider getting out there now.  I’ve got a fresh 12 inches on my driveway, with much more scheduled to come.

Last week I was concerned that I seemed to be re-directing the club from the top.  Everything seemed strong, but tending to go left.  I guess I won’t be worrying about that for the next week or so.

(Thank heavens I spent 8 hours yesterday doing initial springtime yard clean-up.  I probably won’t be seeing anything but snow for a while.)

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They even have to post it in front of churches!  How do we manage to forget something that’s so elementary?

I recently suggested to my 15-year-old that he kick off the golf season by reading Dr. Bob Rotella’s Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect.  Seeing as how the school year still has plenty of weeks (months!) left to go before summer vacation, he doesn’t see the logic in reading anything he isn’t absolutely required to read, for the moment.  But I’m hopeful he’ll get to it, sometime this summer.

Meanwhile, I’ve started in on Dave Pelz’s Short Game Bible. (1999)  It’s about 400 pages long, so it’ll take some fortitude to get through it all, but as we all know…

The key to scoring is what you do from 100 yards in.

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Croatia, which had my favorite flag, wound up with 2 silver medals (men’s alpine super combined and slalom) and 1 bronze (men’s 10K sprint biathlon).

Our nearest neighbor, as far as I can tell (his parents live 4 blocks away) Chris Klug, competing in his 4th Olympics, finished a strong 7th in the men’s alpine parallel GS snowboard competition.

The cool thing about the Olympics– and you should be able to say this about almost every athletic competition– is that everybody who competes is an absolute winner.  True champion.  I realize that people get disappointed when a given individual doesn’t succeed, but it’s the commitment and the dedication that set these athletes apart from the rest of us.

This week, locally, we’re hosting a World Cup Paralympics event, the last of the season heading into the championships in 2 weeks up in (!) Vancouver.

My 15-year-old was out at Buttermilk on Sunday, and he said, “They go really fast!”  These, also, are world-class athletes, not “handicapped” people you have to feel sorry for.  They motor.

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Definitely, my favorite flag is the one from Croatia.  So far, they’ve won a silver in the men’s super-combined (alpine), which Bode Miller won.  (Super-combined is one run of downhill, one run of slalom.  It used to have 2 slalom runs, but they’ve shortened it.  Probably just to save time.)  And a bronze in the men’s biathlon 10K sprint.

Anyway, the flag reminds me of the 1959 movie The Mouse That Roared.  Peter Sellers in multiple roles, the duchy of Grand Fenwick declaring war of the USA and subsequently invading.  Their flag looks nothing like Croatia’s, but what the heck?

Croatia, you might remember, was one of the two large countries subsumed under the rubric “Yugoslavia,” by Marshall Tito after World War II.  (The other country being Serbia.)  Two sub-sets in one nation built out of seven historic countries, with different languages and even different alphabets.  And plenty of age-old grudges.

Anyway, the only one of them that I think of, when it comes to winter sports (other than sniper fire) is Slovenia, which struck me the one and only time I was ever there, as sort of a lower-elevation set for The Sound Of Music.  very pretty sub-alpine place.

Hope you’re enjoying watching the Olympics.  Vancouver, not surprisingly, is doing a fantastic job as host city.

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