How We Roll
A clarification of the TGA's SOP for pursuing mastery
When my students in the Thomson Golf Academy gave me the honorific of sensei, I didn't know that I would subsequently be dealing with a minor uprising of disgruntled Daniel-sans, salty about why they had to spend so much time painting the fence, sanding the floor, and waxing both on and off. I should have seen this coming. In designing the curriculum for the original golf class that laid the foundation for the TGA, I sought the wise counsel of my friend Peter Donahue, teaching professional and founder of The Golf Practice. Within this sage advice was this prophetic nugget:
“Learning is generally not fun. Lots of form. Lots of talking by the teacher. Lots of standing around listening. Lots of being stopped and corrected... [students talking to themselves] Hey, when do we get to knock the ball around and chase after it? When do we get to laugh and scream?”
I knew that Peter was right in honoring the joy that comes from whacking the ball with the club, even when we suck at it, and I followed his guidance with that original cohort of students, to good effect. This time around the Thomson administration threw a wrench in the works when they first barred us from using the field where we play and then locked us inside completely.
I'm in the habit of making lemonade out of lemons, and I therefore treated the restrictions as an opportunity to buckle down on those un-fun aspects of developing competence that Peter indicated. I was reinforced in my resolve by another of the game's greats, Harry Vardon, who wrote in The Complete Golfer:
“Let the simple question be put to [the student] whether, if he could be given the chance of doing it all over again from the beginning, he would not sacrifice the first three or six months of play to diligent study of the principles of the game, and to the obtaining of some sort of mastery over each individual shot under the careful guidance of a skilled tutor, not attempting, during this time a single complete round with all his clubs in action, and refusing all temptations to play a single match—whether he would not undergo this slow and perhaps somewhat tedious process of learning if he could be almost certain of being able at the end of it to play a really good game of golf, and now at this later period of his career to have a handicap much nearer to the scratch mark than his existing one...”
Seemed like a fair bargain to me given our circumstances, and we fared forth. Unfortunately, I neglected to adequately explain The Complete Golfer’s complete plan, and coupled with the general frustration of being on lockdown, the result was my sensei moment. Instead of Daniel Larusso, I had Diamond J standing in front of me asking why he was twisting with a broom handle instead of hitting a ball. Mr. Vardon was no help to me at this point, but Mr. Miyagi was. When the conversation turned to Daniel-san's revelation, while blocking punches and kicks, that he had been doing much more than his sensei's chores, Diamond J understood that in our inside training sessions we were working on mastering the movements necessary to produce good golf shots.
Having become aware of my oversight, I convened a full meeting of the TGA to take a step back and lay out our S.O.P. and its purpose. We are focused on address and impact—more specifically, on the posture and the other fundamentals at address, the position at impact, and athleticism in between.
To the degree that tightness or weakness in certain parts of our bodies preclude athleticism—balance, stability, fluidity, power, speed—then we address those areas through fitness. We work without the ball to practice setup, the takeaway, rotation, transition, and drive in the downswing. Problem elements in the sequence are done in slow motion to ingrain the movements and cultivate focus in our minds. We call fitness and movement rehearsal without the ball training.
Practice is what we call repetitively going through our shotmaking routine, from envisioning and swing cues in the think box to connecting to the ball, the target, and athletic feels in the play box. Practice is done with the ball and is always about intentionally producing specific visualized shots while refining sequence and rhythm.
When it's time to play, we tap into Peter's vibe and just go whack the ball around, chasing, laughing, and screaming as we go. During play time there is no instruction, only cultivation of the joy of the game. We trust our process and let it rip. We have not abandoned the pursuit of mastery when we play, but rather reinforced it with light-hearted energy, with training and practice to be picked up again in a newly rejuvenated state.
Harry Vardon spoke to the balance we aim to strike in our progression when he wrote:
“No doubt the noble army of foozlers derive an immense amount of enjoyment from the practice of their game, and it is my earnest prayer that they may long continue to do so. It is one of the glorious advantages of golf that all, the skilled and the unskilled, can revel in its fascinations and mysteries; but there is no golfing delight so splendid as that which is obtained from playing the perfect game, or the one that nearly approaches it.”
My game is improving along with the other members of the TGA, and I am learning additional, invaluable lessons about being an effective leader and teacher. I tripped up, but Mr. Miyagi caught me and reminded me that golf, like the martial arts, has much to teach about mastery of a craft and life itself. Ilan Gattegno, paying homage to his master Hatsumi Masaaki in his book Sensei, illuminated this bigger picture:
“In the end, Hatsumi's emphasis on play was about more than learning techniques. It was about embracing life with an open heart and a curious mind. It was about finding beauty in movement, joy in challenge, and connection in every interaction... a reminder that the path of the martial arts isn't just about fighting or winning but about living fully, with courage, creativity, and a sense of wonder.”
We take our golf seriously in the TGA. But lest you have any concerns from all this talk of training and heady philosophizing that we are taking ourselves too seriously coming out of this reset, and thereby draining the fun from the game, we also added a standard greeting of mutual encouragement that we use in the hallways and holler across the field. We now pass it along to players everywhere:
May your rhythm be silky smooth
And all your balls compressed.