Golf Tuition Breaks
Serve gone to pot? Swing gone silly? Brush up on your summer sports with our refresher courses
So, right now, we’re rusty. Very rusty. We canter up to the courts with boundless enthusiasm and find our games have reverted to the abysmal. The same goes for golf and sailing. Even surfers lose their timing after the board’s spent the winter in the garage.
What’s the solution? Get rid of the rust in one intensive weekend of refresher coaching. Not only can you get back to where you were at the end of last season, you can do it away from sneering friends. Pretend you’re going for a short break in Paris, sort out your sport, then give them a good thrashing the following weekend.
Vincent Crump: Hacker
Why I need help: in my youth, I won the Riviera Matchplay golf title three years running. You won’t have heard of the Riviera Matchplay. It was just me and my friend Anil, every summer at Paignton Municipal. My best score was a 96, and any glory existed entirely in my own imagination. (And on my CV, of course.)
Since then, my golf has been patchier than the Paignton greens. I haven’t played much for a year; I haven’t broken 96 for two. It’s not so much a clinic I need, it’s casualty.
The course: Jeremy Dale’s Scoring Schools at Stapleford Park promise big. Not just a refresher, but a revolution in golf tuition: better scores without bothering to fix how you wield the club.
“Teaching professionals have done handicap golfers a disservice by perpetuating the myth of the perfect swing,” Jeremy tells me. “You fellers don’t have time to tinker with fundamentals. You want simple shot-making strategies you can take onto the course tomorrow.” Sounds good — especially since a club pro once likened my swing to “a majorette murdering her grandma with a pickaxe handle”.
Jeremy commands instant respect: he finished runner-up in the 2005 World Trick-Shot Championship, and resembles Nick Faldo’s better-looking brother. First, as Carol Vorderman might say, the science — imparted over coffee in Stapleford’s spickly thatched clubhouse. Statisticians have established that golf is won and lost on the “finesse game”: the chip and pitch shots from around the green. Sort out that stuff and even quite bad players can find themselves beating good ones by banishing what Jeremy calls the “bonkers hole” from their card.
There are three other pupils, and soon we are peppering chip shots onto Stapleford’s practice green. The results are Rorschach random. Time for Jeremy to step in with his killer tip: don’t even think about the target, think about the landing zone. Immediately, our shots nestle closer to the cup.
And that’s how the morning shapes up: with trick after trick from the trick-shot champion’s score-saving handbook, often illustrated using unlikely props plucked from his magic golf bag. With chipping, it’s an umbrella. With pitching, a roll of sticky tape. And with long putting, I kid you not, Jeremy’s secret involves wearing trousers with creases in the front. His ideas are not gimmicky, they’re just pragmatic — and delivered with a Ronseal-like revulsion for golf-swing jargon.
After lunch, we go back to the classroom for a “mental game masterclass”: useful if, like me, you’ve ever thrown your sand wedge in a lake. Jeremy explains how to develop a pre-shot routine, and how a simple “attention trick” can kid you into thinking positively as you address the ball.
Finally, it’s back on the range to smack a few drives. After a series of unsatisfying low sliders, he steps forward with one tiny swing tip, a morsel of genius we’ll call “the Tilt”. Instantly, my ball soars sweeter and higher than an Andrea Bocelli aria. Now that’s magic.
Did it work? Next morning finds me on Stapleford’s immaculate 1st, itching to see if Jeremy’s sleight of hand can get me round in less than 96. Sure enough, my halfway score tots up to 43. There’s not a single six on my card, and I’ve just played the steadiest and most satisfying nine holes of my life.
I’m not telling you what I shot on the back nine.
