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Practice?
A couple of men were driving through Georgia, heading for Augusta to watch the Masters. They stopped for gasoline a little country gas station that also served as a bait store. The owner of the station, who pumped their gas, was an old grizzled man with a big wad of tobacco in his mouth.
When they were ready to leave they asked him how to get to the Masters.
He spit on the ground and said, “Practice, practice, practice.”
When we returned to school in the fall, we had a “Get Acquainted” dance on the first day. Being strictly into sports, dancing was “sissy” stuff, so I would just put up with it and just shuffled around. In my sophomore year I was dating Marge. ( Marge was the girl who lived the furthest from the movies, as told in “Are you in shape?”) I was shamed into taking her to the Christmas dance. My dancing was so bad that Marge slipped out to grab a smoke, which was not permitted. She was caught, and they would not let her back in. She sent me a note to come out, but I refused and stayed inside, and she had walk home alone. A couple of nights later she was throwing pebbles at my window to get me to come out, but I refused. Thirty years later she was still apologizing.
Roller skating was my thing. You could get a girl and still be athletic, so that stayed with me for years. Near the end of the war, and while still in the service, the qualifications of the girls I was now dating, had changed, and roller skating was not getting me anywhere. Dancing was the only way I could hope to retain my social standing, so I enrolled for a series of lessons at a dance studio.
When I arrived at the dance studio that night I was wondering if I could get to choose a girl I would like to be my instructor. I have no idea why this happened, but the owner of the studio was my instructor, and it was a “he”. It was awful, and did not do anything to relax me. The next night I returned with the hope that by now he should have realized I was not his type, but no, we danced together again. Every other student had girl instructors.
Right across from the studio was a large auditorium and Harry James was playing there that night. I waltzed across the street and latched on to some girl and went into a mass of humanity that would not let me use the open field dancing that I had been taught, so I threw in the towel on dancing.
A few years later I was the Teaching Pro at the Hermitage C. C. in Richmond, Virginia, and living in a rooming house. The weather was bad, and being only 27, working all day, not having a car, and living alone in a rooming house, is not a healthy. Trying another series of dancing lessons seemed to be the answer. The Arthur Murray studios were near where I lived so I signed up for a series. I told them about my experience in California, and that I wanted to dance with girls. They thought that was funny, and made arrangement for Miss Jones to be my instructor. That night I was all slicked up waiting for Miss Jones, when this guy comes mincing up the stairs, and said, “Miss Jones can/t make it tonight, and I am taking her place.” I said, “Keep the damn money.” And I walked out. Today, if I were to go dancing, it would not make any difference if they were playing the Missouri Waltz, or Tiger Rag.
Having given up on dancing, but wanting more activity, I looked around for another rooming house. I finally found one with a mixture of young working people of both sexes. It was like combining a Fraternity and Sorority under one roof. Who needs dancing?
The same applies to your golf. You have to practice, practice, practice, until you do not have to think about fundamentals, but do thing instinctively. The pros on the PGA Tour are all great players, but still take lessons, however their lessons are “fine tuning”. Racing cars all have to have constant fine tuning. The average golfer has more critical faults in their swings, and like bad habits in golf, they are easy to get, but hard to get rid of. This makes practice very important. A golfer cannot step up on the first tee and be thinking of more than one thing. A golfer has to minimize this thoughts, and that is done on the practice tee hitting many, many, balls.
One of the most frustrating aspects in teaching golf is knowing the student will not even come close to practicing enough to get the full benefit of their lessons.
If I had gotten to dance with girls in those dancing lessons, I would have gone back time and time again, and eventually would have probably become a great dancer, but my male instructor did not give me the needed inspiration. That is why I remained a golf pro and had to give up any thoughts of Broadway.