Game Over 
Sports
The Rites of Swing
For touring pros like Greg Norman and Davis Love III—and amateurs like me—the surest way to a better golf game is a lesson with Butch Harmon.
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Butch then led me to the putting green, where we worked on the short game. As he correctly notes, one of the major differences between touring pros and amateurs is the amount of time devoted to chipping and putting. For pros, Butch says, “practicing the short game is almost a religion.” For amateurs, it’s usually a way to kill time while waiting for the starter to call them to the first tee. The amateurs’ neglect is particularly egregious when you consider that more than 60 percent of the shots in an average round, including putts, are played from within one hundred yards of the hole.
Butch showed me a putting drill outlined in his book. First, he marked a spot eight feet from one of the cups, then he sank a pair of tees on the green six inches short of the cup so that they formed goalposts the width of a putter head. He placed a ball on the eight-foot spot and told me to put my putter behind the ball before taking my stance, rather than the other way around. Finally, he added a personal touch: He took off his cap and held it against the left side of my face so I could not possibly steal a glimpse of the cup out of the corner of my eye.
“Now stroke the ball into the hole,” he said.
I felt nearly blind, but I tried to follow his orders. I hit the ball, carefully watching it leave my putter face, and then heard the sweetest sound in golf: the plop of the ball hitting the bottom of the cup.
“That’s the sensation you should feel on the course,” Butch said. “You should never see the ball go into the hole. Just keep your head still and listen for the sound. When you’re practicing, you can use the goalposts to find out if you’re pushing your putts or pulling them.”
We were about to move onto mental and physical conditioning, the last of Butch’s cornerstones, but the clock ran out on my lesson. In retrospect, that was probably just as well. When I later read those sections in his book, I was greatly disappointed. Butch is to be applauded for noting that they are every bit as important as proper ball striking and a solid short game, yet his discussion of the “mental side/course management,” as he calls it, lacks the psychological depth and detail offered by Bob Rotella’s Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect. And his strengthening and stretching exercise program falls far short of the regimen recommended for serious golfers by most qualified sports doctors and personal trainers.
I was also let down by the autobiographical opening section of Butch’s book. The members at Lochinvar almost universally praise him for being an unpretentious “blue-collar kind of guy” whose flash-and-splash lifestyle belies his effete upbringing. In fact, Butch suffered through more than his share of salad days and ribald rebellious periods before, during, and after being tutored by legendary family friends such as Ben Hogan and Tommy Armour.
The trouble is, he leaves most of the really juicy anecdotal material on the bag-room floor. We learn, for example, that Butch was an accomplished junior champion in the New York area who won a scholarship to the University of Houston in 1962, only to find he couldn’t cut it at the golfing powerhouse that would later produce the likes of Fred Couples and Steve Elkington. “I didn’t like the school or the state,” he confesses in the book, “something I find particularly amusing now since I live in Texas.” Unsure about whether to turn pro, he reports, he enlisted in the Army and spent two years in Alaska, where he won several all-military tournaments and the Alaskan State Amateur.
Actually, this was a greater feat than the innocent reader might imagine, given the true circumstances of Butch’s departure from U of H. According to informed sources, Butch’s college playing days actually came to a temperamental end after he duck-hooked a ball into a lake at a Houston country club. He tossed his entire golf bag, including a set of irons belonging to his father, into the same lake. Only then did he take off to enlist in the Army. When he called Claude Senior to tell him what he had done, the old man replied, “Well, at least you could’ve joined the f—ing Navy so you could get my f—ing clubs back.”
Even with these flaws, however, Four Cornerstones is an invaluable addition to any hooker’s or slicer’s library, if only for its recitation of Claude Senior’s instructional advice and Butch’s addendums. “The average guy on the street can’t copy Hogan’s or Snead’s swing,” the father once told the son, but thanks to the son’s book, the average guy or gal can find succinct and helpful advice on how to hack out of heather or ice plant, how to hit a wedge off a tight fairway lie, how to handle coarse sand in a bunker, and how to cure a shank.
More-advanced players may still find themselves wishing they had the same direct access to Butch Harmon that Greg Norman enjoys by virtue of owning a jet and two helicopters. Earlier this year, Norman decided that he was well enough along to take Butch off full-time retainer and seek his counsel only as needed. But after struggling through the third round at the Doral-Ryder Open, Norman spotted his former mentor in one of the television towers and begged him to come to the practice tee at once. On the spot, Butch corrected some subtle errors in Norman’s stance and alignment, and his star pupil shot a final round 66 to secure a come-from-behind victory, winning his third Doral-Ryder championship in six years.
So how to explain the Masters only a month later? Norman’s painful-to-watch final-round collapse shocked most fans and fellow pros, but I figure it was just par—or in this case, six over par—for the course. Although he and Butch had been working together in the weeks leading up to the tournament, Norman had clearly lost his once-unrivaled physical and mental consistency during their prolonged separation before the Doral. As he probably realizes too late, there may very well be a fifth cornerstone to winning golf: getting full-time, firsthand instruction from Butch Harmon not available in any book.T
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