05/05/2026
In my morning golf today, I paired up with a th*****me. We had some good conversations and one of them, Tom Patchett, was having a hard time trying to hit the golf ball.
He’s an extraordinary athlete 60 years old a passion for running winning gold medals in the Village Olympics and at age 60 a couple weeks ago won the Villages 5K race with over 1000 participants.
He’s got the same problem that Charles Barkley has when he goes to hit the golf ball .
He’s taking numerous lessons by professional coaches with good intentions ,
prescribing ideas to him. His findings to date are that he can make a perfect practice swing he’s a good ball striker a great athlete but when he gets over the ball, he stutters in his back swing similar to PGA champion Cameron Young, who on purpose pauses at the top in this case it’s a fatal glitch of a man who knows he’s not in the slot to hit the proper shot so his body is in search of the perfect slot.
I told him it’s an easy fix. He’s playing the game backwards and I wrote down on the score card the word FLOG.
I quickly told him that that is the word Golf spelt backwards and when you flog something, you’re basically endlessly swinging at something as the target .
I told him the greatest ball strikers in the world play a game that does not involve a golf ball, but rather the true focal point is the ball flying through the sky to an Apex landing on the ground, bouncing and rolling toward the cup. You need to set up to that shot and not set up to the ball. I told him this will now take care of the issue that he has as long as he fully 100% sees the entirety of the flight exactly where the ball is going to land how will react on the ground as it rolls to the cup.
He said he read the book Inside Tennis ,
(And I quickly advised him that the author Timothy Galloway also had written Inside Golf, to which he was aware,) and I then emphasized his the only thing I took from the book Inside Tennis that mattered was the simplicity of the words “bounce, hit”
When you see a tennis ball flying through the air, your brain, the super computer that it is, can see the spin on the ball as you watch it eagerly waiting for it to hit the Earth and that precise moment you say bounce your body is reacting and loading up and as you strike the tennis ball you say hit . Bounce hit bounce hit that’s all you’re saying during the entire match. By keeping it that simple you’re aware of the immediate launch angle needed to retrieve and hit the ball back across the net.
So from that if you set up to the flight of the golf ball, and make a motion towards that flight path and the target (flag), the ball collects up and gets in the way of that motion. At that point, you’ll no longer be flogging. You’ll be on your way to beautiful Golf.
If anybody’s having an issue with the wrong target. If you’re thinking the ball is your target. Start looking at the flag and how the ball is going to get there and set up to that. No practice swing and enjoy yourself.
