TONY Westwood’s golfing e-book, exclusively available through the Naked Leader website, is a big hit for anybody who wants to know how to better their handicap – simply, with the emotion involved. An extract from the book, Naked Leader Plays Golf, is included below. Fascinating stuff. Why not get your copy, here?
Tony says: ‘I did this one afternoon with my six-year old daughter, Hollie. We were in the garden and she picked up her plastic set of golf clubs. She got one of the clubs out and she aimed her swing at the rabbit hutch, which was not a wonderful proposition for the rabbit.
‘Why she aimed there I don’t know. But that’s where she was aiming. She got the club and she was swinging it – and missing it. And she’s not standing in what you would call the right way. But she’s standing the way she’s standing and the way she thinks is the best way for her to hit the ball. So she stands there and swings it, misses it, swings it, misses it, swings it, misses it.
Time to ask her the first question. I said, ‘what happened?’. She said, ‘I missed it’. I said ‘okay where did you miss it?’ She said, ‘over that side’. So I said to Hollie, ‘see if you can miss it on the other side’. So she missed on the other side. Which was brilliant.
Time to set her another task, while encouraging her to discover for herself what is happening. I said to her, ‘now see if you can go in the middle and hit it. This time she hit the right side of the ball and hit it into our neighbours wall on the left.
‘What happened that time?’ I ventured.
She said, ‘Well I hit it’.
‘Where did the ball go?’
‘Well it went over there and hit Mary’s wall’.
‘Fantastic!’ Which part of the ball did you hit?
‘I hit that side, the outside, which sent the ball left’.
She knew, so this time she hit it left but not as far to the left. This time it hit part of the rabbit hutch. Brilliant!
I asked her to see if she could hit the ball and do something different. So she hit it and sent it in a different direction.
‘What happened that time?’
‘Well it was better, but that was too much on the left side of the ball because it went to the right’.
And there it was. She understood everything that she needed to do. She was having fun the whole time. And at no point in time is somebody telling her it’s wrong.
For instance, nobody was saying, ‘you should hold it like this or you should hold it like that’. It is all about do something, then see what happens, then doing something else if that doesn’t work.
If it didn’t work the first time then do something else.
And if that didn’t work, do something else.