As you probably already know, the name of this little corner of the web is Balls, Sticks, & Stuff. The title was chosen because golf and baseball are my two most passionate diversions, two sports which involve balls and stick-like implements. In the magazine Golf World, writer John Strege performs his own "Double Play" and pens a piece about the relationship between baseball and golf and the players that try to crossover from baseball to golf, particularly Mark McGwire:
McGwire is 41 now, still a stalwart of a man, stronger than a two-club wind, but with hands so gentle that his two toddlers are content to wile away hours at home in them. He plays to a scratch handicap at Shady Canyon GC in Irvine, Calif., his scoring buttressed by a tour-caliber short game that allowed him to win the ADT Golf Skills Challenge last year against a field that included Greg Norman, Colin Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington.
But what is really interesting about the article is the Six Degrees of Separation game Strege sets into motion involving the influence of Babe Ruth on modern golf. It begins with a batting tip former Yankees outfielder Sam Byrd got from the Babe:
Babe Ruth taught him to bat, to hold a towel under his left armpit and to take batting practice by shifting to his right leg, then to his left leg. The towel made his elbow stay down going through the ball. It promoted a flat, level swing. Good hitters will never let the lead arm separate and drop the towel.
Byrd would go on to play the PGA Tour in the 1940's after his baseball career was over, eventually taking Jimmy Ballard under his wing as a golf instructor. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, Jimmy Ballard was to professional golf what Butch Harmon is today, the pro's pro. Byrd and Ballard both felf that the golf swing and the baseball swing were very similar, the only difference was that they were on different planes - the baseball swing is on a plane roughly waist high, and the golf swing tilted downward from that. And just as the baseball swing uses a players entire body to swing the bat, so should the golf swing.
During practice sessions with Curtis Strange when he was in his prime, winning back to back US Opens in 1988 and 1989, Ballard would have Strange tuck a towel under his arms and swing, promoting what Ballard called a "connected" swing. Due to Ballard's success with Strange and others, a trace of the the philosophy can be noticed somewhere in nearly every instructors mantra. Go to any professional golf event's practice range, and chances are you will see at least one player tuck something - a glove, a clubcover, a towel - under his arms and hit balls.
Try it, and maybe it will work out better for you than it did for the Babe. Says Ballard:
He [Ruth] wasn't a very good golfer, Sam [Byrd] could hit his 5-iron farther than Ruth could hit a driver, and it drove him crazy.
