COLUMN: A layman learns golf | Part Three — It’s all in the hips

For once in what feels like 10 years, I’m currently not having a heat stroke.

It’s 7 p.m. on this rainy Sunday, and me and my buddy-slash-golf guru Thomas Lightbody are back out at Orange County National Golf Center & Lodge — this time to work on chipping and putting.

The rain has left, but off in the distance, black clouds loom as a heavenly wind blows softly on my collarless shirt — which is technically against the rules here. Although they should be happy I didn’t show up in my usual home garb of a makeshift sleeveless N.C. State shirt and no pants — they don’t want that blight unto their world.

But back to the jest of this column: I’m here to chip and putt, because nothing will help me more in this game than to learn how to hit a ball out of the woods.
 

CHIP CHIP CHER-EE

To start off the evening, the name of the game is chipping.

Now, I’m already almost a professional at this given the obnoxious amount of time I’ve spent knocking around brightly colored practice balls around my backyard, so this shouldn’t be too difficult. I was, sort of, slightly correct in that assumption.

First, however, I watch as Lightbody goes through the motions and talks through what he’s doing.

“The biggest thing with chipping and putting — chipping especially — is good ball contact,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re going to end up on the other side of the world or one foot in front of you. And it’s all tempo, too. Do you see how I kind of open up my stance a little bit? Because what happens is this right here will have a tendency to go right, so I’m aiming left.”

He squares to the red-orange neon golf ball and makes contact. It lands within a few inches of the hole that sits about 10 yards out.

Following the shot, he follows up with a few more pointers, such as trying to leave the ball shorter than long, choking up on the handle and keeping my feet closer together.

With these newfound nuggets of information, I line up to the ball — everything is in place — and give it a good ol’ whack. It pops into the air a bit, and rolls several feet too short — in his now-famous words to me, Lightbody said, “Keep your head down.” 

“The biggest thing with chipping and putting — chipping especially — is good ball contact. Otherwise, you’re going to end up on the other side of the world or one foot in front of you. And it’s all tempo, too.”

— Thomas Lightbody

OK, keeping the head down; let’s see how this works. Like magic, I make solid contact and the ball rolls to within two or three inches of the hole. The shot is met by a round of loud applause from the calvary of cicadas sitting off in the trees — or maybe they’re just getting weird and mating (I’m just gonna inflate my ego and go with the applause delusion).

“You can knock 20 strokes off your game if you can get what’s known as up-and-down,” Lightbody said. “If you go from here to the green, and then to the hole, that’s an up-and-down. Let’s be realistic: Not a lot of us are going to stick to green every single time. So realistically, if you can be good at your short game, then (you can) just put it up there the right way.”
 

THE KEY IS CONSISTENCY

After 25 minutes or so of chipping, we switch over to putting, which logically should be the easiest part of the game. Once again, it is more challenging than I anticipated

I place the golf ball down on the putting green, and Lightbody places two tees down on both sides of the ball. The idea is to keep my putter head between them when I make contact with the ball. I square up and give it a light tap, only for it to die short of the hole because I didn’t follow through. 

“You want to be very consistent and nice and easy with it,” Lightbody said. “You can still aim wherever you want, but you just want to make sure you stay on that (straight) plane.”

I listened to what Lightbody said, but at the same time, all I could hear was Chubbs from Happy Gilmore singing, “It’s all in the hips,” over and over — almost like a chant. This is when I realized that most of the things I learned about golf came from a fictional character who had his hand bitten off by an alligator.

For the next 20 minutes, Lightbody and I circle around the putting green, putting down putts like we’re at the world’s quietest mini-golf course. But as the cicadas continue to scream about global warming — or whatever bugs yell into the void about — and as the dark clouds inch closer to us, we decide to pack up and go home.