| Pinehurst Golf Academy |
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Page 1 of 2 Pinehurst is the Harvard of golf academies—only with score deflation  Courtesy of Pinehurst, LLC The truth is that the golf swing is too complex and unnatural for a quick over- haul. My wife, Amanda, and Iarrived for a three-day session at the Pinehurst Golf Academy with minimal expectations, having played hardly at all in two years. (We’d recently had twins, and you can’t take the club back very far wearing a BabyBjörn.) The Academy drew us because there simply isn’t a better place to try out new skills than at this 2,000- acre playground: Of Pine- hurst’s eight layouts, four are world-class and one, No. 2, is a legend. As soon as the sun is up, the resort’s three hotels reverberate with the scrunch of Softspikes. We arrived early and played a benchmark round on Pinehurst No. 7, a lovely Rees Jones creation, where I shot a surprisingly decent 94. Any jauntiness I felt from that result, and from our class’s companionable intimacy—six instructors for 17 students— was immediately wiped out when the Academy filmed us hitting six-irons. An instructor named Kelly cheerfully anatomized the horrifying results: my club coming back way inside, my left elbow collapsing at the top, my hips flying open, and then...and then I had to look away. Without the benefit of any overarching theory whatsoever, we then began to hit balls. Eric Alpenfels, the beefy, amiable director of golf instruction, eyed the way my collapsing elbow brought my hands beside my right ear and dubbed it “talking on my cell phone.” Amanda suggested that it was more like “hugging my blankie,” a phrase Eric adopted with glee. He loves to nail a swing fault with a juicy simile. His colleague Paul told one student with a reverse pivot, “You’ve got James Brown going on,” and Eric chimed in, “Jump back! Wanna kiss myself!” There’s a reason Eric is listed among the Top 100 Teachers in America by Golf Magazine: The simile thing works. Thinking about my damn blankie made me hit the ball straighter. After a judicious interval, Paul reminded me to also extend my arms on the downswing, and I began hitting it farther, too. Each instructor seemed to focus on a different aspect of the swing, so you never got conflicting advice; the ruling idea is to think about only one or two very basic things—and to go drink lemonade the minute it stops being fun. Pinehurst teaches you to keep the ball in the middle of your stance except when hitting woods (forward) and chipping (back). And it encourages a normal (rather than open-faced) swing in bunkers, on the theory that most golfers aren’t strong enough to blast it very far with an open face. Amanda soon mastered this shot, long her bête noire. |
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