Graham Averill has turned 50 this year and he’s freaking out. Instead of buying a motorcycle or getting a tattoo, he’s decided to try to get really, really good at golf. He started this project as a 13 handicap attempting to reach scratch in a year. He is now a 9.1. Welcome to his midlife crisis.

I’m pretty sure I was originally drawn to sports as a kid because I was told there would be no math involved but here I am deep into a golf quest, trying to wrap my head around physics and geometry. I’m learning how to shape the ball and it’s all about numbers and angles … math. 

I’m talking about the laws of ball flight. The clubface determines the start line of the ball. The swing path in relation to the clubface determines the curvature of the ball in flight. Draw or fade, hook or slice or the miraculous straight shot … it’s all there in the swing path and clubface at impact. 

Or as the kids like to say, “the face sends it, the path bends it.” 

My coach, Sam Hahn, had me start digging into the nuances of face control while I was visiting him in Oregon. We got on his home launch monitor and he showed me how slight adjustments to my clubface or swing path made a big difference in the ball flight. This is one of the benefits of these launch monitors; they break a physical action down into data that’s relatively easy to understand. You swing five degrees to the left with a clubface that’s five degrees open and you’re going to hit a slice. Make a number of swings where you hit those numbers over and over and you can equate that data with a swing feel that you can take to the course. 

So, over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on shaping the ball at the range and in the net in my backyard. I don’t have a fancy Trackman but I do have a relatively inexpensive Garmin Approach R10 which delivers the exact data I need to understand why a ball is starting right and ending way left. I’ll take a handful of clubs and try to hit fades and draws, tinkering with the swing path and clubface and watching the numbers the launch monitor spits out. 

Let me be clear: I’m under no delusions that I can call upon a perfect fade or draw when I need it during a round of golf. Most PGA Tour pros have one shot shape that they depend on 95 percent of the time. I would be psyched if I could find that kind of consistency with a single shot shape, any shot shape. But Sam is having me learn how to shape the ball so I can diagnose what’s going wrong during any particular round. Basically, we’re trying to eliminate the mystery around my misses. 

How many times have you looked towards the heavens and exclaimed, “Why?!” after watching a ball slice into the woods? 

I used to question the golf gods a lot. 

I played a round a few months ago when I was still working through the massive swing changes that Sam had introduced. It was a disaster. I pulled the ball hard left into the woods and I couldn’t figure out why. There was a perfectly good fairway with really nice short grass straight in front of me but every ball I hit ended up in a forest of pine trees. The most frustrating part was I didn’t know why so I couldn’t make any adjustments. My round of golf turned into a nature walk as I spent four hours trekking through the woods. (I saw some cool birds.)

Now I know I was swinging outside to inside with a closed face. If I would’ve just opened the face a bit, I could have had a relatively playable slice. Hindsight, am I right? 

This is one of the benefits of having a good coach. They arm you with the tools you need to fix your game on your own. And speaking of my game …

A Quick Update 

I got to play three rounds since writing my last article and it went pretty well. I also got in a couple of practice sessions, one in my backyard and one at the range, where I focused primarily on shot shaping with half and three-quarter swings.

I played my home course three times and shot a three-over 39 through nine holes, a two-over 51 through 12 holes, and an even-par round on the front nine. My driver was a weapon. I’m keeping the ball in play, sending it decently far and finding roughly half of the fairways during any given round. During my even-par round, I gained 1.4 strokes off the compared to a scratch golfer. My approach game was good, too, hitting 89 percent of greens in regulation. I gave those strokes back once the flat stick was in my hand, though, losing 1.2 strokes while putting. That entire deficit can be chalked up to a three-putt I had on a par-3. It was a 25-footer and I underestimated the break. Sigh. 

Put it all together and I dropped half a stroke from my handicap this week, bringing it down to a 9.1. What’s going right? I’m having more birdie looks and sinking more five-foot putts for sure but the real difference maker has been the work Sam has had me do with my driver. It is becoming more consistent every day.

Dig deeper into one golfer’s struggle to get better at golf in middle age and read last week’s Scratch By 50 where Graham waxes poetic about the benefits of playing with better golfers.