It’s summer and the college kids are out there grinding on the range. They roll up in their parents’ luxury cars with golf bags full of private-course headcovers or emblazoned with the name of an Ivy golf team. They are tan, fit, and hatless. They take a couple of swings and then the tripods appear. The phones are positioned and leveled, aimed at the hands. Swing. Look at the phone. Swing. Look.
I remember the first time I videoed my swing—years ago now in my backyard. It was like hearing my voice on an answering machine. I sound like that? I swing like that? So different from what I had pictured in my mind’s eye. The college kids seem comfortable looking at themselves. They’ve been doing it their whole lives. They scroll forward and back through the swing, searching for the deviation, the position to correct. I watch them rehearse and then swing again. The ball flight might be a touch better or a touch worse. Golf is a game of millimeters after all.
The search for the perfect swing. We do this even though the professional world is full of cautionary tales. Michelle Wie, who had her natural athleticism put into a straitjacket. Or Seve Ballesteros, who could do anything with a 3-iron. When he came to the States, he knew he would win on tour because no one else could get out of the trees like he could. But he began to doubt that creativity, and went hunting for a textbook swing that would hold up under pressure.
I like thinking about the swing. It’s an interesting problem: is there a way to swing that feels right? That fits the biomechanics of my body? If I find that swing then I will just turn and hear the click. The course will become a comfortable space. I have a friend, a generation older than me, who is a very good golfer. I asked him what his game was like when he was playing his best: “I would just look and the ball would go there.” That’s the standard to strive for, a preternatural confidence.
A great swing is often seen as a gift from the heavens. You hear talk of players who never lived up to their swings. Adam Scott. George Knudson (a deep cut). A swing can also feel imprinted, inescapable. The questions can get uncomfortably deep: can we ever change who we really are? Swing thoughts expand, touching every aspect of your life. Focus on impact. Find the ground.
In the mornings before work, I ask ChatGPT for golf advice. It has my height, age, and handicap stored in its “memory.” It has analyzed videos of my swing and correctly diagnosed my major issues. I sort of knew that I came out of posture on my backswing, leading to thin shots. But the supercomputer made that abundantly clear in four separate bullet points. I ask it to offer advice on my swing as if it were Sasho MacKenzie, Ben Hogan, or Harry Vardon. It is endlessly flexible and adaptable, willing to try anything. The A.I. Harry Vardon told me not to worry about swing plane: “The ball does not know the angle of your shaft — only the honesty of your strike.” A bit cringe, but not wrong.
I recently took my search to the next level and joined the tripod kids on the range: I downloaded an app that records your swing and then analyzes it according to A.I. This was disconcerting at first. The app clips your swing and then places it like a specimen under a microscope. You await the scores like a prostate exam. My inside takeaway earned a blazing red 6 on a scale of one to ten (ten being awful).
My impulse was to immediately delete the app. Why do this to myself, and surely it would just mess with my mind and send my swing haywire. The A.I. is an unthinking automaton that has ingested millions of golf swings. It’s offering me an average. And yet, it did kind of help my ballstriking when I widened the takeaway. This was a classic “feel vs. real” moment in golf instruction: I felt like I was sending my arms way outside my body, when I was actually still slightly inside. So I am staying with the discomfort. Seeing where it takes me. I’m looking at my phone. I am staring at myself.
Michael Agger is an editor at the New York Times, and he still watches too many swing videos on YouTube.
