My shots had been drifting right.
I don’t know when it started exactly. I can remember a round at Mossy Oak two Decembers ago, aiming for the middle of the 14th green and watching my approach drift wistfully off the right side. I told myself it was the wind. At Pinehurst last summer, I noticed I was losing more shots to the right than usual, which is to say that I was losing any shots to the right — and that when my ball’s flight wasn’t fading, my distance was. I stood on No. 2’s first tee and aimed my drive down the right side of the fairway, to allow for my predictable right-to-left shape. But the ball started for the pines on the right and never came off them.
I self-diagnosed a change to my grip, and things seemed to go back to normal. So I forgot about it. Or tried to, anyway.
The 16th hole at Dancing Rabbit’s Oaks course in Philadelphia, Miss.
For years, my ball flight has moved one way for every club in the bag: left. This is by design. When I started seeing swing guru VJ Trolio several years ago, he knew that the first thing I needed was more distance. So he started tearing down my natural slice and replacing it with a draw, which rolls out more than a fade. We started off practicing a takeaway that began comically inside and a clubface closed shut; month by month, it came closer to on-plane until it was controllable.
Sometimes the swing yielded beautiful tight, towering draws that never seemed to fall. More often, I hit a bunch of pulls that were medium-height but manageable. But never anything right.
Which brings us to what this is all about: depression.
As of late March, 45 percent of Americans reported that the COVID-19 pandemic had created a negative impact on their mental health. Who the hell are the other 55 percent? Most days are a prison: the same teleconferences, the same deluge of e-mails, the same struggle to balance teleworking and homeschooling, and the same failure to do either very well. No one has any idea when it’ll end, and most days, it feels like it never will. As we have established, this whole thing sucks.
I absolutely count myself among those for whom the pandemic has brought depression. It’s something I’ve fought for years, with various levels of dedication and success. But the monolithic day-to-day quarantine, combined with an unrewarding teleworking experience and the stress of parenting, make this moment a perfect storm for mental health.
And like a pesky slice, it comes and goes. Some days, you can’t escape it. Other days, a quick fix seems to bring it under control. And those days are the most dangerous, because there’s no such thing as a quick fix. Depression feasts on the bad days, but the ones when things don’t seem so bad and maybe you don’t need help after all — those days of delusion are how depression survives.
There are moments of clarity, though. Eventually, things gets so bad — either you can’t stop drifting off path, or the ball can’t — that the need for help bashes you over the head. Those moments must be seized; you have to be cunning enough to use those moments to make a plan. If you don’t, then inevitably, the moment will fade and delusion will seep back in. You’ll be back where you started. And you can’t go back where you started. You must move forward.
The view back up the fairway from the drivable eighth hole at Dancing Rabbit’s Oaks course in Mississippi.
So I committed to a plan (sharing the plan with someone makes it harder to flake out, in my experience), and I booked a couple of hours with VJ and his partner, Tim Yelverton. Like going to see a therapist, there’s never a good time: VJ and Tim’s clinic at Old Waverly Golf Club is more than two hours from Jackson. But you’ll always come up with reasons not to get help: work is too busy, or you can’t find someone that you’re comfortable talking to, or maybe things will get better on their own in a week or two. That’s the delusion talking again. And you must move forward.
In West Point, VJ helped me make a couple of simple changes that quickly got me functional again. The best therapists not only listen when you need them to, but also offer practical tools that you can use to support your best version of yourself. VJ and Tim aren’t much different. I once saw VJ working with a women’s college golfer, who seemed glum despite the fact that she was striping her irons; eventually, I realized that their conversation wasn’t about swing mechanics at all. Afterward, I asked him how much of his role with elite golfers is swing coach and how much is sports psychiatrist; “It’s about 50-50,” he said. But I needed practical help, and he narrowed in on a couple of parts of my daily practice routine that could be tightened up. There are no quick, permanent fixes for bad golf swings or depression. But if you can commit to seeking out tools and sticking to them, then you get a little better every day.
My round at Dancing Rabbit the next day wasn’t perfect, which is to say that I wasn’t perfect. My mechanics — stuck somewhere between my old motor pattern and my new swing thoughts — felt awkward. But I shot a career low, which proves that being your best doesn’t require perfection. On No. 10, I badly flubbed a wedge from the fairway, but I pitched on to 10 feet and made the putt for par. On No. 18, I tugged my tee shot into a fairway bunker and had to wedge out, but then I putted from 75 yards off the green to within eight feet.
It’ll take time for the new tools to seep in fully. And in the meantime, there’ll be good days and bad days. If there are too many of the bad ones, then I’ll get help again. Above all, though, I’ll keep moving forward.
. . .
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