You get The Golf Channel right? Of course you do. Silly question. Anyway.
As mentioned previously the weather was ( WAS. Certainly not now. ) fantastic, and then there was the whole St. Pats day thing. Which means there hasn’t been a lot of TV watching lately and the Tivo was starting to fill up. However as you may have heard the weather here in The Wild West took a decided turn for the worse. Bad enough, in fact, that there have been 2 snow days. 2. Which means we have been catching up on the TV watching.
And you know what has been a big hit here at The Household? The Haney Project. You know, the The Golf Channel show where Hank Haney is trying to fix Charles Barkley’s swing?
( brief explanational interlude: Hank Haney is a golf coach. A VERY good golf coach. He is Tiger Woods golf coach. And the coach of a lot of other golfers who are household names. At least in this household. Charles Barkley is, well, Charles Barkley. Charles took up golf, and used to be pretty good. But he developed, as Mr. Haney says in the show, a hitch in his swing. Which is putting it nicely. VERY nicely. Charles’ bad swing is legendary. Go take a look at it on YouTube. )
The show is really funny. We were all laughing out loud. If you know anything at all about Charles Barkley you know he has a mouth and is not afraid to use it. Sir Charles and Mr. Haney are quite serious about fixing the swing, but they both have a healthy sense of humor about it. And it’s very instructive. At least for those of us who aren’t The Golfer. You can learn a lot about what a swing is supposed to look like by watching Mr. Haney show Charles what’s wrong with his, and what kind of things he has him doing to try to fix it.
Charles has lots of interesting friends, and hangs out in a lot of interesting places. He has put on some weight but you can see the work ethic and concentration that made Charles a basketball great. He works very hard, with a lot of determination and no whining or slacking off.
We had the first 4 shows Tivo’d and after watching the first one we watched the rest of them one after another. After 4 shows Hank had done wonders with Charles swing on the driving range, but things fell apart again when he went on a course. We will, of course, be tivoing the rest of the shows. I strongly suggest you do the same. And I have to say that I full confidence that by the end Mr. Haney will have Charles swinging like a pro.
Although there is one thing. On the driving range Mr. Haney lines up a long row of balls and has Charles start at one end and work his way to the other. And each time he hits a ball Hank very quickly tells him something to fix before he hits the next one. And Charles explains that this is the best way to do it. Just keep hitting them until it becomes muscle memory. I had a good laugh at that. The Golfer and I approach the driving range differently. He almost never makes it through a whole bag of balls. He hits each ball very carefully. And watches it’s flight, and thinks about it. And then sets up another ball, and goes through his routine and hits that ball. He can spend a long time on the range and not hit many balls. I can go through two bags of balls easy. I do it Mr. Haney’s way. I line up as many balls as I can fit in my spot, then start hitting them, making little adjustments along the way. Then I line up another set of balls and do it again. And here’s the thing. The Golfer is very good, and I suck. So Hank/Charles may want to re-think that whole hit-a-bunch-of-balls thing, is all I’m saying.
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