Earn your swingStart here
You can’t buy a golf swing. What I’d do if I were starting again.
The people who can buy anything agree the swing isn’t one of them. Ed on how he got his the slow way, and what he’d do differently starting now.
A golf course is a strange thing to find in a city. Acres of perfectly kept grass in the middle of all that build-up, with a handful of people on it. I’m Ed, one of the founders of Grady, and I still find it a little bit unbelievable that you’re allowed to walk onto one and hit a ball. Most people never see the inside of one. The ones who do have earned it, one way or another, with a career and the years that went into it. That’s what we mean by golf is your reward. It’s not a slogan about the game. It’s about who’s standing on the first tee.
I’ve been lucky in my career to meet some very successful people, investors, CEOs, people who can buy more or less anything. And the thing they agree on, all of them, is that a golf swing is one of the few things they can’t. No amount spent on lessons or on the best clubs changes it. A swing is earned. You mould it, you nurture it, and at some point it becomes a part of you. It’s very difficult, and I think that difficulty is what keeps people coming back. Because golf shows you what you’re capable of almost from the start. You stripe one, send it flying, and that’s the part that hooks you. A glimpse of something great, and it’s attainable, and now you want to do it again on purpose.
So the course you’ve already earned. The swing is the part you can’t buy, and it’s the only thing standing between you and actually enjoying the place.
How I got mine
I started in my teens with my uncle’s old set, much too tall for me, because that’s what was around. There was no YouTube. There were no coaches online showing you the proper way to do anything, so it was hard to even picture what a good swing looked like, or a grip. You went to the range and you hit balls, thousands of them, and your body, which is smart, worked out a way to get the ball in the air. It was the wrong way. A giant out-to-in swing, because I didn’t know how to use the ground or my hips to turn, and a slice to go with it that I carried for years. As an adult I paid for about two years of lessons to undo it. Habits get built into your body, and the swing I ended up with was just the consequence of not learning it properly at the start.
What I’d tell myself starting now
I wrote a version of this down a few years ago: I wish I’d had the blueprint of clubs, technique and training that I have now, so I could have started on the right path. If I were starting today, with everything that’s available, this is the path.
- Be smart with the clubs. You don’t need the full set, because you can’t hit half of it yet. A few quality pieces that fit you, three irons and a putter, is where I’d start, and I’d put the money I saved into clubs that actually suit me rather than more of them.
- Learn the fundamentals properly, and in order. The grip first, then how you stand to the ball, then a small swing that makes contact with the ground on purpose before a full one. All of this is online now, from coaches who are better at explaining it than I’ll ever be, and it’s free. That’s what the Learning Lab is: the order we’d do it in, with the videos we’d watch.
- Practise, don’t just hit. A big bucket of balls every visit is how I built my slice. Working on one element, with a drill, until it holds, is how I got rid of it. It’s fewer balls and more attention, and it’s a lot less boring than it sounds.
- Take lessons at the right stage, which I didn’t. Not at the very beginning, when a coach will show you what a video would and hand you a bucket. Later, once you’ve been at it a while and something in your swing is going wrong that you can’t see or feel yourself. A coach watching from the outside can tell you what it is and give you a drill for it. That’s when the money is well spent.
- Get to the course. The range is not golf. A par-3 or a short nine with three irons and a putter is, and it’s the reason you started.
A swing is earned.
Why Grady, and why these stories
Grady came out of that. Not out of the golf industry, which as far as I can tell would like you to buy the full set, look the part, take the lessons, and spend a couple of years at the range before you think about a course. I think there’s a better way to start, and the clubs we make are built for it: a few that fit, for the stage you’re at. That’s the pitch, and it’s a short one.
The rest of this section is stories, not lessons. None of us are coaches. We’re a few steps ahead of you, we’ve made most of the mistakes, and we’re only going to write about the stretch we’ve walked ourselves. Every piece has to pass the same test: would I have told myself this, back then? If it wouldn’t have helped me, it isn’t here.
The first one is about the start, and how early you have to invest in it. Whether golf turns into a passion for you, and the joy and the people that come with it, is yours to discover.
