Changing Your Grip

I’ve learned a lot from life on the PGA Tour. Except how to play.

Once upon a time, my life revolved around the PGA Tour.

My former husband played the Tour for ten years, until his sponsorship fund got embezzled (never let a “friend” handle your money). Then he was hired by Deane Beman, the former commissioner of golf, to work in marketing at the Tour HQ. He also became a regular commentator on network golf broadcasts. I was there through all of it.

He was a child golf star, then a high school star, then an NCAA college player. We fell in love somewhere in those years, and were married with two tiny boys by the time he got his Tour card and started playing as a pro.

So golf has been in my life since I was in my teens. I didn’t play, though. (I still don’t.)

I fell in love not because he was a golf star, but because of his hot looks, terrific brains (he was pre-med in college, the only pre-med major among his contemporaries – guys like Tom Watson, Tom Kite, Tom Purtzer, Fuzzy Zoeller, Ben Crenshaw — in his Tour class)… and the fact that he turned me from someone who didn’t think she wanted icky, sticky kids into someone who liked to high-dive frequently into the maternal sea. We ended up having four sons in the first ten years of our life with the Tour.

Did I mention that TJ was also funny and grew to be charismatic? He was magic (at times) on the course – and sometimes notorious for his temper displays. He was a favorite in the press tent for his interviews, which always included insightful, honest answers and occasional relevant quotes from Woody Allen comedies.

Oh, there’s a whole long list of stories – and we’ll get to them.

The point is, though TJ left the Tour and ultimately my life, golf never left my consciousness. And it taught me a lot.

The only time I ever “picked up a club” was to move one off the floor so I could vacuum…. So where do I get off writing anything about golf (you may ask)?

I’m an outsider who was an insider. I’m an observer. And a writer… Yeah, I started my writing career during the time we were with the Tour. Wrote for Golf Digest and everything. As a Tour Wife and writer, I lived on “both sides of the microphone,” so to speak. I believe once a Tour Wife, a bit of that remains in your bone marrow. But that’s just me.

Let’s jump ahead to the present. The day the light bulb went on: I began to realize that in golf, there are life lessons for the rest of us.

It happened like this:

I was having a bad day. Feeling very frustrated – frustrated to the point of tears – over a situation that kept repeating itself despite my best efforts.

My youngest son, Colin, came to the door of my office and discovered me in tears. He was a wise 20-something, an old soul.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

So I told him. Didn’t dump it all, but he got the gist.

“Mom,” he said in that calm, man-voice he’s acquired. “You need to change your grip.”

Explain, my son.

“See, when you first change your grip, it feels really weird,” he said. “You know that it’s going to change your game for the better. But at first it feels so unnatural. Your shots go all over the place. You feel like you have no control. It’s scary.”

“But then,” he said, “you start hitting a few shots where you want them to go. Your new grip feels more natural, the more you use it. And you start hitting shots so much better. You get the results you want. Because you changed your grip.”

Positively brilliant! What a great analogy. I realized he was absolutely right. I needed to change a behavior before the situation would change. Could change.

Non-golf Life Lesson: If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.

Or as Einstein says:

You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.

So that has me thinking: How many other golf experiences, tidbits, analogies, slang, axioms and terms actually apply to life lessons for the rest of us? That’s what I intend to explore.

Besides, I just have so many great stories.

And — have I changed my grip? Keep reading to find out.

How about you? Got any examples of how you “changed your grip” in life and made things better? Or do you think it’s easier said than done?