Hips Don't Lie!

If you live anywhere near a radio, you've heard that Shakira song four thousand times now. It sticks in your head " I'm blah blah blah and my hips don't lie, blahdy blahdy blah" but did you know it's a song about golf and not belly dancing? I learned why today when we were hitting balls in JC. Caution to the squeamish (or the curious): this blog is about my hips, not Shakira's.

A few weeks ago I practised keeping my head down and my eye on the ball when taking a swing. Now after hitting about 500 balls I realized you don't really keep your head down, you keep it balanced on your neck like a ball on a tee, very still. You keep your eyes on the ball not because it's going anywhere, but because it focuses your golf ball head still on the tee. Having come to some enlightenment on this I decided to move on to my hips.

I never took a physics class in school but I can tell that golf is based on one of those Newton's Laws about every action causing a reaction. You want the ball to go far, you need to hit it hard. But over these last few months I haven't seen one person on the golf course who looks like he or she could swing a cat too far, but there they are, wacking the hell out of the ball. Thwak! It's such a satisfying noise.

The secret is shifting your weight from one side to the other and purposely moving your hips from one side to another. It feels awkward at first but then you get that mindless feeling of unexepected physical abandonment, like a quick few seconds of wild dancing in an elevator. And the ball goes far enough so that maybe tomorrow if I get to play, my score can be under 200.