In Throlling Through the usual end-of-year golf roundup articles, which I always enjoy doing, it struck me this week how small the overlap was with my personal highlight reel. Despite a job that takes me to some of golf's most interesting places and situations, only one of my to three memories of 2007 had anything to do with the big-time games.

That was the experience I had in September of closely observing as Tiger Woods played four rounds at East Lake, during the Tour Championship. This beat even the special privilege I had earlier of following and interacting with him during a practice round for the U.S. Open at Oakmont because at East Lake he was competing in - and winning - an actual tournament at the top of his form. I knew with every step I was witnessing history.

Next on my list comes the two lessons I took in February with Ben Doyle, an eccentric old teacher in Carmel, Calif. He taught me much that was useful, but mostly the pleasure was being in the presence of the man, whose passion for the game and hands-on style took me back to what I imagine were the simpler, hard-dirt delights of golf circa the 1950's or '60s. (Please scroll down to read John Paul Newport's article on Ben as it appeared in the WSJ, February 2007)

And finally, the nine hole around I played in June with my daughter at the funky course near the beach. Golf is the least of her 13-year-old interests, but for those few hours I could see by the spark in her eyes that she was caught up in the spirit of the game...

 

 

When I was on the Monterey Peninsula last week I booked a lesson with Ben Doyle. Mr. Doyle, 74, is a cult figure among golf teachers, the leading advocate of a fiendishly complex system called the Golfing Machine. I didn't particularly need a lesson, I thought, but I had heard about the Golfing Machine for years and was curious to see how a man who breaks the swing down into 24 basic components, 12 sections and three zones would go about teaching an innocent.

One of the great things about golf is that it allows for so many approaches. I nominate "stop thinking and hit the damn ball" as the best single piece of golf advice ever, but for anyone with even the vaguest nerd-like tendency, burrowing deep into mechanics can be irresistible -- and even occasionally helpful. Just ask Tiger Woods.

I had met Mr. Doyle for the first time a year ago -- at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, of all places. He was throwing sand around on a classroom stage as part of his presentation at a golf and technology conference. Back home, he gives most of his lessons in a sand trap, and when he's not in the bunker he primarily uses a 6-by- 10-foot vinyl tarp -- "Ben's Facts & Illusions Mat," he calls it -- imprinted from stem to stern with swing diagrams, master lists and aphorisms such as "complexity is better than mystery." For the MIT presentation he had imported both the tarp and several bottles of sand, which he gripped (mouth down) and swung like golf clubs to demonstrate how in certain phases of a proper swing the sand stays in the bottle and in other phases it flies out.

The day before my lesson last week I ran into him again on a practice range at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. He has gray locks, a voice so quiet that sometimes only dogs can hear it and rheumy eyes that regard students with a mix of patience and amusement. Before I could stop him, he started teaching me.

"Is this straight up and down? Or is this?" he asked, demonstrating two possible club positions using the shaft of his spectator seat as a proxy. "It's this way, right?" he said, answering his own question and proving the point by loudly whacking the stick flush against the vertical side of a fence.

I was a bit concerned that Mr. Doyle's passion to teach was creating a commotion, but I shouldn't have been. Several pros squeezing past us said, "Excuse me, Ben," and "Good to see you, Ben." Laird Small, the director of instruction at Pebble Beach, came over to give Mr. Doyle a hug.

Mr. Doyle was waiting for one of his students, former PGA champion Steve Elkington, to emerge from an equipment trailer. When he did, Mr. Elkington launched into a spirited defense of the reputed complexity of the Golfing Machine, which is based on a dense 245-page book (of the same name) written primarily for instructors in 1969, after 40 years of research, by a retired Boeing engineer named Homer Kelley. (Mr. Doyle wrote the foreword.) Today there are roughly 150 teachers world-wide actively teaching the book's G.O.L.F. (for Geometrically Oriented Linear Force) curriculum, most of them trained at least in part by Mr. Doyle.

Said Mr. Elkington, "If someone gave you a textbook on oncology, would you expect to understand it right off? Of course not. But you'd better hope your oncologist does. The Machine is the essence of golf, nothing less."

Mr. Doyle likens the 24 basic components of the swing (starting with the grip and concluding with "power package release") to an alphabet. "To spell you have to know your letters. But if you only know four of them, you won't have much of a vocabulary," he said.

The biggest misconception about the Golfing Machine is that it preaches one swing type. In fact, the system is more descriptive than prescriptive. Each swing component has three to 15 variations -- "I like 'em all," Mr. Doyle said -- leading to an almost limitless number of viable swing combinations.

But there are three imperatives: a good swing plane (the path along which the clubshaft travels), clubhead lag and a flat left wrist at impact.

The first thing that Mr. Doyle demonstrates on his mat for new students, including me, is golf's most-damaging illusion, namely that what appears to the eyes (positioned slightly behind the ball) to be a straight up-and-down clubshaft is actually leaning backward, away from the target. To compensate Mr. Doyle insists that all of his students briefly press their hands forward before beginning their takeaway, to visually pre-set the impact position. He says that driving the hands through this aiming point correctly while sustaining clubhead lag as long as possible is "the secret of golf."

I spent more than three-fourths of my lesson in the sand making tiny, maddeningly difficult chipping, pitching and punch swings. The goal was for the clubhead to smack the lines he drew in the sand just so, in good rhythm and with the hands and arms following the lead of the lower body. The cardinal swing sin for Mr. Doyle is overaccelerating the hands and arms. In demonstrating, he clipped the mark in the sand perfectly every time. I -- a single-digit handicapper, by the way -- made only four or five successful swings and a handful of barely decent ones that he praised as "negotiable."

This sandwork was accompanied by a patter of injunctions, explanations and references to sections of the "Golfing Machine" gospel. His purpose, he said, was not to make changes in my swing so much as to upgrade a few of its components.

My first lesson lasted more than two hours and cost $200. I say "first" because my inability to strike the sand properly so agitated me that the next day I returned to spend 90 minutes in the bunker on my own, and then persuaded Mr. Doyle to give me a second lesson (one hour, $100) on the morning I left. I also bought a desk-sized version of his "Facts & Illusions" mat for $100.

Am I nuts? Diseased is more like it. But when I finally hit some balls on an actual course that afternoon, I felt a precision in some of my swings that I had never felt before, and an inkling of how, with work, that precision might become consistent. A lot more work, presumably. In Mr. Doyle's alphabet, I'm probably not even finished yet with the letter "A."