GOLF INSTRUCTION

THE SET-UP:
‘Just because it feels natural doesn’t mean it’s right’

By JEFF BLANCHARD
Photos by George Peet

KEVIN WALKER

The Nantucket Golf Club
Siasconset, Massachusetts
PGA Professional

Age: 46

Years As A Golf Professional: 27

Years At NANTUCKET GOLF CLUB:  9

WHY DID YOU WANT TO
BECOME A GOLF PROFESSIONAL?
“Gosh, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. When I was 13, I was fortunate enough to get a job at Eastward Ho!, and the pro there was Dan Keefe. He was the image of what I thought a golf pro should be. He became a mentor, and then a role model for what I wanted to do.”

AWARDS/ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
• PGA Class A Member since 1985
• Head Golf Professional, Nantucket Golf Club
• Director of Instruction, McArthur Club, Hobe Sound FL
• President, Kevin Walker Golf, Inc. Specializing in corporate and private outings
• 1995 Colorado PGA Teacher of the Year
• One of America’s Top 100 Teachers by Golf Magazine
• Tour Players worked with include: Brad Faxon, Mark Wiebe, Tom Kite, Andy Bean and Annette DeLuca
• Founding Faculty Member of the Internet Golf Academy
• Featured speaker at 1998 PGA Teaching and Coaching Summit
• Regular guest on the Golf Channel Academy Live
• 2002 New England PGA Horton Smith Award winner

BEST COMPETITIVE ROUND OF GOLF:
64 at Kapalua, Maui, Hawaii, in 1988

FAVORITE COURSE (OTHER THAN HOME COURSE):
Royal County Down, Northern Ireland

IF THERE WERE ONE THING TO TELL A GOLFER, IT WOULD BE:
To get the set-up right, because everything that happens with your golf swing depends on what preceded it.

One of the inherent contradictions of golf is that there is no substitute for regular play and practice, for hitting balls hour after hour, day after day, but there is little progress to be made if you’re doing it wrong from the start. Which brings us to the set-up.

As any pro will tell you, the set-up is, without a doubt, the key ingredient to a good swing, which translates to a good shot, a good hole, a good round, and a better appreciation for the sport.

After the set-up, the foundation of the golf swing, all other aspects of shot-making are “just so much finish carpentry”, as Kevin Walker, head pro at the Nantucket Golf Club, put it during an instructional session with Golf on Cape Cod.

Walker’s lesson came on a perfectly calm, sunny Thursday morning in late June at the country club where he has worked since its inception in 1997. The 7,080-yard links course designed by Rees Jones won immediate and lavish praise as the finest new private course in the country (and garnered accolades in building circles for the clubhouse and guest residences designed by architect Lyman Perry).

The setting invites you to step back in time, back to a simpler age when golf was played along the sandy shore by men and women who didn’t spend half the time waiting around for the foursome ahead to hit. Except for maybe the occasional Nassau, cash doesn’t change hands on the property, and the people who play here don’t have money. They have wealth. But the currency of the realm is neither. It’s golf.

And golf at the Nantucket Golf Club combines all the modern amenities with an atmosphere that harkens back to the roots of the game. Take the grass, for example. The mowers here don’t stripe the fairways when they cut the grass, because proper links aren’t striped. But to protect the bent grass greens and fairways from infiltration by other species, players have their shoes sprayed between rounds.

Members also take their role in the community at least as seriously as their golf, as Nantucket recently announced a public invitation to play, at $10,000 per foursome, in its inaugural tournament to benefit children’s charities.
Although favored by CEO’s, scions of industry and sports stars, White House occupants and aspirants, there is nothing stuffy about the Nantucket Golf Club. It doesn’t need to be. It is what it is – a championship-quality course with a classy, comfortable, Nantucket-style clubhouse and a landlocked, 250-acre grip on the fescued dunes of this island in the Atlantic.

Considered in context, the club is a perfect fit for today’s Nantucket, which has put a premium on open space and recreation (Club member and United States Senator John Kerry’s ballyhooed crossings by windsurf-board would be an extreme example). Two of the Nantucket Golf Club’s closest neighbors are the Siasconset and Sankaty Head golf clubs (while Miacomet GC has expanded its course from nine to 18 on the other side of the island). As Walker said of Nantucket GC’s naturally contoured layout, “It looks like they kind of found it here.”

Walker himself is another good fit, both for his credentials as one of America’s most accomplished teachers, and the fact that he is a product of the area.

A native of South Orleans, whose father was a barber in Chatham for 42 years, Walker was introduced to the game when he was 11 and had developed a pre-teen’s yearning for a bike with an engine, a 50-horsepower mini-bike. If he could earn the money, he could get the bike, his father said. And wouldn’t you know it that one of dad’s regular customers (Bill Cotter) just happened to be a fixture at Chatham Bars Inn’s pro shop (now Seaside Links), and he was hiring caddies.

Two years later Walker landed a spot on the caddie crew at the Eastward Ho! Country Club in Chatham, and six years later he turned pro.
An all-around athlete who also played varsity hockey, Walker would have graduated with the Nauset High Class of ’78, but his family moved to Florida when he was in his junior year. It was a move that brought him even closer to the game of golf.

Walker worked his way up the ladder to the famous Doral CC in Miami, and then to top clubs in California and Colorado, which is where he met Fred Green. Fred was a Vail golf course developer who was taking swing lessons from Walker. When Fred told Kevin that he was in the process of starting a club on Nantucket, he also asked for Kevin’s help in finding a head pro.
A mid-career culmination of his work as a golf professional came when the New England PGA awarded him the prestigious Horton Smith Award for his contribution to the game as a teacher, and when he spearheaded a well-attended summit at The International. Walker spends half the year on Nantucket, which he calls “the decompression chamber, a real state of mind,” and the other half at his home in Florida, organizing corporate outings and making appearances on the Golf Channel.

“We gotta get the hackers out there!” Walker said to his superintendent, Mark Lucas.

He wasn’t talking about golfers, but cutting instruments, as the 10th hole apparently had grown a little too shaggy for fairness and had trapped one of Ben Crenshaw’s balls the day before.

Walker has known Crenshaw for 18 years and says of his friend’s famous ability with a putter, “It’s like watching a great artist with a paintbrush.” He has counted Brad Faxon among his golf buddies even longer, and through the years he’s swapped swing tips with a veritable Who’s Who of great players and famous instructors. Which doesn’t necessarily matter when he’s standing over a shot, he said. “The golf ball doesn’t care who you are, or what you do.”

The first thing Walker does before he begins a lesson on the set-up is to stretch, as this will be his first shot of the day and flexibility is key.
That’s one reason why hackers can get the wrong idea about the best way to approach a shot by watching guys like Tiger Woods on TV. Because of Tiger’s strength and flexibility, which have come from years of constant hard work, “The average guy doesn’t have a prayer of hitting like Tiger,” Walker said. So it’s silly to try. Better to just work on getting the set-up right, and go from there.

“It’s really the only thing magazines should do instructional pieces on,” he said. “The swing is just a chain of cause and effect, and it all starts with the proper set-up. Everything after that is a series of compensating moves, with each one dependent on the one that preceded it. And if you only play once or twice a week or a few times a year, you had better be coming at it from a good starting position.”

1: GRIP
Let the club-head rest on the ground in front of you with the blade flat and square to the ball. For righties, pick up the club and wrap the left hand around it so the grip rests along line where the fingers meet the hand, with the thumb pointing down the shaft of the club. Grip the club with the right hand similarly, either by overlapping two fingers or with a baseball grip, but be careful not to hold the club either too far up in the palms or too far down in the fingers, and not too far over the top or under the bottom. Use a grip pressure of about four on a scale of 1-10, with one being too loose and 10 being a “death grip.”

2: POSTURE
It’s helpful to have good posture to begin with — so stand up straight first, and then bend slightly toward the ball while also flexing the knees slightly. The club is in the right position if it is pointing to the logo area of your shirt, with the cap of the club not far from your belt buckle. To check your posture, you should be able to dangle a club between your shoulder and the tip of your knee, and you should be able to dangle a club from the tip of your knee to the forward row of your shoelaces.

3: STANCE AND FOOTWORK
As Ben Hogan believed, it is helpful to your rotation if you open your left foot a bit, with the right foot staying straight to barely open, with your weight balanced on the balls of your feet, with your feet spread to about the width of your shoulders.

4: BALANCE
Since your right hand is extended farther than your left hand, your shoulders may have a tendency to tilt down to the right. This tilt should be corrected to a more level position by straightening the left arm, being careful to maintain a posture and balance that is neither squatting back nor leaning forward.

Since your right hand is extended farther than your left hand, your shoulders may have a tendency to tilt down to the right. This tilt should be corrected to a more level position by straightening the left arm, being careful to maintain a posture and balance that is neither squatting back nor leaning forward.

5: ALIGNMENT
If the lines of your feet and shoulders are perpendicular to the ball, then the face of the club should be perpendicular to the target. You can check this by placing a second club on the ground behind the ball facing in the direction of the target, and taking a swing in line with the club on the ground.

6: TAKEAWAY
Since the first thing to move is your club-head, try starting the takeaway by moving the club-head straight back 90 degrees to the 3 o’clock position, and hold it there to see how it feels without shifting anything else, especially the position of the hands. “With the correct takeaway, it’s basically a rotary motion on two pivot points,” Walker said. If your balance is maintained and your head is steady, only your waist and shoulders should be rotating, and your wrists should hinge without effort by lifting the club back in a motion that begins at the ball, continues through the 3 o’clock position and rotates on the same centrifugal plane throughout the swing.

7: PRACTICE
For anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing their swing on video or in pictures, you know how humbling it can be. A less invasive method is to set up a full-length mirror and scope out your set-up and swing from all angles. “It’s not what’s comfortable that’s right,” Walker said.

8: PRACTICE
Walker said that Payne Stewart used to employ a practice drill in which he would use his driver to fire balls at a target 150 yards away, to slow things down, to make sure he was right - right down to the basics of the swing. In a similar vein, Wayne O’Grady used to warm up by hitting his 7-iron incrementally farther from 50 to 200 yards, and back again. Whichever way you go about it, there is no substitute for repetition, but only if the set-up is right. If it isn’t, you may hit good shots, but you are not making good swings, and there is a difference. “There are a lot of ways to get to town, but the proper set-up opens the door,” Walker said.

9: PRACTICE
One more thing Walker mentioned after taking a quick look at my swing: He said I’d be better off if I hit the ball first, and then made the divot, and not the other way around. This little tinkering related to the set-up in that it changed my view of the target, and thus the plane of the club and everything else. “But don’t think about it, just set up,” Walker suggested.