10,000 Hours at a Time...
The year was 1987.
I had survived through the toughest year of my personal life up until then to get ready for my favorite event of the year, the U.S. Open Qualifying. I had tried unsuccessfully every year since my "debut" in 1980. Every year I improved a little, and was closing in on making through to the sectionals. The previous year, paired with PGA Tour player Tommy Moore, I led the field with 12 holes to play in the 36-hole event, and finished two shots out.
The local qualifying was held in those years at Timberlane Country Club outside New Orleans, a course that suited my draw at the time very well.
I played pretty well, finished just 3 shots out of a playoff, and soon after to go to Carmel to work with Ben Doyle for the first time.
Who knows what would have happened on that time line, I was nearing my second 10,000 hours playing and practicing golf.
I started playing golf in 1971. I played on the weekends, and for the first five years I played, I spent about 600 hours a year on my game, playing and practicing.
3000.
The next three years, I spent about 900 hours a year.
5700.
My first year in college, I decided not to try out for the golf team, and at 17 years old, just practice every day for the first time in my life.
"I am going to work on my game everyday and see what happens," I told City Park Assistant pro and Head Pessimist Larry Griffin, his pessimistic protege Gary Schultz. Both were pros, and both play golf every day of their lives from a very young age. Both peaked at 17 years old.
"If you aren't any good at 17, you'll never be any good," they exclaimed. I pointed out to them that Larry Nelson started at 21 and Calvin Peete at 24. They ignored me.
For the next year, I practiced and played about 1800 hours. I tried every swing in every book at the library. Al Jewell, an old pro who sold balls at the City Park Driving range saved me.
"Schwing dem orms, schwing dem ORMS!!!," Mr. Jewell barked as he banged on the glass five months into that year. I literally got five shots better overnight.
7500.
I made UNO's team after that year. Two months into my college career, I broke my left thumb and quit the team.
7900.
After transferring to Southeastern Louisiana University, and not playing any golf for four months, I started hitting balls for four to six hours hours every day with a new swing key.
Have my right arm under my left at impact.
Almost a whole semester of beating balls and playing on the weekends with a huge upgraded impact.
8400.
I played and practiced every day that summer, played in several amateur events, and made the SLU team in the fall as a walk on. Practicing six hours every day and getting to play with good players really sped up my improvement. By the end of the semester, I was playing so well, I won the team's match play tournament going away.
9700.
Then two things that changed my life happened in one week.
The coach at SLU inexplicably decided not to give me a scholarship. And, I let the other players give me lesson to try to "conventionalize" my swing. Five days not sniffing breaking 80, after a semester with a 72.5 scoring average, I decided to come back home to the University of New Orleans, and learn everything I could about the golf swing.
I had to, nobody on New Orleans could teach a lick, and none of these country club college players' teachers knew anything either.
It took a lot of work over that winter to put my game somewhat back together after that week of junk.
10,000.
A week into my first semester back at UNO, I was given a scholarship to play golf.
So 10,000 hours into playing golf, I earned a college scholarship, and was 300 hours into the career I didn't even know about yet.
9,700 hours later, teaching David Toms on the PGA Tour in 1991.
10,000 hours after that I was making David Leadbetter look bad with Michael Finney's help on Papa John, and starting my assault on Louisville's teaching crown.
10,000 more hours and I did my first presentation at a National Level Summit at MIT, with the #1 instructor run website in golf and several top selling videos.
A couple or thousand after that, we have the D-Plane, the practical application of TrackMan instruction, the assault of Golf Instruction Junk Science, several more seminars around the country, the GTE program, The Manzella Matrix and Matrix Short Game, and much much more.
Basically, the book "outliers" talk about the "perfect storm" it took for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be who they became.
When I was asked in that interview last night on UStream if I had any regrets, I said no.
Without the pitiful instruction that was available in New Orleans when I was young, without the junk lessons from the country club kids at SLU, without Henry Thomas seeing me teach at the National Real Estate convention and giving me the whole City Park Junior Program at age 21, without all the independent contractors paying off the cashiers and throwing my sequence book into the lagoon, without Frank Mackel blacklisting me for 20 years, without Ben Doyle, without Mike Finney & Tom Bartlett golfing talent, IQ and constant questioning and prodding, without the Gahm family, without meeting my wife Lisa in 2001, without stupid forums banning me, without 10,000 members, Mandrin, Zick, & wood, without Hamburger, Jacobs, Shields, Lucas, Kobylinski, Simther, Khatib, & Hardesty, I don't get to here.
And I still have a couple thousand to go on this 10,000. A quite a ways to go on my goals.
A perfect storm.
It's a great book.
Outliers that is.
