Scott Mayer is a PGA-certified teaching professional who works at Nonesuch River Golf Course in Scarborough. He has written two instructional booklets, A Golfing Philosophy to Play A-Round With and Golf is a Concept and produced an instructional video, The Fundamentals of the Mind. In the spring of the 2004 he was named the State of Maine Teacher of the Year by his peers. Throughout the summer he will be providing me – a 16-handicapper with a propensity for banana slices – with a weekly golf tip. I’ll hit the range or practice green to put the tip to practice, then I’ll write about my experience with it – what worked, what didn’t, etc.

I’ve been playing golf off and on for about 15 years, and as long as I can remember I’ve always fought a really bad slice. Sure, there are times when it more resembles a power fade than a well-thrown boomerang, and I can even remember stretches when it has disappeared entirely.

But it’s always there, lurking around the corner, waiting to pounce on me. And when it does finally jump, it doesn’t let me up for air. It suffocates me. The harder I try to rid myself of it, the worse it or another part of my game gets. My grip tightens out of anger; I swing harder out of anger. And then I start topping shots and chunking shots and hitting slices so bad they make me burst out laughing.

I have recently realized that when the slice goes away it’s more of a coincidence than anything else. Last summer, when I was still living in California, I got a tip from a stranger while playing a round at Torrey Pines (as a city resident I was able to play at the site of 2008 US Open for next to nothing). This dude told me to relax my right arm and shoulder during my set up and backswing. Normally I’ll wait until after my round to try something new, but Torrey’s famous rough was eating me up so I was desperate. The suggestion worked. I practiced it some more at the driving range and it worked some more. By the end of the summer, the slice was pretty much gone, and I was shooting in the low to mid-80s on a consistent basis.

The problem was, I really had no idea how relaxing my right arm and shoulder was making things better. It felt right, and my scores were going down, so I didn’t care. But when my game started going in the toilet again at the beginning of this summer, I started to care.

I give Mayer credit for that. He hasn’t quite overhauled my swing, but he has helped me realize not only why things happen the way they do, but what I need to do to fix the flaws. Most recently, we broke down the slice.

Mayer’s take:

“What’s happening is, when you’re slicing, the club is lagging behind your hands due to tension. And you’re missing one of the sources of power in your swing: your hands and release. And release is nothing more than releasing the club, allowing it to pass your hands, letting it go, setting it free, swinging it, as opposed to hanging on tight, restricting it, impeding it, holding release back and guiding the club through the ball with tension.

Every time you slice the ball you’re losing a power source because you’re not releasing the club, so when you do it proper it actually requires less effort and produces more speed.

There are two conditions in a slice: path of the club and the face position at impact. And the face is controlled by the hands. So grip can be a condition of a sliced shot as well. If the hands get turned too far to the left the club the club comes back in opened and that’s a weak grip. If they’re too far to the right they might come in closed and that’s a strong grip and it might go left.

The first thing you do is fix face. And how you fix face is through the release. And as I said, in a sliced shot, the conditions are: the toe of the club is behind the heel, the clubhead is behind the hands, the right palm is at the sky. the left palm is at the ground, the right forearm is underneath the left, and the left is over the right. And a hooked shot is the opposite where the toe of the club has passed the heel, the clubhead has passed the hands, the right palm is to the ground, the left palm is at the sky and the right forearm has rotated over the left. Each one of those are variables I will utilize with an individual to overcome a sliced shot, and to create more of a hook so they can get rid of their slice.

I recommend to people – once they develop a key thought that works to overcome the slice – I recommend they hit a bucket of hooks. And what happens is, when you slice it, the body grabs ahold of a particular feeling, which adds up to slice. And when you hook a bucket it gets introduced to the body that it can feel this (a hook) just as well as that (a slice). And next thing you know, the body will re-adjust the timing of that release of those variables so that you start hitting it straighter automatically without trying to hook it.

Another good drill to help promote release by staying behind the ball and level is to hit balls with your feet together because then you can’t move laterally. Keeping your feet together allows me to stay right here where the ball is and work on this release. Another good drill for release is the split-handed grip. All you’re trying do is feel the right hand over take the left and let the forearms cross or touch through the swing. And that will really promote excessive release and a hook shot.”

CJ’s take:

I hit the driving range on back-to-back days with all of this stuff fresh in my mind and written down in a notebook for back-up – just in case my mind failed me.

I’m not going to say that I didn’t slice a couple of shots during my two hour-long sessions, because that would make my pants catch on fire and my nose would grow, and I don’t want either of those things to happen.

I can safely say, however, that I have trained my body to feel the difference between a hook and a slice – right palm down instead of up, club face closed instead of wide open. When I want to hook the ball, I can hook it. When I want to slice it, I can slice it. And for the final 15 minutes of my first session I found a swing slot that was creating the cleanest shots I’ve hit since the end of last summer.

Now that I am able to consistently feel the difference between a hook and a slice, I know I’m getting close. And when the results do come I’ll know why.

More importantly, though, when my swing fails me and starts producing boomerangs, I’ll know how to adjust on the fly.