How One Pro Found New Golf Love With Old Ideas

If you follow Phil Blackmar’s blog, you  know he can provide some compelling ideas on golf. The 6′-7″ pro has three PGA Tour wins and now is a regular on-course reporter during GolfChannel’s coverage of the Champions Tour.

Blackmar says he lost his love for the game back in 2000. However, he rediscovered his long-forgotten passion for the game in a surprising manner.

I didn’t play at all for about 5 years. Then in 2006, out of work and needing to make a living, I embarked on the Pga tour Champions which lasted about 5 years until I quit again. Instead of being fun, the game had turned into a means to an end, an end which was quickly looking more and more like the Bellevue Psych ward.

Growing up, through college, mini tour years and into the beginning of my tour career, golf had been a game. Sure, to be honest, I probably enjoyed the competitive side of playing for money the most, but I still approached it as a game. Then, sometime early in my 16 year Pga tour career, the game became drudgery.

It wasn’t until recently playing a one club match with Craig Perks, Todd Green and Gary Christian on a windy Sunday afternoon in Jacksonville, Fl., that I realized what I had done to take the fun out of the game that I used to love to play.

One club in hand, we scampered around 20 something holes at a municipal course that was closed due to heavy morning rains. There were no putters, no wedges and we played from approximately 6500 yards while giving each other grief at every opportunity. I had a blast taking a 4 iron and trying to shape iron shots, bunker shots, chips, putts and all. It was a test to find a way to manipulate a 4 iron to do what it wasn’t designed to do. 

That night I realized, that while I still made adjustments occasionally on the course, my primary concern had become making a swing and I had quit playing a game. And while I knew this already, I realized I didn’t fully appreciate the depth of what had been slapping me in the face all these years. Where there is satisfaction in engineering a solution, there is joy in artistry. More than that, satisfaction in engineering only takes place with a good result, but there can be fun in a “watch this” sort of attitude that is willing to try to play a shot a certain way even though it’s not pulled off. To create a couple of shots in a round with an artistic mind set can bring you back again and again and again.

Blackmar continues about going back to old equipment–clubs that allowed for more artistry than merely smashing straight shots a long way. I’m not sure about hitting ancient sticks. But when walking, I will take out either the odd or even irons to reduce weight. The added value is creating shots when confronted with in-between club distances. It refreshingly harkens back to the artistry required to manufacture shots by guile and feel. Some of my best scores are shot that way–and its darn fun too.

There’s been talk of maybe bringing back the one-club event. It was a popular format back in the early days of the Teebox Golf Show. I (and you)  just have to convince Craig Rosengarden to do it.