Hank Haney Got Mad This Week

RUSH: I made Hank Haney really mad yesterday. I made Hank… (interruption) No. No. (laughing) It’s ’cause I haven’t practiced since I last had a lesson. I made Hank Haney really mad. It reminded me of high school football. If we lost a game, we knew practice the next week was going to be a b-i-itch. Five straight hours on the range with one club, a seven iron. No breaks. Then we went into the putting center where they put all this equipment on your putter, infrared laser beams and so forth to measure everything about your stroke. It’s about a 15-foot putt. I made five out of six. They spent ten minutes telling me what I was doing wrong. (laughing)

I’m not kidding, five outta six of them and I got ten minutes telling me what I was doing wrong, because, you know, Hank’s gotta do his shtick on putting. So five out of six, I made ’em, and I had to sit there and watch on the video screen the impact what was happen club head, the arc of my swing, the backswing, where it related to the pro’s backswing. All this stuff, ten minutes of stuff on a computer monitor. I made five out of six. If I’d have made six out of six I’d have probably had to sit there and 20 minutes. (interruption) Well, I don’t know, you… (interruption) No, you’ll see more than that. (interruption) No, you might see just the one out of six, I don’t know. We’ll see.

My hands were bloodied yesterday! Five straight hours! My right hand, yeah, blisters and all kinds of stuff. Five straight hours without a break. Now, but I tell you what. There was one point during the day where we’re inside the practice facility, and I’m videotaped — swing, ball contact and everything — and I’m finally pulling off something Haney is trying to get me to do, I look around Golf Channel guys, ‘You get that?’ They’re not there. They are on a break! (laughing) I looked around and I said, ‘Did you guys get…?’ and there’s nobody there! That’s what I did for fun. (interruption) Well, it was a lousy slate of games on the NFL yesterday. I picked a Sunday, but… (interruption) You just don’t think it was lousy because your Cowboys won. It was a lousy slate of games. You’re going to have Sundays like that in the NFL.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Hank was great. I played with him in Hawaii, spent a lot of time out there and I haven’t played since because I have a job. I’ve been busy, and you could see Hank was a little put out with me, a little sad, a little disappointed. So I paid for it. ‘Okay, you’re not going to practice? Well, it’s boot camp today, pal!’ Bam! Bam! Bam! One club. And of course one of the reasons amateurs like me never go to instructors is because they tear you town and start you over again. ‘Cause there is a right way to do this, and you try and teach me the right way to do it, and I’ve been doing it wrong for 13 years. But even doing it the wrong way I score well now and then but I’m not consistent with it.

So I’m trying to get more consistent with this. But it’s tough starting all over and always saying, ‘No, we’re going to work with what you got. We’ll just fine-tune it and tweak it.’ Ha! It’s all being torn down. It has to be, because I’ve got some things I do need to fix if I’m going to improve the game, and that’s what he’s trying to do. But I’ve never spent five hours on the range. Maybe ten minutes max. We never got out to a golf course. We were going to Hank Haney Ranch in Dallas yesterday. I thought we were going to see cows and cattle and horses and so forth, but it’s actually a professional golf training center and so forth. Also speaking of all this, people want to know when the airdate is. This starts January 11th. The premiere show for the Golf Channel Haney Project is January 11th on The Golf Channel, channel 218 on your DirecTV tuner

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: What? Yeah, we do have some Haney photographs, some from Hawaii. I don’t particularly like ’em so I haven’t put ’em up. And they did send me one from yesterday. You can see the intensity on the one yesterday. It’s on my home computer. I’ll use my screen-sharing app to go get it and I’ll have them put it up. Yeah, I’ll put it up. I’ll send it to Koko and we’ll either put it on Facebook or our Web page, whatever. Yeah, it was intense. ‘Intense’ is a way to describe this yesterday. I don’t know. You people that have never played golf, you don’t understand. They ought to make prisoners play the game. That’s how frustrating it is. It is punishment to play the game ’cause it is so difficult. Now, I say that there’s one way to play the game. There’s one way to do it right. There’s one way to actually impact, strike the ball a correct way.

You can play the game and if you don’t mind not being very good you can enjoy it but if you want to do it right there’s one way. No matter how you get there, whatever your swing looks like, at the moment of impact (the ball strike) there’s one way to do this right. He’s trying to teach me that. And it’s tough, because I have 13 years of, they say, ‘muscle memory.’ Muscles don’t have memory but I’ve got 13 years of built-in physical behavior in my golf swing. Any time you start trying to change that, at age 59 — and after the taping of the episode, there’s always a post-episode interview off camera. The producer’s off camera. So he said, ‘What do you think about today?’ I said, ‘I gotta tell you: If the lessons ended today, I could not make a triple bogey anywhere.’

In those five hours, I didn’t hit one shot that I liked. Not one. I didn’t hit. Not one. Maybe there was one the ball striking was correct. Mainly, I did not hit the ball nearly as well as I do in my old, incorrect way. But that’s the way it is. Who knows? Next time I go out it may all click in. At some point it has to, if I keep this up. The challenge is to not revert to the old swing and the old patterns, the old memories that I have, and he’s making some pretty good fixes in the swing and the swing plane and so forth, but not one shot. So I’m telling the producer in the off-camera interview, ‘No, there wasn’t anything today I was particularly proud of. Nothing that I was particularly happy about.’

He said, ‘Really?’

I said, ‘Well, this is reality TV, isn’t it? I mean, you want me to tell you the truth.’

See, reality TV, folks, is just typical TV, but the script writers are not union. (laughing) It’s what it is.