![\"\"](\"http:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2013\/01\/Orange-NationalCircularRange.jpg\")
<\/a>Orange County National's Circular Range--Demo Day Venue<\/p><\/div>\n
On a splendidly sunny but cool morning, the vendors set up booths around the perimeter, with Nike and Callaway and TaylorMade and Cobra more or less anchoring the cardinal points on the compass, while the aspiring companies and hopeful inventors occupied fill-in spots among and between the grand pooh-bahs.\u00a0\u00a0 Color is a big theme among clubs these days, from Cobra\u2019s orange to TaylorMade\u2019s iconic white to Nike\u2019s cool black.\u00a0 Now I have no doubt, as Graeme McDowell shrewdly pointed out when Rory McIlroy\u2019s defection to Nike was announced to great fanfare in Abu Dhabi, that all of the leading club manufacturers make great equipment, and a player\u2019s choice of what equipment to use is as fickle at the end of the day as his choice of what car to drive.\u00a0 The PGA Touring pros have an entirely different relationship to their clubs than you or I, not least because their talent and experience yields feedback at a level incomprehensible to us.\u00a0 A great NBA player once came out for a pre-game shoot-around and after one shot called for maintenance, because to him the rim was clearly off.\u00a0 The crew came out with tape measures and a level and sure enough, the front of the rim was 1\/8 of an inch lower than it was supposed to be.\u00a0 He was one of maybe forty people on the planet who could have noticed that\u2014and the PGA Tour players have the same finely calibrated sense of their equipment.<\/p>\n
That being said, there is also no doubt that if it needed to, Nike\u2019s crack engineering and equipment development team could reverse-engineer any clubs Rory likes, tweak their appearance and put the swoosh on them.\u00a0 I am not saying that is what happened, I am just pointing out the a golf club is not a particularly complicated piece of equipment, and if a Chinese car company could reverse engineer a BMW, Nike could do the same for a golf club.\u00a0 But Nike\u2019s staff can also work with Rory, as they have with Tiger, to produce clubs exactly to his liking, which may in turn influence what you or I may want to buy, without changing our skill level or results over the course of a summer much if at all.<\/p>\n
But the hope that we can get better is what drives us.\u00a0 David Jacobson, Peter\u2019s brother, provides the best illustration I\u2019ve heard about how hope animates every golfer\u2019s quest to improve.\u00a0 When his dad was ill and only a\u00a0month or so\u00a0away from dying,\u00a0David’s dad called\u00a0and said he needed to meet him at the range right away.\u00a0 \u201cI think I\u2019ve got it figured out,\u201d he said, and wanted to share his discovery.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s the chi<\/em> of golf.<\/p>\n The Golf Swing Shirt<\/strong><\/p>\n And it\u2019s that same spirit that moves someone like Ray Rapcavage, otherwise occupied making a living in commercial real estate in New Jersey, to invent the Golf Swing Shirt<\/a>, a cross between a crossing guard\u2019s bib and a strait-jacket that earned the endorsement of none other than Jimmy Ballard, the guru of \u201cconnection.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Ray says that he was practicing in his yard one late winter\u2019s day, getting ready for his first round of the season, when he shanked three balls in a row off the side of his house.\u00a0 In frustration, he jerked his wool sweater over his head, and in trying to put it back on somehow got all entangled and the next thing he knew he had both arms down one sleeve.\u00a0 He grabbed his wedge and hit a shot anyway, and lo and behold, it was good.\u00a0 He hit another, with an equally satisfying result.\u00a0 He had a friend in the garment business, and between them they stitched up a prototype, which Ray wore to his course, where he shot 72.\u00a0 Eureka.<\/p>\n Padraig Harrington Endorses Swing Shirt<\/p><\/div>\n With a little more tweaking, he developed a version for the market, and began showing it to PGA pros in New Jersey.\u00a0\u00a0It starts with\u00a0a basic sleeveless tee-shirt-like body (made of stretchable nylon fabric) with what Ray calls the \u201ccenter trunk sleeve\u201d\u2014the funnel of fabric that holds your arms against your side while aiming your hands toward the grip position–attached to the front. \u00a0Most of the local pros liked it, Ray says, because getting amateurs to take their hands out of the swing and move in the connected way Ballard likes is one of the toughest skills to teach.\u00a0\u00a0 The Golf Swing Shirt made it impossible not<\/em> to swing connected.\u00a0 Only one pro said he didn\u2019t like it\u2014he loved<\/em> it, he told\u00a0Ray,\u00a0but he\u00a0didn\u2019t want to sell it because he thought it would make his instruction obsolete.<\/p>\n I slipped one on and took a few swings on Demo Day.\u00a0 At first I felt like I was on my way to an arraignment just hoping to make bail, but once I got over how tight my hands felt when I first gripped the club, I was thrilled with the results\u2014every shot high and straight (the test club was a forged wedge), although Ray says most players hit the ball a little thin the first few passes.<\/p>\n The shirt now is designed with a pocket\u00a0you can slip the center trunk sleeve into, so if you buy it in black or white rather than orange (the three color choices available), you could play a practice round without looking as if there are bloodhounds on your trail.\u00a0 I bought one and look forward to trying it out on the range and even on the course when I get home.\u00a0 I won\u2019t shoot 72\u2014Ray, after all, is a 3 handicap, so a 72 is always within range\u2014but I would hope to break 80, and if I do the Golf Swing Shirt will not only have Padraig Harrington\u2019s endorsement, it will have mine.<\/p>\n<\/a>