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Engage in a conversation with Michael Lavery and you’re liable to hear terms that don’t often pop up when golf is the subject: homunculus theory, Leonardo Da Vinci, cerebral cortex, graphology. Pretty high-falutin’ stuff when you consider that Lavery’s immediate goal is breaking the world record for the longest distance traveled while bouncing a golf ball off a hammer. But Lavery’s skill with a golf ball and club — he can hit a ball more than 350 yards from the left and right side and can also execute an array of trick shots, such as driving the ball with an upside down 3-wood — is more than a novelty. He’s convinced that he’s found a better way to learn, practice and play the game through his 20-year study of hand-eye coordination. “When I picked up golf three years ago, I told people that I was going to shoot par,” said Lavery, a 46-year-old Laguna Beach resident. “They said I was nuts since I’d picked up the game relatively late in life. But I’m well on my way.” Lavery, a painter, taught himself to be ambidextrous through emulating something the great Da Vinci was proficient in: simultaneously writing with both hands. This skill enables Lavery to serve a tennis ball at more than 100 mph with both hands and to generate phenomenal distance in golf with an amazingly short backswing. “Because I have back problems, I can’t get a shoulder turn like a lot of golfers, so I’ve learned to lift my left leg up as high as a baseball pitcher and get more than 370 yards off my drive, and hit it consistently straight,” he said. “It’s not the way most people swing, and no one would ever teach that. But it works for me.” The secret? “I’ve achieved a hand-eye coordination through training for 20 years that allows me to do things with a golf ball that most people think are impossible,” said Lavery, who spent a couple of years in the Toronto Blue Jays organization and was also an accomplished amateur in tennis and hockey. “First I just started bouncing golf balls off the wedge like Tiger, then I started using the putter face,” Lavery said. “But I did it 500 times in a row and I thought that’s kind of boring. Being an artist, I deal with hammers and I’m constantly building frames and such. So, I started fooling around with bouncing the ball off the head of a hammer. I did it 20 times and thought, ‘that’s pretty good.’ Then I started thinking, ‘why not 100?’” Lavery soon created a golf club that uses the head of a hammer welded to a 46-inch shaft. With his enhanced hand-eye coordination, Lavery can hit a ball 300 yards with a clubhead that has a surface area of less than an inch. “When I use a regulation club it’s like there’s a toaster on the clubhead, so I’m able to really whack it,” he said. And really bounce it. “I can bounce the balls running, climbing up stairs, doing just about anything,” said Lavery, who is talking to the Stanley Tool Company about trying to set the world record at its Connecticut headquarters. He plans to walk a mile while bouncing a ball off the head of a hammer. Lavery, who has immersed himself in reading about theories on how the right and left halves of the brain communicate and process information, believes that athletic performance can be enhanced by adopting those theories. “There has been a lot of research over the last 40 years about how the brain works, and they’re discovering that different portions of the brain are used in different areas of athletics,” Lavery said, citing putting as a right-brain activity (more spatial, intuitive and creative than the more logical, analytical left-brain). It stands to reason, Lavery said, that someone who isn’t good at putting can improve by increasing the use of the right side of their brain. One way to do that is to force the right side of the brain to involve itself more in activities such as handwriting. “I’ve studied the way the brain works out of curiosity and because I’m an artist and I’m wondering what you can do as an artist to enhance your creativity,” Lavery said. “I’d always played around with handwriting with both hands. I can write backwards with my left hand at the same time as writing with my right, and you can’t tell the difference. I think that’s trained my brain to do things that it otherwise wouldn’t have learned. And I think that’s why I have the ability to bounce a golf ball off a hammer, or serve a tennis ball with both hands. It’s a degree of coordination and spatial influence I wouldn’t have otherwise. Basically, I’ve taught my brain how to multitask, which helps my short-term memory, and I think that’s helped me pick up the game of golf as quickly as I have.” Lavery would love to parlay his eccentric gift into a full-time job by getting sponsors who see the entertainment and educational value in a trick-shot artist who can talk as well as perform. “I know what I’m talking about and I make these demonstrations fun,” Lavery said. “People really trip out when they see these incredible things I do. I think I’d be great for a charity golf tournament, because I can tee up a ball 4 inches off the ground, knock it 350 yards with a club with a hammer for a head and then talk about why it’s possible.” n |
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