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A good man has just died, giving him a merciful release from a wretched illness. Gavin Christie was a professional golfer but more particularly a golf teacher and a very good one. The names of those he taught is like a Who’s Who of British professionals in the past 50 years and include Ian Woosnam, who got to be world No 1, Mark James and Howard Clark, stalwarts of Europe Ryder Cup teams, David Russell, and Roger Chapman, who won the Senior US Open and Senior PGA in 2012.
He engaged with them in an easy way, often saying little other than “aye.” Stuart Christie, one of Gavin’s sons, recalls watching his father working with Woosnam before a Ryder Cup at the Belfry. “They were there for half an hour and nothing was said,” Stuart recalled. “No, that’s not right. At the end Woosie said: ‘Thanks Gav.’ ”
“Gavin was always up for a discussion,” said James, Christie’s longest-serving pupil. “He would hear me out and at the end he would tell me when and where I was wrong. And he was usually right.”
James is credited with giving Christie the nickname “rhino” because he had a thick skin and charged a lot.
“I started working with Gavin in 2010 and he told me my ball flight was too high,” Chapman said. “He wanted me to get more lag into my swing and compress the ball more. You could say that my winning those two US majors within 50 days of one another made 2012 a bumper year for us both.”
“Gavin was unlike many of today’s coaches in that he refused to be at the beck and call of any of his pupils,” David Jones, the northern Irishman, said. “They had to fit in with him. He was very uncompromising, never a man to take an easy shilling. He was a proud Fife (Scotland) man. If you asked him where he was going he’d say, “Home to the Kingdom.”
Christie’s death brings into focus the differences in teaching styles that exist in golf, old and new, traditional and contemporary. He was old-school, like John Jacobs, who taught that the ball flight always indicated what the swing was doing, and Harvey Penick. Bob Torrance preferred aphorisms delivered in his gruff Scottish voice, such as: “It’s no use having arms like Popeye if you’ve got legs like Olive Oyl,” or to someone who is swinging too quickly, “There’s no rush. The train doesn’t leave until half past 6.”
Christie’s most technical gadget was the shooting stick he carried when he walked round watching one of his pupils. He used his eyes to analyse, and Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf was like a bible to him.
“Tom Haliburton at Wentworth used to tell me that Gavin was rather laid back as an assistant but that he was an excellent teacher,” Bernard Gallacher, former Ryder Cup player and three times captain, now captain of the PGA, said. “He could get club golfers hitting the ball well very quickly.”
DJ Russell, another pupil, remembered an idiosyncrasy of Christie’s. “He used to like to stand in the shank position,” Russell said. The memory of that brought a smile to Howard Clark’s face.
“The first time he did that (with me) I pulled away,” Clark recalled. “He was about 10 or 12 feet away and I said to him: ‘Stand back. I might hit you.’
“ ‘No you won’t,’ he said. ‘You’re all right.’
“He wanted to see the clubface coming through the ball from the right angle. He couldn’t see that from behind the person. With Gavin it was all in the impact, the build up of power, the strike of the ball and the follow-through. The hands control the clubhead and the hands must get past the ball before the clubhead. He used to talk about the beat of a swing.
“Gavin had a lot of one-liners, most of which you can’t print, but were quite funny. I remember his words to me after I had won my singles in the 1995 Ryder Cup and put us (Europe) in a position where we could win. He sidled over and said: ‘Aye.’ He used that word a lot. ‘Aye, we can live off that for the next 10 years.’ ”
He loved teaching, whether amateurs or professionals, grown-ups or children, and he imparted his knowledge simply and vividly.
The trick of golf coaching is working out how much of the old school, the Christie/Torrance school, should be blended with current thinking, influenced by all the modern coaching aids that are available. “No one size fits all,” Neil Matthews, the Wales national coach, said. “It is quite easy to work out what the problem is but it is quite hard to know what to do about it.”
Gallacher said: “You can get only get so much out of TrackMan. It is not for everyone.”
Barney Puttick, the English teaching pro said: “Generally, I find that golfers of higher than 5 handicap just want to improve their swing and the best golfers want all the scientific data. As a teacher, I am only as good to someone as when I am not there. I also have to remember that there is a danger if you try and talk about, say, ground force to a 14-handicapper that he will be baffled by science.”
It is as important in 2021 as it was in 1921 for a coach to be able to impart their expertise in a way the pupil understands. With Torrance it was by using aphorisms. Remember those photographs of Nick Faldo using a beach ball and swimmers’ flotation wings when he was reconstructing his swing under the eye of David Leadbetter? These days it seems no European Tour professional worth his salt dare travel without a TrackMan or a GCQuad or a derivative in his luggage.
Christie, an old-school teacher, had the instincts of a pedagogue. He loved teaching, whether amateurs or professionals, grown-ups or children, and he imparted his knowledge simply and vividly. Right at the end he still was telling his sons: “Hit it late. Don’t fish it. You can never hit it late enough.”
One month before his 80th birthday and six days before he died, Christie received a surprise: The PGA had made him an honorary member. Never was a reward more deserved.
Top: Mark James was Gavin Christie's longest-serving pupil.
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