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Bernhard Langer makes golf look easy with logic and love of learning
DELRAY BEACH, Fla. -- Bernhard Langer makes golf look easy. He makes it sound easy.
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Standing on the range at Delaire Country Club, he explains to a small gathering of members and guests at a private Adams Golf event how to work the golf ball. For him, there's nothing different in hitting the ball dead straight, hooking it left or a pulling off a banana cut. It's a matter of where he grips the club and where he aims his feet -- both questions of how far left or right he should go.
Psssh. The ball flies right and turns left on cue. Pssh. There goes that butter cut that lands soft.
Even when he's demonstrating how to hit shots poorly, he does it well.
It's that approach to golf that has served the two-time Masters winner well. Langer had his best season last year on the Champions Tour, winning five times, including two major championships, bringing his tally of 50-plus majors to four.
Go ahead, make jokes about his German lineage and how he's a machine. He'll chuckle a little. However, it's a regimented approach to his game that keeps him at the top.
The approach is rooted in a love of golf. Langer still watches pro tournaments when he's not competing. He really enjoys the game, whether it's watching, competing or designing courses.
He also loves learning more about the golf swing, deepening his knowledge of a game you can never entirely know. Langer turned pro when he was 18, working as a teen on staff at a Berlin country club, giving lessons to members. He has an eye for mechanics, not just a feel for his own. As he walked up and down the line of people hacking away next to him, he quickly found trouble spots and offered precise tips to fix them. Find a problem, offer a solution.
Over time, Langer has found what works for him, and he's changed as technology evolves. He embraces launch monitors and the influx of data players have at their hands, although data can only inform his equipment choices so much. He put his hands on Adams' new Red hybrid for the first time during the demo and promptly ripped it down the middle with a perfect draw. He got another just like it and took them both on the course after the demo.
"When I make an equipment change, it has to perform as well, if not better, than what's already in the bag," Langer said. Don't mess with what works.
You'll notice Langer never grounds his driver. He learned long ago that his swing gets stuck when the club drags along the ground. He effortlessly pounds a drive 310 yards down the right side of the fairway. We'd all do a handstand as part of our pre-shot routine if we could do that a lot of the time.
However, change is coming for Langer. The game's governing bodies have outlawed the anchored putting stroke as of Jan. 1, 2016, and that means the days are number for Langer's broomstick putter. He's decided to wait until the end of the year to figure out what to do next. The Champions Tour off-season is two months, long enough, Langer said, to decide on a new approach.
Langer isn't happy he's been targeted after Webb Simpson won the U.S. Open and Ernie Els won the Open Championship with an anchored stroke. What's done is done, however, he said. He's looking for an answer. He won the Masters with a traditional stroke in 1985 and the Matt Kuchar approach in 1993. During our round together, Langer went back to that putter-grip-up-the-arm approach with a traditional-length putter from a player in our group. He stroked it cross-handed. It came up a revolution short for birdie. He'll be just fine; it's just a matter of finding what let him putt his best.
On the final hole, Langer pipes a drive down the right-side of the fairway, hugging a bunker and a hazard a little more astray. As I mistakenly try the same shot and end up with a worse fate, I joke that golf's more fun when taking a risk.
Langer laughs, then says, "What's so boring about down the middle?"
Ryan Ballengee is a Yahoo Sports contributor. Find him on Facebook and Twitter.
