Golf : Florida Specialist Concentrates on Improving the ‘Brain’ Game

When professional golfers talk about their game, they usually tell you it’s all in their mind.

Sometimes, that’s the worst place for it to be, and now, in this age of golf doctors who fix sick swings, there is a new and expanding arena of specialists for golfers who want to play better.

One such specialist is Chuck Hogan, who wants his clients to be the best they can be.

“I try to tell them they can run their own brain,” Hogan said.

Hogan, 42, is the founder of Sports Enhancement Associates, which he began in 1983. He lives in Naples, Fla., and spends a lot of his time talking with his clients on the telephone. Last week, during the AI Star Centinela Hospital tournament at Rancho Park, he had several long-distance conversations with Colleen Walker.

“Some people can do this on their own,” Walker said. “I just happen not to have that knack.”

Walker, who finished third, also has a fourth and two seconds this year. She is one of the LPGA’s up-and-coming stars. According to Hogan, Walker will soon be something else.

“I don’t think you’ll find her winning, I think you’ll find her dominating,” he said. “She has not lost. Other people have won. She is very decisive about what she wants.”

Hogan’s ideas center on the combined functions of the brain and the rest of body.

“The brain runs a body,” he said. “You can’t make a golf swing, you can’t do anything without the mental. On the other hand, if the body isn’t expressing what the mental is doing, who cares? It’s the complete package.

“What we try to do is identify those things where people are doing them well and then amplify that stuff. Take those elements--it may be attitudinal, it may be nutritional, it may be a matter of exercise, it may be a matter of reframing information, learning how to make a good experience out of every experience. It may be a matter of perspective relative to the idea of a failure.”

Hogan’s first client was Peter Jacobsen, who signed on just before he won the Colonial in 1984. Hogan said his other PGA clients include Mark Lye, John Cook, Mike Reid, Mike Hulbert, Gary Hallberg, D. A. Weibring and Curt Byrum.

On the LPGA tour, Walker, Martha Nause, Kelly Leadbetter, Mary Beth Zimmerman, Carolyn Hill, Deedee Lasker, LeAnn Cassaday, Kathy Postlewait and Nancy Brown are his clients.

Hogan said he is not a sports psychologist.

“I am definitely an educator,” he said. “I most certainly am an ologist , one who studies. The psyche is the mind. So I am definitely an ologist of the mind, but I am not licensed as a certified psychologist. What I do is search all the realms--mental, physical, nutritional, attitudinal--and use that as an educational base and to expand choices for people.”

Hogan has a degree in education. He said he uses it to help his clients.

“I try to find out what they do well and then amplify that process,” he said. “That’s the first thing.

“Then I try to get them to explore their imagination more so that they can create more ways to do the things they want to do. They can expand their choices. I try to get them real intimate with their sensory experience: The kind of pictures they have in their head, the kind of feeling they have in their stomach, the kind of sound they have rolling around in their brain.”

For instance?

“Mike Reid. Everybody has a nice voice in their head and everybody has a voice in their head where they pick on themselves. They both have distinct locations, textures and tones.

“Mike Reid’s walking down the fairway and he’s going, ‘Mike, you jerk,’ and what we did was change the location, the rhythm, the tone, the texture of the voice in his head to one which was very loving, kind, soothing.

“So he took this voice that was somewhere way up high in the back of his head, it was screechy and high and fast and gruff, and then it came down lower in his head, and it was nice and smooth and had a very nice tone to it. It changed everything about how he feels.”

Hogan does not advertise. He said that most of the clients he really wants, he already has. The idea, he said, is to help those people utilize their own resources.

“Everybody’s got resources,” he said. “I just try to find ways for them to expand their resources. To be more precise about how they use their resources and create more choices for themselves.

“We are stimuli-response animals, no matter how sophisticated we’d like to think we are. I’m trying to get people to understand the stimuli, and, more importantly, their internal response to that stimuli. And there is no point in time when there is not stimuli and responses. I’m trying to make people more aware of how they process that information.

“There is a certain kind of character that lends itself to this kind of process. The person who is independent on one hand but receptive on the other. I’m not in the business of fixing people. Certainly Colleen is one of those kind of people who has nearly the perfect balance.”

Hogan would not call his teaching methods the wave of the future in golf instruction.

“There’s nowhere else to go,” he said. “You can only go so far with technology or technique. You have to realize that all technique is first mental anyway. If you tell somebody to keep their left arm straight, they have to represent that in their brain before they can do it with their arm. Anything physical has to be first represented in the brain.”

The best-dressed golfers? How about nobody?

But no, that’s not the answer.

Payne Stewart, Jan Stephenson and Doug Sanders are the snappiest dressers, presumably in a very limited field, according to a Golf Digest survey of tour players.

Jane Geddes, defending LPGA Championship winner, says she has fond memories of Ohio after winning the LPGA tournament and the Jamie Farr Toledo tournament in the state last year.

But she has one problem with the state, Geddes said.

“I’ve won a lot of money here, and I keep getting high tax bills from Ohio,” she said, chuckling.

Geddes, 28, will be back to try to repeat as the LPGA Championship winner when the tournament returns May 19-22 for its 11th year at the Jack Nicklaus Sports Center, near Cincinnati.

Former LPGA tournament champions Pat Bradley, Donna Caponi, Sally Little, Nancy Lopez, Patty Sheehan and Jan Stephenson are also in the field. The LPGA Championship offers a $350,000 total purse and a $52,000 first prize.

Masters champion Sandy Lyle, the first player to win three PGA tournaments in 1988, has committed to the Panasonic Las Vegas Invitational, the richest regularly scheduled event on the year.

Masters second-place finisher Mark Calcavecchia, Craig Stadler, Ben Crenshaw, Fred Couples, Greg Norman, Don Pooley, David Frost, and Ray Floyd are also signed for the 90-hole tournament, which will be played May 4-8.

If Lyle, who has 1988 tour winnings of $591,821, including the $183,800 check from his Masters victory, were to win the $250,000 first- place check at the Panasonic, he could break the tour season winnings record of $925,941 set last year by Curtis Strange.

Keeping score at home? Well, Jack Nicklaus is fond of saying that Greg Norman is probably the best golfer right now. Norman, 33, has won one major tournament, the 1986 British Open. When Nicklaus was 33, he had won 14.

Golf Notes

The second Pinfinder tournament benefitting the United Way of Orange County will be played Aug. 5 at Anaheim Hills Golf Club. A 144-player field will play, starting at 8:30 a.m. Players make an “over par” pledge as their donation to the United Way. There is a $50 entry fee. For more information, call (714) 970-7884.

Mickey Rooney and Raider quarterback Rusty Hilger have been added to a list of celebrities who will play in the third NutraSweet tournament, which will raise money for diabetes research. The May 9 event at Riviera Country Club also includes Tom Bosley, Dick Butkus, Alan Thicke, Nolan Cromwell, Mike Jerue, Johnnie Johnson and Mike Lansford. For information, call the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation at (213) 461-5816.

The third Chaminade Alumni tournament, a fund-raiser for scholarship money, will be played May 9 at Woodland Hills Country Club. . . . The Retirees Golf Assn., seems to have cornered the market on holes-in-one. In five years, members had made eight of them, and two more were made at a recent tournament at Willowick Golf Course in Santa Ana. Hal Marshall of Costa Mesa sank one on the 152-yard fourth hole, and Frank Cummings of Corona del Mar made one on the 184-yard 17th.