Turnabout Is Fair Play : Golf: Northridge’s Perry Turner, 70, has a grasp on the game from both sides.

If you play golf, try a little experiment. Take a club out to the back yard and prepare to swing from the opposite side. If you are right-handed, as are the vast majority of golfers, put that left hand below the right hand for a change, put your right foot forward, grip the club tightly and take a big swing. A full, grunting rip.

OK, now get up off the lawn.

And before you forget, go retrieve your golf club from your neighbor’s driveway.

A bit awkward to swing that way, isn’t it?

But not for Perry Turner. The 70-year-old retired lawyer from Northridge, a member of the posh Valencia Country Club, plays golf left-handed. Or right-handed. Depends on how he is feeling. And from either side, his score is roughly the same, somewhere in the 90s, which for a man his age is all right.

Or all left.

Turner went the other way in February, converting from a left-handed player to a right-handed player because of an injury to his right elbow. Swinging left-handed caused great pain. So he tried playing right-handed, and the pain virtually disappeared.

“At first I was awful,” Turner said. “The first few swings I tried on the practice range, I missed. Whiffed. But within a day or so it started feeling comfortable and I could really work on my new game.”

The turnaround was not, however, new to Turner.

As a sandlot baseball player in the 1930s and 1940s, and a natural right-hander, he taught himself to be a switch-hitter. When he took up golf at 26 while a student at Purdue, he found a set of left-handed clubs in a sporting goods store and decided to purchase them. With a $90 investment in 1947, he had made a rather big decision.

For six years he played left-handed, but when he moved to California in the early 1950s and wanted to work hard on improving his game, he could not find a golf instructor who could teach from the left side, still a common problem for left-handed golfers.

“I tried a few and they’d look at me swing for a while and then say things like, ‘Well, everything looks OK. There’s something wrong, though, but I just can’t tell what it is. It looks so awkward.’ ”

So, with not much more thought, Turner did the only logical thing. He bought a set of right-handed clubs and began playing--and taking lessons--from that side.

As a left-handed player, Turner’s best score was in the low 90s, he said. His first round as a born-again right-hander brought a score of 117, but within a few years he was shooting in the 70s.

In 1978, Turner injured his left knee. He was unable to play golf for four or five months, he said.

“But I didn’t want to give it up. I loved the game too much,” he said. “So I found my left-handed clubs again and gave them a try. And my knee didn’t hurt much at all swinging from that side.”

Turner was a left-handed golfer. Again. And better than ever.

“By that time, I was able to take all those right-handed lessons I had taken and transpose them to the left side,” he said. “I could figure out my mistakes and correct them. I very quickly became an 11-handicap golfer from the left side.”

He continued, however, to practice from both sides. Sometimes it paid off. In a Valencia Country Club tournament a few years ago, Turner, with his ball resting against the base of a tree and unhittable from the left side, pulled out a right-handed club and saved at least two strokes with a nice shot to the green.

“Sometimes, when I was practicing left-handed and all of a sudden would take right-handed clubs and start practicing that way,” Turner said, “some guy on the tee next to me would stop and watch and say things like, ‘Now, why did you have to do that ? Are you trying to embarrass me?’ ”

But last year, the right elbow injury occurred during a round of golf. He continued playing left-handed, but the pain intensified. He began a treatment program and was unable to play for a few months.

But the right-handed clubs were still in his house gathering dust. Turner gathered them up and headed for the club.

“And the arm felt great from the right side,” he said.

In February, he began playing the course again. The country club members who knew Turner only as a left-handed golfer were startled to see him whacking the ball with equal ease as a right-hander.

“I think I’ll stay on this side from now on,” Turner said. “It feels comfortable. I think I’ve gone back and forth enough times.”