Driver Training

From a prominent Los Angeles sportscaster to a PGA certified teaching professional, Joe Buttitta’s job title has undergone quite a transformation since the mid-1980s.

One thing that hasn’t changed is his passion for golf, the game he calls the hardest to master.

“I don’t care what Ted Williams said about hitting a baseball,” said Buttitta, a teaching pro at Westlake Village Golf Course. “This is the hardest game in the world. When I was broadcasting [for] the Angels, there was a group of us, Doug DeCinces, Bobby Grich, Rod Carew, Rob Wilfong and a few others, who would bring our clubs on the road. And Rod Carew, a seven-time American League batting champion, could not figure out how to hit a golf ball straight. . . . That’s when I started thinking that hitting a golf ball . . . where you want it to go is incredibly hard.”

Buttitta’s road to becoming a PGA teaching pro was one of circumstance.

Although he taught golf in physical education classes at Cal State Northridge from the early 1970s until the mid-1980s, sports broadcasting was his full-time job.

He was a sportscaster on radio station KGIL-AM in San Fernando from 1972-1980 and got his first taste of television in 1979 when he filled in occasionally for Lynn Shackelford as the sports anchor on KHJ-TV Channel 9.

Within a year, he was the weekend sports anchor for KTLA-TV Channel 5.

In the fall of 1980, he became the weeknight sports anchor and was hired as the station’s play-by-play announcer for UCLA football and basketball, and the Angels.

“I had the best job in town,” said Buttitta, 58. “My God. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, and then in 1985, I got fired.”

Buttitta, who lives in Simi Valley with his wife Teri and their 11-year old son Joey, spent the next three years as the sports anchor for KTTV-TV Channel 11 but was released from that job as well.

“I still don’t know why I got fired [from either job],” he said. “Nobody ever gave me a reason. I begged them, ‘Tell me a lie, give me a reason, anything.’ And they’d say, ‘Well, it’s just time for a change.’ And I’d say, ‘That’s not a reason.’ ”

Buttitta tried desperately to get back into television, but his straight-forward delivery was no longer valued in a market that was beginning to put flash and gimmicks ahead of substance.

“My style when I was on television was pretty bland, vanilla,” Buttitta said. “I never thought that I was the show. My highlights were the show. People wanted to see Pete Rose hit a triple so you showed clips. Today, the [sportscasters] are the show.”

Although Buttitta admits to going through a “woe is me” funk and sulking around the house for several months after being fired by KTTV, he got a job in 1989 in the pro shop at Westlake Village Golf Course and giving lessons there.

He did that for three years before becoming a full-time instructor in 1992.

He began his three-year apprenticeship as a PGA teaching professional in 1993 and was certified in 1996.

He enjoys his job immensely, but there are times when he marvels at how a kid from the Italian section of the Bronx became enamored with golf.

“I was a traditional football, baseball, basketball kind of guy,” said Buttitta, who moved to California in 1953 when he was 11. “Anything else didn’t matter. . . . I couldn’t afford golf and didn’t want to wear the white sissy stuff for tennis. Now I think they’re both wonderful sports.”

Buttitta, who graduated from Notre Dame High in 1959, was introduced to golf in a physical education class as a freshman at San Fernando Valley State, which became Cal State Northridge.

“The first ball I ever hit, without any instruction, was high and straight and beautiful,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Man this is great.’ But for the rest of the hour, I couldn’t get the ball off the ground. . . . That hooked me. The challenge of it.”

Buttitta was a first baseman and pitcher--a term he says to use loosely--in college from 1960-1963 and graduated with a bachelor of arts in journalism in 1964. But he spent much of his spare time during those years hitting golf balls.

“My friends thought I was crazy,” Buttitta said. “But I remember the feeling I got the first time I hit the ball properly. I can’t describe it, but it was just wonderful.”

A desire for his clients to experience the same euphoria has made Buttitta a convert to what is known as Natural Golf.

The technique, which has nothing to do with playing in an environmentally friendly manner, is rather simple.

You grip the club with the palm of your dominant hand (right hand for right-handers) instead of the fingers, and take a wider than normal stance to inhibit hip turn.

Buttitta and Natural Golf proponents claim this makes it easier for golfers to get the club head square at impact, leading to more accurate shots without losing distance.

“I thought it was a gimmick when I heard about it,” Buttitta said. “But I tried it and within two or three days, I said, ‘There’s something here.’. . . . It’s like when the Fosbury Flop started in the high jump. People said, ‘You can’t jump over the bar backward.’ But now everyone does because it’s an easier way to do it. Mechanically it’s an easier way to do it and so is Natural Golf. It’s an easier way to hit a golf ball.”

Does that mean that every player on the PGA Tour will be playing Natural Golf in 15 or 20 years? Buttitta doubts it.

He says there’s too much money to be made playing for conventional golf club makers, but he plans to expound the virtues of Natural Golf for years to come.

“Teaching people to play golf and coming to a golf course every day is pretty nice,” he said. “I can see myself staying in this business for a long time.”