Golf: Fighting the Straight Ball

Low handicappers take heart! Don’t yawn with ennui as drive after drive soars 275 yds. down the middle of the fairway. Don’t sigh as your approaches bite dead in the center of the green, and your putts plunk gently into the cup. Live a little. “Amaze your friends. Open a whole new golfing world,” advises Paul Hahn in a new book, Trouble Shots (McKay; $4.95).

How? First get into trouble. Hook the ball up against a tractor shed on the lefthand side of the fairway. Then try the Upside Down Shot, by reversing a No. 7 iron and swinging lefthanded. Then there is the Hanging Lie for those happy times when the ball nestles on the far lip of a trap; back to the pin, you scoop up the ball with a wedge, and flip it over your head onto the green. After that there’s the Kneeling Shot. “For any distance from 180 yds. to 230 yds.,” writes Hahn, “this shot is amazingly simple. On two occasions I have rimmed the cup from 200 yds. away using the kneeling stance.”

“A Little Hocus-Pocus.” The self-styled “Wizard of Clubs,” Paul Hahn, 46, is the world’s acknowledged expert at “devious ways of hitting the ball.” A teaching pro since he was 18, Hahn took a fling at the P.G.A. tournament circuit after World War II, quit after two years (“I wasn’t making any money”), and went back to telling duffers the difference between a mashie and a niblick. To keep himself amused, he tried “a little hocuspocus” on the practice tee, and club members started showing up to applaud such antics as hitting two balls simultaneously, one with a hook, the other with a slice. Aha! thought Hahn, and hit the road as a trick-shot artist. In the 15 years since, Hahn has visited 37 countries, traveled 1,500,000 miles. Today, his income from exhibitions, movies, TV, books and newspaper columns runs to $100,000 a year.

As far as the commercial airlines are concerned, Hahn is public enemy No. 1. The flat rate for transporting a golf bag in the U.S. is $4, and his weighs 80 Ibs. One club has a rubber hose for a shaft; another is hinged in four places, still another has a shaft 12 ft. long. A canny showman, Hahn modifies his routine periodically to keep it fresh. He no longer, for instance, performs his William Tell Shot—driving the ball off a tee clutched in the teeth of a pretty girl.

Look, One Hand. At an exhibition in Caracas last week, Hahn walked down a line of six balls, swinging onehanded and switching from left to right, knocked them 130 yds. or so. He drove 225 yds. off a tee 3 ft. high, poked fun at golfers who fuss about leaves and such around their ball, by covering his ball with a sheet of newspaper and picking it off cleanly. Hooking and slicing madly, Hahn cracked: “To a lot of you, these shots aren’t too unusual.” Then he boomed a perfect screamer 250 yds. down the middle. “I just can’t seem to get rid of that straight ball,” he said. “I’ve been fighting it for years.”