STUDENT SPOTLIGHT – ALEJANDRO ALVAREZ
By Bill Baldes
My name is Bill Baldes and I have been a certified USGTF Master Golf Teaching Professional for over 25 years. After certification, I had various teaching assignments. I taught at high schools, colleges, America’s Favorite Golf Schools and also gave private lessons. For the past 25 years I have been the only continuous teacher at the Tappan Golf Center in Tappan, New York. During all these years I have not had a client as interesting as Al Alvarez.
Al is the owner of a medical services business that operates in several states. He and his family escaped from Cuba and left everything behind. They came to this country with nothing but the shirt on their backs.
I met Al in September of last year. He had just begun to take up golf and he realized he needed lessons. He has been playing baseball and softball for 25 years but found out that his skills did not transfer over to golf very well. He said he was planning on becoming a very good golfer.
His athletic skills were obvious. He had the typical issues associated with a baseball player that takes up golf. Because the ball is sitting on a tee, they think they can swing away with all their might. I explained to him you can, but there are no foul balls in golf, only out of bounds and penalty strokes. So, we started on the journey of learning how to swing a golf club and not a baseball bat. He told me, “Every time I swing I try to put the ball in the woods at the back of the range.”
He took several lessons and his improvement was remarkable. His playing partners were in disbelief of the change in his swing. They were inspecting his clubs and questioning him as to how this could happen. He told them he was watching videos on YouTube all the time and it seemed to work. They have not figured out he is taking lessons.
We started lessons again this past May, with him taking a lesson almost every week. He is an incessant practicer and worked on what he learned after each lesson. When he arrived at the next lesson, he would proficiently demonstrate the skill he had just been taught. If I challenged him to do something, it was like lighting the kindle to start a fire. He would exhibit his understanding of the skill and typically demonstrate it to me. He would then practice it and show me at the next lesson his ability to perform it. I showed him how to hit a fade and a draw at the end of one of the lessons. The next lesson he told me he used that knowledge to draw a ball around a tree and it landed on the green. His playing partners went insane.
It is a joy to teach someone so determined and dedicated to the game of golf. Although it was only his second year of playing, he just missed breaking 90 on a very difficult course. Lessons are done for the year. I expect if we continue again next year and if he practices like he did in the past, he will break 80 as well. That was his goal when he started, and I have no doubt he will achieve it. Quite an accomplishment for a 65-year-old man.
