My driver isn’t keen on stickers, but I am ! I’m a huge fan of stickers. I have to say that after 35 years of teaching, including quite a few years in nursery school, stickers have become part of my daily life.

In nursery school, we use stickers for everything :
– to learn to count
– to create logical sequences
– to identify objects
– to create paths that help the hand learn to write,

Some of you have no doubt been keen users of Post-it notes at work or at home.

You’ve stuck them on the fridge door, on mirrors or on the front door to remind yourselves of things you need to do.

For me, it’s stickers.

Before I explain why my driver doesn’t like stickers, I need to tell you a little bit about this driver.
About ten years ago, I visited an ‘adoption centre’ – a place where you can adopt golf clubs, some of which are old and worn out, whilst others aren’t quite so old ; sometimes they’ve simply been neglected by their owners, who’ve abandoned them.
This place could be called the SPCG (Society for the Protection of Golf Clubs), but it chose a different name : it’s called ‘the trocathlon’.

That’s where I met my faithful companion. At the time, he was still young and dashing, but I realised straight away why he’d been abandoned.
It was because of the ‘tattoo’ he had on his neck.

Indeed, looking beneath his head, I saw that dreadful number engraved in one corner : 8.5 !

And I realised straight away that despite his prestigious lineage (my driver is a scion of the famous Titleist family), his previous owner hadn’t managed to tame him.

I took an instant liking to this driver, despite its handicap. And it looked at me so sadly, as if to say : ‘Come on, adopt me – I promise I’ll be very well-behaved’.

As if !

No sooner had we got home than its true nature took over. He started acting up, sending my balls hurtling into the woods to the right of the fairways.
Worse still, especially on hot days, he’d send them straight off to cool off in the large pond to the left of the green.

In short, for a while, he stubbornly refused to take a quiet stroll with me down the middle of the fairway.

Through hard work and persuasion, I eventually managed to channel his energy a little. It took me a while, but for the past few months he’s been kindly agreeing, most of the time, to take a more measured swing and land the ball about 200 metres in front of me, which suits me perfectly at my advanced age.

There’s still one small problem : this driver is still rather stubborn, and every now and then he fancies hitting the ball like a donkey.
That’s quite normal – I bought him in French Catalonia. So this driver is Catalan, just like me, and the emblem of the French Catalans is a donkey. You can’t deny your origins.

The problem is that when it hits like a donkey, the ball starts flying off into the woods or into the ponds again. So I had to find a way to stop that.

Let’s get back to the stickers.

The pros rightly tell us that when faced with a challenge, it’s better not to think about what you mustn’t do, but rather what you must do.
This is particularly true, for example, when you have to play over a water hazard : it’s better to think about where you want the ball to land on the fairway beyond the water, rather than thinking about not hitting the ball into the water.

But with my driver, it’s more complicated than that.

If I tell him what I want him to do, he just looks at me and laughs, and does exactly as he pleases. So I’ve decided to give him three stickers. I’ve stuck these three stickers on top of his head.

Each of these stickers has a letter on it : N, O and N, and as you can see, they spell out the word ‘NO’.

Every time I place my driver in front of me, I read the word ‘NO’ in my head – and sometimes out loud – and my old driver realises that it MUST NOT swing like a donkey, but instead make a much slower and much smoother swing that will keep the ball on the fairway in front of me.

So, in my last round the day before yesterday, this enabled me to place 100 per cent of my drives in the middle of the fairway.

My scorecard wasn’t exactly impressive, though – but that’s down to other factors.
I’m also having a bit of trouble getting to grips with my sand wedge at the moment. And sometimes with my putter.

That’s another story I’ll tell you about soon.