Chris Kirk's Lefty Experiment

Johnny Bulla, tour pro of an earlier era, was a more serious southpaw

Chris Kirk, a tall, strong Southerner, won The Sentry in impressive fashion on Sunday as the PGA Tour started its 2024 season with a birdie fest on Maui. Kirk finished at 29 under par to edge Sahith Theegala by one shot for his sixth career victory on an unusually calm Hawaiian day when the field averaged 66.66 on the par 73 Plantation course at Kapalua. It was the lowest single-round scoring on record since the tour began keeping detailed records in 1983.

A footnote to Kirk’s victory was seeing over the weekend one of his Instagram posts from last fall. He was swinging left-handed in the video clip and noting how he had shot an 82 with a goal of breaking 80.  

Kirk, who is 38 and the father of three, was asked about it when talking with reporters after winning The Sentry, saying he started playing golf from the opposite side when he was younger. “Before I had kids, some of my friends and I would play every day for a week left-handed,” Kirk said. “We were all terrible. It was just a lot of talking crap to each other and just having fun goofing off. That’s mostly what it is now. It’s just fun.”

A beautiful approach to close range on the 17^th hole secured The Sentry for Kirk. “For me to feel really great about a shot that I hit right-handed, it’s got to be something phenomenal, something like I hit on 17 today,” he said. “But left-handed, if I hit the fairway or if I hit a 7-iron on the green, like, hell, yeah, that's awesome. You know, like, you make two pars in a row, I mean, that's unbelievable. It brings back a little bit of the kind of childlike nature of the game, and my expectations are so low that it is way easier to be happy about what I'm doing than it is right-handed,”

Kirk’s experimentation from the port side made me think of another tour pro who stood 6-foot-3 and grew up in the South, although Johnny Bulla’s left-handed golf was more than a lark.

Bulla, born in 1914, was a contemporary of the Hall of Fame trio of Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead and was particularly good friends with Snead. Bulla won once on tour, at Los Angeles in 1941, and was runner-up in the Open Championship in 1939 and 1946. He was a premium ball-striker but struggled on the greens, sometimes to such a degree of disgust with his handsy stroke that he threw the offending putter. “I’m going to have to get a pilot’s license for this thing,” Bulla said during the ’39 Open, “because it’s always flying.”

Bulla was adamant that he would have enjoyed more success swinging from the port side. But growing up when he did, many people were discouraged from being lefty. He recalled being hit by a ruler in school in North Carolina to dissuade him from writing his natural way. He learned to play golf right-handed as well, at a time when left-handed clubs were hard to come by, but never felt completely comfortable.

“Golf was so natural for Snead,” Bulla told me in a 1990s interview. “It wasn’t natural for me. I was left-handed and always fighting it.”

In middle age, Bulla began practicing and playing a lot with a left-handed set and sometimes putted southpaw when playing right-handed.

Some of the members at the club where he was the head professional were mystified when they saw Bulla hitting balls left-handed and skeptical that he could do much that way. “One of them told me I was going to ruin my game doing that,” Bulla said, who presently got that member and a couple of the club’s other good players in a game in which he played lefty.

“On the first tee, if I hit it a foot I hit it 300 yards,” Bulla recalled. “I shot 36 on the front and 40 on the back. I just killed ’em, and that shut ’em up. In a year’s time I could break par. It was natural. I’d have been a hell of a player if I had played left-handed.”

Bulla was convinced other golfers also were held back by not playing their natural way and was fascinated by handedness and ocular dominance. A friend of Bobby Jones, Bulla recalled a trap-shooting experience with the legendary amateur.

“He’d hit 10 to 12 targets,” Bulla said. “I said, ‘Bob, you’ve got to get your dominant eye with the barrel.’ So, I showed him. The first time he shot left-handed, he broke 22. Bob was left-eye dominant.”

Bulla, who passed away in 2003 at 89, tinkered around playing left-handed as long he was able to get out on the course and once finished second in the national lefty championship. Kay Cornelius, a teaching professional in Arizona, where Bulla settled after his tour days, took lessons from him when she was a teenager. Her father, Bill, played a lot of golf with Bulla.

“My dad and a couple of others were in a game with Johnny, who went to his car after nine,” Cornelius said. “He switched to his left-handed clubs at the turn and still kicked their butts.”