Federico Frangiamore Illustration by João Fazenda

David McCormick first took a golf lesson from Federico Frangiamore several years ago. “Federico asked me, ‘You want to hit some balls?’ ” McCormick recalled the other day. “I said, ‘Sure,’ and I hit some balls, and he said, ‘No, no, no! That swing is shit!’ And I thought, I’ve found my guy.” McCormick is fifty-seven. He plays most of his rounds at Marine Park, in Brooklyn, and he has a single-digit handicap. (He also runs a literary agency.) He sees Frangiamore for thirty minutes roughly once a month.

Frangiamore gives his lessons not at a golf club or a driving range but at Brooks Brothers, in the men’s sportswear department, on the third floor of the store at Forty-fourth and Madison. McCormick said, “When I met him, I’d been upstairs buying some trousers, for work, and I came down and I was, like, I didn’t know they had a golf simulator here.” The simulator is Frangiamore’s golf academy. It’s an elevated room-size box with a green-and-white wooden fence in front, and it’s equipped with artificial turf, a projection screen, ceiling-mounted sensors, high-speed cameras, and a computer. A golfer hits a ball into the screen, and the computer analyzes its speed, direction, spin, and flight path. When guys who hate shopping see the simulator, their eyes light up, and, after Frangiamore has worked on their slice for a while, they happily load up on polo shirts and seersucker shorts. That, at any rate, is the theory.

Frangiamore was born in Pordenone, Italy, north of Venice, in 1986. He’s trim and fit, he has longish brown hair, and he dresses exactly the way the resident golf professional at Brooks Brothers ought to dress: more like Ben Hogan than like John Daly. “I always admired the gentleman game,” he said. “I like the old golf shoes, I like the pants, I like the sweaters, I like the ties—it was a way.” He won his first junior tournament when he was five, played on the Italian national team as a teen-ager, and turned pro at nineteen. He met the woman who is now his wife while he was working at an Italian golf club, then followed her to the United States. She’s also Italian, and is a vice-president of a shipping company that has an office in New Jersey.

“I have a broken English,” he said. “You have to listen to me carefully.” He’s too modest about his English, but, even so, he views nonfluency as a pedagogical tool: “If you speak simply, they can get what you say.”

McCormick visited Frangiamore on a recent Tuesday, because he was about to leave for California, where he’d been invited to play several celebrated golf courses, and he wanted a pre-trip tune-up. “I was on a golf vacation once, and I was playing terribly, and I was desperate, so I sent Federico a video,” he said. “I forget what he told me to do, but, whatever it was, it worked.” He told Frangiamore that he had played at Marine Park a few days before, when it was so cold that he could barely get a tee into the ground. “Usually, I take a little hammer and a nail,” he said. He hit a few balls in the simulator, to loosen up.

Frangiamore watched, and, as he watched, he said, “The most difficult thing in this game is to have the same swing two days in a row. With golf, it’s always ‘if.’ You never hear somebody say, ‘I played great—I shot 70.’ What you hear is, ‘I shot 70—but, you know, I missed one putt, so it could have been 69.”

McCormick said that during his recent round he had hit his irons well but had had trouble with his driver. The club he was using now was a 7-iron, and the shots he was hitting, as depicted on the screen by towering red arcs, were tailing slightly to the right.

“That’s what you got with the driver?” Frangiamore asked. “Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“First of all, I don’t see your arms on the way down,” Frangiamore said. “You are thinking too much about the start of the swing rather than swinging. Second of all, I’m not seeing you complete that backswing.”

McCormick swung again, with a similar result.

“Relax your hands. Relax.”

McCormick hit a good one. Then another.

“There we go,” Frangiamore said.

McCormick hit another.

“Look at me one time,” Frangiamore said. “Why you hit the ball three times in a row well? In your opinion. What change, mainly?”

“I tried not to think?” McCormick said. “I just swung?”

“Correct,” Frangiamore said. “Bravo.” ♦