Category Archives: playing the game

The Importance of Technical Golf

Ansel Adams (click the link to get a Google search, then click the Images link on that page) was a legendary American photographer of the mid-20th century. His breathtaking landscape photographs set standards that few have met and none exceeded. He was a virtuoso artist whose medium was the photograph. Behind the beauty of every photograph he released, though, was a master of the photographic craft.

Most of the dramatic prints he made were photographs of fairly mundane scenes. But Adams knew, before he pressed the shutter, that if he gave this much exposure to the scene on this kind of film, and developed the film with this kind of developer, and printed it on this kind of paper using this kind of print developer, and by manipulating the heck out of the negative while he made the print, he would produce a masterwork.

Because he had mastered the technical side of photography, he could concentrate on the art of photography: choosing just the right the subject and framing the shot just right.

Golf is the same way. If you have done your homework on the range, you will know in any given situation which club to use, and which setup and swing variables to select in order to hit just the right shot for the situation you’re in.

For example, consider the short pitches from 25 to 60 yards. The main course variables are the distance from your ball to the edge of the green, and from the edge to the pin.

If you have truly learned how to hit these shots, then for any combination of these two distances, you will know without thinking which club to use, and which setup and swing variables to tack on. Then you can concentrate on the feel of the situation and have the clear mind necessary to pull off all that technique.

When you’re trying to figure out the technique for the shot at the same time you’re trying to keep your mind focused, you won’t be able to accomplish either one.

A few years ago I saw Retief Goosen on TV hitting from about seventy yards to the right of the green, in front of the one on the neighboring fairway. He had little green to work with, and the shot was blind because he had to hit over a cluster of trees. He flew the trees and stopped the ball inside six feet from the pin.

Don’t tell me that was lucky. He knew from his practice exactly how to hit that shot.

The more technical shot-making skills you can develop on the practice ground, the easier this game gets and the better you will play.

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Recent Facebook Highlights

Either you’re lurking or you haven’t been checking my Facebook page every day. Here’s a bit of what you have missed if you’re in the second group:

Find the club you hit 175 yards and get real good with it. If you look at the scorecards of the courses you play, you’ll find that if you can nail that shot, par 4s are yours for the taking and par 5s become birdie holes.

There’s a neighbor cat who hangs out in my backyard when I hit plastic golf balls every morning. It thinks every one has to be pounced on. So I’ll hit one to this side of the yard then that side, to give it something to chase. I’ll also get out a wedge and see how close to the cat I can drop one. Great practice.

Winter is the best time of year to get a lesson. You know what needs patching up, so you can get corrected and have the time to practice it until you’ve got it. Also, NO ONE is taking lessons now, so the pro’s dance card is empty. You can sign up any time you want to. Go ahead, do it!

I’ve found that when I go to the range, if I know what I’m doing, about a dozen golf balls will do. If I don’t know what I’m doing, the whole bucket won’t help.

My teaching pro told me a story from his college days about a teammate who spent lots of time hitting one-foot putts. So the question finally got asked: “What are you doing over here?”
“I’m practicing making putts.”
“But they’re only this long!”
“Yes, but the putter doesn’t know that.”

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Golf in the Rain

Last week I wrote about the joys of autumn golf in the warm late afternoon sun. Autumn golf also features the cold afternoon rain.

Now if it’s raining and cold, I don’t go out. Someone once said to me that because I don’t like to play when I’m cold or wet that I’m not a True Golfer . . . whatever that means.

But sometimes you just have to go out and it isn’t raining, but it might rain. So here’s what we do in the Pacific Northwest, the rain capital of the western world.

Bring along your rain jacket and rain pants. If you use a golf glove, bring extras. They get soaked quickly and won’t dry out.

Bring four towels. One is to clean your clubs with. The other three are to dry your hands before you take your grip. Bring three because one will be wet before you make the turn. The second one will be wet halfway through the back nine.

Make sure you have the club cover that came with your bag. When it starts raining, we cover our clubs first and put on our rain suit second.

Did you pack an umbrella, by the way?

Bring along an extra pair of socks and shoes to change into when the round is over. There’s nothing like having dry feet on the way home.

Now for playing in the rain.

The ball will sit quickly when it hits the green, so you can be more aggressive that usual. Your approach might plug or make a deep mark when it lands. Please repair!

Be sure swing easily from the fairway and hit the ball easily. You might need to take one more club accordingly.

Concentrate on hitting the ball first. A strike that is the least bit fat will throw up mud and the ball will go only a very short distance. If your habit is to take a divot, try to play for picking the ball off the ground.

Near the green, put away the bump and run because the wet ground can grab the ball before it has a chance to run. When chipping from greenside, try to minimize spin, which can again stop the ball before it starts to run.

A wet green will be a slower green, so you can hits putts more boldly. Play less break because of the added speed.

Read Rule 25-1, which tells you what to do if there is a build-up of casual water.

Do all this, and by golly, maybe you can become a True Golfer.

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In Golf, the Hole Is the Only Thing

I started playing golf when I was 10 years old, but I knocked a golf ball around the back yard much earlier than that. My father had some wood-shafted clubs in the basement and a few balls which he let me hit over a little course which he laid out by setting tin cans set in the lawn for holes.

I would put the ball on the ground and think of one thing only: get the ball in the hole. I was too young to think about technique, taking too many shots, anything like that. All I wanted to do was get the ball in the hole, and that’s what I thought about with a child’s singe-minded intensity.

I remember that feeling even today, when I get too caught up in how I’m hitting a shot instead of why. The purpose of what I am about to do is to get the ball in the hole. There is no other.

That’s why, when I make adjustments to my chipping stroke because of an unusual situation, and I think only of the adjustments, the shot isn’t always satisfactory. When I look at the situation and adjust my setup and stroke with the hole in mind, I come up with some pretty interesting stuff and it works a lot more often.

Golf isn’t about making good shots, or doing what we practiced last time at the range. At the moment you tee up the ball you should be thinking only about how this shot will help you get the ball in the hole, because that’s what golf is about.

I’m lucky. I have this uncluttered memory of pure golf that only a child can play to fall back on. It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s a relentless, desperate attraction to the hole with which nothing else has a chance to compete.

Don’t think that I am not in favor of technique. Good technique will get the ball in the hole quicker than bad. My grandson has taken lessons and I help him on the course with a few suggestions, but only when things aren’t going well at all.

I try my best, though, to make sure that play doesn’t get confused with practice. When we practice, technique matters. When we play, only the hole matters.

That lets you hit any shot without fear, make mistakes without remorse, and play offensive golf for the entire round. And that’s a fun way to play.

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Bobby Jones on Game Management

Bobby Jones’s most famous book is titled, Bobby Jones on Golf, and has a deservedly sterling reputation. It is a compilation of selected columns that he wrote for syndication to daily newspapers from 1927 to 1935.

A book he wrote later, as a book, titled, Golf Is My Game, is equally rewarding. The instruction portion is more to the point in many places, and reads as a unified piece of instruction rather than a collection of thoughts on various subjects.

Chapter 8 is titled “Management.” He means both management of the course and management of your temperament. He has a bit about expectations that, if absorbed by any golfer, will make every outing much more enjoyable. I quote:

1. I must be prepared for the making of mistakes.
2. I must try always to select the shot to be played and the manner of playing it so as to provide the widest possible margin for error.
3. I must expect to have to so some scrambling and not be discouraged if the amount of it happens to be more than normal.

End of quote.

These admonitions come at the end of an extended section where Jones explains that in an average round (for him) of four to six under par, there would be only one or two shots “that had not been mishit to some degree,” and in his best rounds, only five or six.

By keeping expectations reasonable and accepting the course and the playing skills you bring with you that day, it is entirely possible to become someone who always gets more out of his or her skills than would seem possible.

What more can any golfer do than that?

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

Golf’s Distance Gap

I suspect that most recreational golfers feel comfortable playing into a green from under 160 yards, maybe as far away as 170. I also suspect they feel all right playing shots of about 200 yards or longer into fairways. That 30-yard gap in the middle, however, is the problem that many of us have yet to solve.

If we face a shot from within that gap, we’re trying to hit a green. Not many of us can hit a green reliably from that distance. It’s not just us, either. Touring professionals have a gap as well. It’s just that their numbers are different than ours.

There’s a chart in the book, The Search For the Perfect Swing that shows the percentage of greens hit, from which distances, in a professional tournament in England in 1964. The data show that the percentage of greens hit from 150 to 180 yards was fairly consistent at 75-80 percent. At the 190-yard mark, the percentage of greens hit dropped to below 50 percent. Remember that in those those days that they hit to 180 yards with a 4-iron.

So at some distance, there’s a sharp drop-off for everyone, and it’s sharp. What do you do about it?


1. Learn to hit the long clubs straighter. Obvious on paper, but pretty difficult to do in real life. If the pros can’t do it, we can’t either. Let’s try something else.

2. Sharpen your short game. This is better. You’re probably going to miss the green from such a distance, but if you can get up and down you’ll be O.K.

3. Lay up. If there is real trouble around the green, bad trouble, it’s a losing bet to think you can avoid it from a long distance. Play short of it and trust your greens game (chipping and putting). By real trouble, I mean water, and bunkers, especially if you’re not a good bunker player or they’re deep and plentiful. You might take four shots to get down from the fairway following this strategy, but if you can guarantee that, it’s better in the long run than trying for three and most of the time taking five or six.

Recreational golfers should emphasize 2 and 3. These are two ways to play within the capabilities you now have and that you can likely attain to. I don’t mean for you to play timid golf, and this isn’t doing that. It’s getting the most out of the game you have and not asking more from it that it can deliver.

What do you do when you have a shot that falls inside your distance gap? Post your solution in a comment below.

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A Few Ways to Play Golf Faster

Slow play is everyone’s bugbear. Well, maybe not for the slow players.

But to get around the course in less time, you don’t have to play faster. You only need to play more efficiently.

This is what I mean. Say your group is at the tee. One member is on the tee box, teeing off. The other three members are standing way over there by their carts.

The one guy tees off, and the next one up walks up to the tee box, goes through a routine and hits. Then the third member walks over to the tee box and so forth, and finally the fourth member walks over and hits.

Or this.

The first member is on the tee box and the second member is standing beside it. The first member hits, and right away the second member steps onto the tee box and the third member walks up to it.

The second member hits, the third member walks on the tee box, and the fourth member walks up to it. The third member hits, and the fourth member steps on the tee box. And hits.

Can you see that the second version could easily save almost a minute in getting the foursome off the tee? Multiply that by 18 and you get a significant saving in time over the course of the round by doing just that.

No one had to hurry. No one had to rush. It’s just that the entire group played more efficiently. That’s all.

Everyone doing a little thing added up to a lot of time saved. That is the faster play strategy.

Here are a few more examples.

From the fairway, when someone is hitting and you’re next, you can begin surveying your shot at the same time the other player does. (Out of courtesy, don’t pull your club until the other ball is in the air.) In other words, be ready.

On the green, read your opening putt as soon as you get there instead of waiting until it is your turn. Mark your ball, clean it, and put it back down unless it’s in the way of someone else’s putt. That way there’s no waiting when it’s your turn. I watch the four old guys ahead of me get on and off the green in a hurry, and this is how they do it.

Just doing those three things could save close to an hour over eighteen holes. That is, if you can convince your buddies to give them a try.

It all comes down to this. Paying your green fees does not give you the privilege of holding up your group and the the groups behind you by playing at any pace you choose. By giving back a bit of what we think we might be entitled to, everyone benefits from the overall goodwill that’s created.

Playing efficiently is a painless way to do it.

Can you think of some others? Post them in a Comment below.

The Opening Tee Shot

Maybe not the hardest shot in golf, but certainly the most unnerving, is the opening tee shot. No matter how well you warmed up, you can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen today. There’s a host of doubts that could be running through your head, but if there are, it comes down to this. You warmed up your swing but you forgot to warm up your mind.

Isn’t that the point of your warmup, to get ready to play? If all you do is hit balls to remember your swing and smooth out any loose shots that appear, the exercise is all you got. The warmup is meant to accomplish three things: establish clean contact again, establish your swing tempo, and get your mind into playing mode. That last one is the most important.

One thing you will hear about your pre-game warmup is not to start correcting faulty shots. The reason for that is doing so warms up the wrong part of your brain. You want to engage your subconscious mind, the one you can’t have a conversation with, the one that responds to what it sees on an intuitive level.

When you have a ball in front of you, look downrange, pick a shot, and hit it. Don’t judge the result. If you have a slice that came from nowhere, let it go. Hit lots of wedges and fewer shots with the longer clubs. Swing, hit the ball. Swing, hit the ball. Make it no more complicated than that. All the while, practice looking first to find a shot and hitting the shot you see.

When you step onto the tee box, stay in that mode of thinking. Look down the first fairway and see what needs to be done–where you want to hit the ball and what club will get it there. The big mistake would be to hit the shot you hit the last time you played this hole. Respond to what’s there now. Let the needs of the shot you see infuse themselves into you and respond to that feeling. Then go through your pre-shot routine as you would for any other shot and play away.

The more often you can start a round in this way, the easier this shot will get over time, and the more you will start playing every shot this way. Your only limitation will be for how long you can sustain this kind of concentration before you get back to analyzing again. With practice, you will be able to keep on for the entire round, but it all starts with your warmup, validated by playing the first tee shot the right way.

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Understanding Your Golf Course

I would bet that a touring pro could play one round at your course and know it better than you do. It’s their business to get familiar with a course as fast as they can so they know the most efficient way to move the ball from tee to green on every hole. These are some things you should know about your course, or any course you play.

After you have played a course one time, you should know which club you will tee off with on every hole and where you want to put the tee shot. The first time around, write down on the scorecard the club you used if that is the one you would use next time, otherwise the club you should have used.

When you get to a point in the fairway where you would like to have your tee shot end up, take a look back to the tee and then ahead on that line to find something in the distance you can use as an aiming marker from the tee. It might be a certain tree, or a neighboring building. On one course I play, the architect did a good job of hiding the fairway, so having a good idea of where to aim your tee shot is the only secure way of hitting it.
On par-5 holes, figure out what strokes to play, and to where, so that you have a money shot into the green, such as your 9-iron or an 85-yard pitch. On par-3 holes, especially the longer ones, see if there is a bail-out area to which you can safely play in order to avoid hazards and yet have a good chance for a chip and a putt.

Notice as you go around the course where you can get a good look at the pin position on greens that you have yet to play. One course I play frequently has an access road you can drive down that lets you see the pin placement on seven of the front nine greens.

Learn which hazards are in play for you and which ones you can ignore. Find places that are not hazards, but will nonetheless cost you strokes if you hit there. Sometimes bunkers are not meant to be hazards, but directional indicators. You’ll find bunkers like this on par 5s and long par 4s. You aim a shot at them or just off to the side in order to put your ball in a good position for the next shot.

On any hole, learn to which side of the green you can safely miss and which side is to be avoided. The usual reason is that it is easier to chip to the hole from one side than another, either because of the condition of the ground, or that the green is more or less receptive to a chip.

Learning the breaks on the greens takes more than a few rounds, but you should at least know if there are one or two greens that are faster or slower than the rest, and the general slope on every green.

Don’t make golf a game of chance. In one time around a course, no more than two, you can learn what a course will give and what it will take away. Seek the first, avoid the second. It’s that simple.

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Nine Ways You Give Away Golf Strokes

I would bet you give away at least two strokes per side because you don’t play the game as well as you should. That’s not your shotmaking, but the decisions you make. Here are a few ways you can start lowering your handicap tomorrow, and it doesn’t take any practice time to do it. These are nine good ways to get back those wasted strokes.

1. Hitting recovery shots off the tee shot. – if your course has heavy rough or lots of trees, you can use up several shots every round just chipping the ball back into the fairway. On a course like this, leave your driver home.

2. Playing over water. – Bad things happen when you play over water if you don’t have to. Figure the longest club in your bag that you’re sure you can get in the air. If you have to hit a longer club than that to clear the water, go around or lay up.

3. Not seeing the golf course (until it’s too late). – For example chipping into slopes or soggy ground that you hadn’t noticed, ignoring pronounced slope around the cup, little things that are right there that you don’t see until after you hit the shot.

4. Hitting when you’re not sure. – If you feel anything about the shot you’re going to hit other than complete confidence, step away and gather yourself. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself saying in about four seconds, “Why did I hit that? I knew I wasn’t ready.”

5. Getting angry. – You’re not as good as your good shots, nor as bad as your bad ones. Accept what happens and move on.

6. Playing with the distance you want, not the distance you have. – If 155 yards with a 6-iron is a good shot for you, and you’re 153 yards from the pin, don’t hit the 6! Take out a 5-iron, grip down, and put a smooth swing on the ball. The extra club in your hand takes off the pressure and you’ll hit a better shot.

7. Two short shots in a row. – At the professional level, the short shot takes the place of the approach putt. At the amateur level, the short shot is meant to get the ball on the green. Getting the ball close to the pin is secondary. Whatever it takes, get your first short shot on the green, two-putt close at least.

8. Not aiming your greenside chips. – When the ball is close enough to the green that you truly can give it a run at the hole, line up the shot like you would an approach putt. This avoids hitting your chip hole-high but four feet to the left and gives you a chance to leave the ball tap-in close or even sink it.

9. Not taking lessons. – Don’t hit from the rough very well? It’s not hard to do. Do uneven lies give you fits? They shouldn’t. Can’t hit the chip from 30 yards? Simplest shot there is. Get a list of shots that give you a hard time and have a pro show you how to hit them. I don’t understand why so many golfers I talk to won’t do this. I just don’t.

Please comment if you have any more ways for us to save shots like this.

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