This how you have to play to get into single digits, based on my experience having been there.
1. Get the ball on the green or green-high in 38 strokes or less.
2. Get your first short game shot* on the green. Two short shots in a row is a big no-no.
3. Hit greenside chips to one-putt distance.
4. Hit approach putts over 20 feet to one-putt distance.
5. Be very good putting from four feet and in. I mean VERY good.
* Pitches, chips, sand.
To hit the ball in the direction you intend, you have to set up aimed in that direction. What doesn’t get said is that you have to aim not only yourself, but your swing, too.
Just before you take the club away, imagine a short line on the ground in front of the ball going right toward your target. Tell yourself that is the line you want your club to be travelling on when it hits the ball.
Now you have aimed your swing. You have given your subconscious mind an order to swing the club along that line, and it will make sure your body complies.
Dave Pelz, renowned short game and putting researcher and teacher, died on March 23rd of prostate cancer. He was 85 years old.
Pelz played collegiate golf at Indiana University, with a record of 0-22 against an Ohio State golfeer named Jack Nicklaus.
A physics major, Pelz worked for NASA for 15 years before leaving to devote his life to the game of golf.
His researches changed the way professional golfers play today, most importantly the four-wedge bag setup that made Tom Kite the career leading money winner on the PGA Tour for a time.
Read his New York Times obituary.
From time to time I write a post about what I work on with my swing to produce the results I want. You know, down the middle, reasonable distance. Not asking a lot.
For most of 2024 I worked on these things and take them into 2025 fully installed.
I see no reason why they wouldn’t work for you, too.
1. Backswing. All I want from the the backswing is for the clubface to be square when the backswing is finished. Because there are so many ways to get the clubface out of square, I have no guidance on how to achieve this other than to say swing back, check the clubface alignment, and if it isn’t square, figure it out. Hint: start with your grip. How do you check the clubface alignment? If you set up facing north, swing back, leave your hands where they are in space as you turn to the east, and lower the club to the ground.
2. Transition. Start the forward swing at the same speed you swung back.
3. Your head. Everything is moving toward the target in the forward swing: legs, hips, torso, arms, hands, club. Except your head. It stays put until after the ball has been struck. This is a very important point. Another way to say it is, stay behind the ball. See Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, pp. 75-76.
4. Lag. At the end of the backswing there is an angle made by your trailing forearm and the clubshaft. In a light, graceful way, swing forward so that angle does not straighten out, but do not lock it in place. You could straighten it out, you just choose not to. The momentum of the swing will straighten it out for you at the right time.
5. Tempo and rhythm. Swing at a walk-in-the-park tempo that allows you to feel everything that is happening in your swing and that none of it is rushed. Your swing should have a dance-like rhythm to it. Remember you are trying to swing through the ball, not hit at it.
An overlooked detail of the setup is nonetheless important – having the weight of the club in your hands before you take it away.
Most of us rest the clubhead on the ground before we take it away. That is a bad habit.
The moment you do take the club away, its weight, which was on the ground, comes to your hands, primarily your leading (left) hand (right hand, for lefties), causing you to squeeze slightly with that hand, creating tension that you don’t want.
Before you put the clubhead down behind the ball, make sure you feel its entire weight in your leading hand and keep it there by resting the sole no lower than on the tips of the grass blades.
Now you have pre-set your leading hand grip, tension-free, and there will be no more gripping introduced when you take the club away.
As well, if you rest the weight of the club on the ground, you have to lift the club slightly for it to clear the ground and not slide along it, which lifting can transfer to your shoulders, causing them to lift. You don’t want that to happen, either.
Here’s a second point. You might also find that when the weight of the club is in your hands, it hangs down with the shaft leaning backward (away from the target) just a bit. Keep it like that.
If you make the shaft go straight up and down at address, you will notice tension into your leading wrist and forearm. Bad.
Do these two things, not resting the clubhead on the ground, and allowing the shaft to lean backward as it wants to, to promote a smooth, tension-free, and effortless swing.
Hole-by-hole statistics
1. Number of full swing shots.
2. Number of short shots (anything off the green with less than a full swing).
3. Number of putts.
4. Length of first putt.
Include penalty shots in the count of where they occurred, number 1 or 2.
What the numbers show
These numbers are good:
Par 3s: 102 or 111
Par 4s: 202 or 211
Par 5s: 302, 311, or 212. 202 is nice, too.
These aren’t:
Par 3s: 213
Par 4s: 322
Par 5s: 412
When number 2 is 0, that represents a GIR. Fairway hit? Draw a circle around the number 1 score.
Looked at hole-by-hole, you can see how you got your score, and which part of your game was not ideal:
Number 1 was greater than par minus two.
Number 2 was two or more.
Number 2 plus number 3 was greater than three.
Number 4 and number 3 together are an assessment of your approach putting.
Over a number of rounds
If number 1 is consistently too high, you need swing lessons.
If you have too many twos in number 2, or number 2 plus number 3 is consistently three or more, get some short game lessons.
Too many threes in number 3? Total putts over 34? Putting lessons.
Prioritize improvement in this order: swing, putting, short game.
A fuller explanation of how to use these stats can be found here.
Most of us around the country aren’t playing much right now, because it is either too wet or too cold. So now is a good time concentrate on improving.
This is what to improve on:
Your swing.
If it takes you more than 40 strokes in 18 holes to get the ball on the green or green-high, it is your swing, not short game and putting, that you need to work on.
Your swing doesn’t need to be fixed or modified. You need a new one.
Start over. Get lessons, not just one, to find out from start to finish what you are supposed to do, and what it feels like when you do it, and then spend the winter practicing THAT.
Don’t be afraid to get a refresher lesson after a month to make sure you’re still on the right track. Tour pros do, who are you not to?
Percy Boomer said, in his book, On Learning Golf, “It is true that if you cannot putt you cannot win, for no hole is won until the ball is down—but good scores are only made possible by good play up to the green.”
And Ben Hogan said in his book, Five Lessons, and this is my favorite quote from it, “The average golfer’s problem is not so much a lack of ability as it is a lack of knowing what he should do.”
So this winter, find out what to do, practice it, stop experimenting on your own, and see what you get by the start of the 2025 season.
Casting, or hitting over the top, means to release your wrist hinging at the very start of the forward swing. This is one of the worst faults in golf, and one of the most prevalent, because it is so easy to do.
The object of the swing is to swing the club, not to hit the ball. But that is not intuitive, so people try to hit the ball with their hands as soon as their hands start moving towards it.
That is what makes sense to almost everybody. It makes sense to me, too, which is why one of my major swing drills is in practicing how not to do it.
Imagine you have attached a ribbon to the end of a stick. If you were to swing the stick back and forth, the ribbon would trail the stick.
Now imagine your arms are the stick, when you swing then forward, let the clubshaft trail them like the ribbon would.
When it’s time, the clubshaft will catch up on its own and deliver the hit in spite of yourself.
The reality of golf is that you are not as good a golfer all the time as you are when you shoot your lowest scores. You get in your way if you don’t accept that.
Given the 9 handicap that I played to once, these are the scores that handicap was based on:
88, 88, 86, 85, 85, 84, 83, 83, 82, 82, 81, 81, 81, 81, 81, 80, 79, 78, 75, 74.
That’s quite a range. I was good enough to shoot those low scores, but also bad enough to shoot those high scores.
Every Tour pro can lay down a 63 sometime. If they couldn’t, they wouldn’t be on the Tour. But they can also shoot a couple of 76’s and miss the cut huge. They’re no different from us in that regard.
Bring your round down to just one shot: the shot you are about to hit. Try your best to make that a good, playable shot. Keep doing that, over and over, then add ’em up when the round is over, because that is all you can do.
Accept that some days you got it, some days you don’t. Golf is a lot easier that way.
Your long game (tee shots, approach shots) give you the opportunity to shoot a good score. Your short game is how you make that score. The more kinds of short shots you can hit, the more pars you are going to make.
This is true: you will only be able to hit short shots that you have hit in practice. When you look at the situation you are facing, you can only pull solutions out of your mind that are already in there.
You know this is true by remembering the times you had no idea what to do from where you were.
Let’s say you were chipping out of greenside rough, and you know how to do that. But instead of being level, the green was sloping away from you. You know that if you play the shot you know, the ball will run way past the hole.
And believe me, this is an entirely different shot, and you won’t discover the solution in the thirty seconds you have to make your stroke.
The best thing you can do to shoot lower scores is to give yourself problems around the practice green and learn how to solve them. Get a short game playing lesson if you are really stuck.
Become a GOLFER.