I got the recent Golf Digest magazine yesterday, which put the distance or direction debate to bed for good. At least for me.
There is a feature every month called “What’s in My Bag”, where a touring pro talks about the clubs in their bag. There is a sidebar that shows how far they hit each club.
This month the pro was Danielle Kang. I looked at the distance sidebar and almost fell off my chair.
When I was playing my best, my distances were hers, plus or minus a yard. And yet, she is one of the best female golfers in the world, I was a hack trying to get a single-digit handicap.
We can talk about short game and putting, I have no doubt that she is much better than I was in both those parts of the game.
But the real difference is in the long game. She is much straighter every time she hits the ball. I was just trying to get the ball on the green. She is aiming for a quadrant of the green and hitting it.
True, you need to be good around the green, but without a swing that hits the ball straight, you’re playing for bogeys and hard pars.
Birdies? She makes more in one round than I make all year.
True that, Bob. So, it’s “back to basics” for most of us.
We have to have a fundamentally good swing for the driver, the hybrids, the irons, the wedges, and the putter — which translates to our having relative accuracy.
Without such fundamentals, we’re doomed to “hitting the ball all over the place.” And nowhere is this more costly than in the “short game.”
Every time I play, and screw up what should be a fundamentally simple chip or putt, adding “x” number of strokes to my round, I acknowledge to myself that I have a lot of “room for improvement” in the area of fundamentals.
The challenge for me personally is to actually make the commitment to take the time to change. I have fun “just playing” — and I use that as an excuse not to practice the very fundamentals that would make me a better player.
If I were younger, I’d do things differently. But I feel “fun” is itself a FUNdamental part of the game — or at least it should be.
So I don’t let myself get too hung up on my voluminous screw-ups. I just try to laugh them off as the direct result of not choosing to become more fundamentally skilled than I am now.