All posts by recgolfer

playing the game

Golf is a Game You Play

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Most of the stuff on this blog, and almost everything you see on YouTube, is about one thing: how to hit the golf ball. And you go to the practice range to practicing hitting the golf ball. You need to do that. It’s important.

But golf is not about the shots you hit. You can hit good shots and still not be able to score. Golf is a game you play, and you have to know how to play the game to shoot low scores.

In his book, The Elements of Scoring, Raymond Floyd says “if somehow I was given your physical (golf) game and we had a match I would beat you 99 times out of 100 because I know how to play the game better than you do.”

I read a interview with from Miller Barber in which he mentioned leaning when he got on the tour. He said he got lots of help on how to manage his game, shot selection, course management. “I thought I knew how to play, but I didn’t.”

I’m not going to say that if you learn how to play the game you could save X number of shots because I don’t know what that number would be. But I know you would save more than you think you would.

There’s a guy on YouTube called the Golf Sidekick. He’s South African and somehow he’s playing golf in Southeast Asia and if you haven’t seen his videos, you should, because how to play the game is all that they’re about. He gives you hardly any instruction on how to hit shots. It’s all about how to play the game.

How to play the game is a huge subject and I’m not going to go into that here. I’ll give you two teasers.

I have posts here and here on the number one game playing flaw of a recreational golfers. You never use enough club to get to the green. You always think you can hit it farther than you actually end up doing, and those posts will explain that.

The other major part of knowing how to play the game is knowing how to play from different lies. The first thing you do assess your lie to determine what kind of a shot you need to/can hit. Distance is probably the last thing you want to check.

Don’t be content with being a golfer. Move up to being a player.

golf swing

How to Shallow Your Forward Swing

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When you swing the club through the ball, you want the club to be approaching on a low trajectory. This is called shallowing out the swing path. It is something you should want to do.

You can go to YouTube and watch videos that take ten minutes of your life to explain something they could have said in one, but fortunately The Recreational Golfer comes to your rescue.

In Byron Nelson’s marvelous instruction book, Shape Your Swing the Modern Way, there is a little section that gets right to this point, so I’ll quote it in full:

“I can’t emphasize too much the fact that your lower body must lead the downswing while your head remains relatively still. You must create the sensation of swinging past your chin, of keeping your head back while your hips and legs swing past it toward the target. The best way I can describe the feeling is that you swing completely out from under your head. Your body moves clear past the point of your chin and your arms swing into the follow-through before your head moves.” [Nelson’s emphasis.]

Watch this video of In Gee Chun’s swing to see what Nelson means. Go to 1:50 and play the video. Put a toothpick or something very thin on your screen so it bisects her body at address from top to bottom in two equal halves.

Watch that through impact, her head stays in the same place, but her hips and torso are well ahead of the line you set up.

She is swinging completely out from under her head. She has shallowed out the swing path.

golf swing

Width in the Backswing

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Width in the backswing is important. Real important. All that means is preserving the space between your hands and your chest that you have at address when you swing the club back.

There are lots of videos on YouTube that say why this is a good thing. I have no disagreement.

What I do disagree with is how they tell you to get it. My way works just as well and is much easier to do.

Take the club back by pushing your right hand straight back with your left hand. Lefties, push your left hand with your right. A gentle push, not a muscular one.

That, combined with your turn, gets the club up there where you want it to be, and at the width that everyone tells you that you need to have.

This move also sets up the speed of your swing, makes the flow forward to the ball almost happen by itself, and best of all for many of us, creates a swing that is easy on your lower back (at least it is for me, and my lower back talks to me right away if my golf swing is abusing it).

Practice this a bit until you get it to work. I promise you that you will hit the ball better.

golf swing

Clubhead Speed – 2

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Several months ago I published a post on gaining your maximum distance by swinging with relaxed arms. Let me more specific here about what that means.

In 1969, a British engineer named David Williams published a book titled The Science of the Golf Swing. In this book, Williams analyzed a stroboscopic sequence photograph of Bobby Jones’s downswing.

Among other things, Williams determined that the speed of Jones’s hands in the first part of the downswing, from the top of the backswing to hip-height, was 34 feet per second, and in that interval the clubhead moves from nothing to 50 feet per second.

From there to impact, Williams found that the hands continue to travel at 34 feet per second. They do not gain any speed. The clubhead, however, increases its speed to 165 feet per second, or 113 miles per hour. This change is not all due to the arm swing. The effect of a hinge and of centrifugal force count, too.

But the point here is that, since the acceleration due to gravity of a falling object is 32 feet per second, all you need to do is drop your arms from the top as a gravity move. You don’t need to add force of your own.

Relaxation? The more relaxed your arms are, the easier it will be for your hands to drop by the force of gravity alone.

None of this means that you let your arms go limp; that’s the wrong kind of relaxation. Your arms maintain the shape of the swing while letting them be pulled downward by an outside force. Once you get it, you might be amazed at how fast the clubhead is swinging through impact with so little effort on your part.

playing the game

Leave Your Rangefinder at Home

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Yesterday I went out to play nine holes and found when I got to the course that I had left my rangefinder at home. And this is a course that doesn’t have yardages on the sprinkler heads.

So after a few holes of getting my eye for distance adjusted, I found that I ended up taking more club than usual, thus hitting more greens instead of being short, and was passing the flag.

When you have a rangefinder, you try to match the yardage to the distances you hit your irons on paper, but that only works if the shot you actually hit goes that far. Most of the time it doesn’t.

Try it sometime. Leave your rangefinder at home and pick your club according to your eye. You might well get conservative in your club selection and end up picking the right club more often than you usually do.

improvement

Review Your Round

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Here is one thing of many that help you shoot lower scores and have nothing to do with hitting golf balls. Review your rounds. In detail.

When I get home from having played, I write a brief description of every shot I hit. For every shot that worked out, I write down the conditions, what I did, and my opinion of why it worked. You can’t take success for granted. You repeat success by knowing how to be successful.

For every shot that didn’t work out, I write down the same thing, and my opinion on why it didn’t work out. What should I do if I faced this shot again? Sometimes you have done everything right but you just made a bad swing. That happens. But most of the time you have the skills to hit that shot, but you didn’t think it through, or your mind was on something else

In other words, learn from what you did, both good and bad. In other words, keep on doing this, but next time, do that.

If you play a round and don’t learn anything from it, you just went out for exercise, which is OK if that is what you want out of golf.

But you spend all that time playing, so you might as well get as good as you can. Here is one way to do it.

playing the game

Play Within Yourself

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When I play a round of golf, I always learn something or remind myself of what’s important. This is what came up today.

Swing. Don’t try to hit the ball hard. Just put a swing on it and take what you get. Trying to hit hard just ruins everything unless you are a very talented golfer and your name is Bryson.

Professionals golfers live on the center of the clubface. You can, too. Before you take the club away, say to yourself, “Center hit” and carry that thought with you. Uncanny how this works if you trust it.

Trying to reach every par 4 in two and every par 5 in three is sometimes too much, especially the par 4s. On those holes, back off. Plan the hole so you end up near the green in regulation for an easy pitch and maybe a putt, but no more than two. Trying too hard is what gets you doubles and triples.

When you’re close in, say 80 yards or under (you pick the distance), just get the ball on the green. A putting green is a huge target. Just hit that target so you can start putting.

Chunking or topping pitch shots? Odds are that your stroke is all arms, with no lower body movement. You have to turn your hips as you swing back, and turn your hips as you swing through.

If you have a really short putt, say two feet, that has break in it, ignore the break. Aim for the center of the hole and hit the ball hard enough (but no harder) that it runs straight through the break. Practice this before you try it on the course so that you see that it really is a better way.

equipment

What’s My Bag – November 2025

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I like to play around with my equipment, try putting different clubs in my bag to have solutions to different problems. This is my latest experiment.

Driver – Titleist 975D. This club will never leave my bag.
Fwood – Titleist 20.5*. I can get this one in the air.
Hybrid – Ben Hogan 24* Edge CFT. 4-iron equivalent.
Irons – Ben Hogan 1999 Apex, 6-E.
Wedges – Titleist Vokey 52/08, 56/08.
Putter – Ping G3 Tess. Toe-balanced for approach putts.
Putter – Hog 1005B. Face-balanced for short putts.
Extra – Ben Hogan 1999 Apex 2-iron
Extra – Ben Hogan Producer 9-iron, left-handed.

The LH 9-iron is for when the ball is outside of a deep bunker on the right edge with no room for a right-handed stance, and for hitting in restricted areas where there is no room for a right-handed swing.

distance

220 in the Fairway Beats 270 in the Weeds

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There is a debate about whether it is best to hit the ball a long way, or to hit it straight. You read this on golf forums all the time. And sooner or later someone will chime in with, “220 in the fairway beats 270 in the weeds.” Let’s examine that tired trope.

It implies that short hitters are always in the fairway and long hitters are always in the weeds. The guys I have played with who can really put it out there are also very straight, because they have a very good swing. The guys who hit the ball all over the place are the 220 hitters (if that), because they don’t have a good swing at all.

If you could give me 270 off the tee I would take it in a heartbeat and learn to control it if I had to. You can always learn to hit it straight. You can’t learn to hit it long if you don’t already, despite what you see in the golf mags or on YouTube.

It comes down to this: 220 in the fairway beats 220 in the weeds, which is around where most of us are playing. So straight is better. With the distance you have.

playing the game

Three ways to score better

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1. If you’re trying to break 90, play 90 golf. Add one stroke to par and play for that. Playing for pars is how you lose that one or two shots that keeps you from breaking the barrier. You will get more pars this way, and fewer doubles and triples.

2. If you’re trying to shoot something lower, don’t even look at par. When par is rattling around in your head, you tend to take risks that end up biting you. Just keep hitting the ball and add it all up when the round is over.

3. If you have a shot that is working today, ride it for all it’s worth. Hit it as often as you can even if you would normally do something else. Confidence is everything.

Just sayin’.