Once you have started the club moving, do not be in a hurry to hit the ball, especially during the forward swing.
Let the pros swing at blink-and-you-miss-it speeds. We do better with a leisurely motion.
This is especially important with the driver.
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Picking the Ball Off the Fairway
This is something I have been doing from the fairway for a while now and which seems to be working pretty well.
Hitting out of a fairway bunker is a real easy shot for me. I just keep my lower body quiet and nip the ball off the surface of the sand. It always works out well. Really nice ball flight.
I got the idea, why not try that off the fairway, too? I mean just the picking the ball off the sand part.
So I tried it, and it’s working really well. Just nip the ball off the turf, not try to be hitting down and all that stuff, but hitting level.
Result? Beautiful ball flight, the club not getting into an argument with the ground, everything good.
Just thought I would mention it.
Good Golf Is About Controlling Distance
We all want to hit the ball straight. We want to stop slicing or hooking. That’s important, but neither of these faults are hard to cure. Once you can hit the ball straight most of the time, then what?
Following your tee shot, getting the distance right is everything. If you’re in the fairway 143 yards from the pin, can you hit the ball 143 yards?
Further, if you’re 72 yards from the pin, can you pitch the ball 72 yards? If you’re putting from 27 feet can you make the ball go 27 feet?
THAT is how you score, and once you have basic tee-to-hole shot-making figured out, make those skills work for you by learning how to hit ANY kind of shot to a specific distance.
I’ll leave you to figure out how to do that, and close this short post by saying when you have acquired that ability, you’ll be playing a different game.
How the Mental Game Really Works
The mental game of golf is all about being in the right frame of mind to hit the ball as well as you can. Oh sure, there’s decision-making, staying in focus and all that.
But the essence of how you use your mind when you play golf is in what happens in the few seconds just before you take your address, set up, pause, then swing back and through the ball.
How do you set up mentally for that? What goes through your mind during that time?
I have found that the key mental approach is to have a firm thought about where I intend the ball to go, and not on how my swing is going to get it there.
I reduce the moment to a simple thought–I want to hit the ball from here to there. Then, retaining that thought, I step up to the ball and hit it there.
The thought is not hoping, or “would liking,” or any of that. It’s, “The ball is going from here to there.” Period. And with a mind that believes that nothing will keep that from happening.
When you think this way, you would be surprised at how the technical stuff falls into place by itself.
Try it.
A Day With the LPGA at the Portland Classic
The Portland Classic is the oldest (1972) continuous tournament on the LPGA schedule. I go out to see it every year.
It rained for a while Thursday morning, but that didn’t bother anybody. I watched Madelene Sagstrom warm up and play a few holes. She hasn’t made a bogey in three rounds. She’s my fave, and five back going into the final round. I hope she finds a way to win.
I also followed the group of Lexi Thompson, Brooke Henderson, and In Gee Chun for a while. You do not have three more different swings. Lexi? She’s the Alpha female out there. I wish her game matched her presence. And I had never noticed this before. When she hits her driver, there is a moment when both feet are off the ground. No kidding! She missed the cut by one. I was also surprised at how tall In Gee Chun is. 5′ 9″.
Azahara Muñoz is very easy on the eyes. Photos you have seen of her don’t do her justice.
Both Thompson and Muñoz missed the cut by one shot. Here’s how it happened on Thursday morning.
Thompson duck-hooked her tee shot in #9, and had to play short of the green out of the rough. About forty yards from the pin now, with plenty of green to work with, she could have hit a bump-and-run, or flown it all the way. She did neither. A middling pitch landed short of the green and barely trickled onto the putting surface. Two putts, bogey, MC.
Muñoz hit her drive on #13 (par 5) onto an elevated surface bordering the fairway, and with a large tree blocking the way to the green. Instead of drawing the ball around the tree, she played a straight shot to the other side of the fairway, where there were more trees in her way. She tried to cut it too fine and her third hit a tree and dropped straight down about sixty yards away. Approach to the green, a chip and a putt, bogey, MC.
I’ll say what I said last year, from tee to green these gals hit the ball brilliantly, but around the green I saw some poor decision-making and just bad execution. On the PGA Tour, everyone out there has a ridiculous short game. You can’t say the about this Tour.
But the thing is from tee to green. Yes, there are a few sluggers out there, but most of the rest have a graceful, relaxed swing (much faster than it looks) that is very inspirational to golfers at our level. I don’t learn anything from Rory’s swing, but these gals teach me how to swing a golf club.
The Solution to the PGA Tour’s Slow Play Problem
The PGA Tour thinks it has a slow play problem. Players take too long hit the next shot, which adds up to taking too long to play a round.
But that is the problem, long rounds, not slow play. We need to look at it from that end to see what can be done to cut down time time it takes players to make their way around the course. Where can time be saved?
The solution is so obvious. Walking from the tee to the fairway, and from the fairway to the green is golf’s dead time, and that is where time can be saved.
This year major league baseball installed a pitch clock that requires the pitcher to start his motion 15 seconds after getting the ball back from the catcher, 20 seconds if there is a runner on base.
But if baseball were played like golf, it would be about three minutes between pitches, not 15 seconds.
Let’s get back to golf and cut down the time between shots. How? Golf carts.
The PGA Tour is about to be awash with money from the Saudis. It can use some of that money to buy a fleet of golf carts.
Each pairing would have one cart per player. As soon as the threesome, or twosome, has teed off, the players and caddies would get in a golf cart, driven by a volunteer, and zoom down the fairway to their ball. After the approach shot, carts to the green.
That would cut down the walking time from six minutes to 30 seconds, on average, per hole. THAT is how you get players around the course faster.
One more thing. When a player hits the ball into a place that even 20-handicappers don’t visit, and wants a ruling, TWO rules officials, not one, get summoned. They examine the situation, confer, deliver their ruling and that’s it. Play on.
No holding up the tournament behind you for ten minutes to have your discussion with the rules official. The ruling gets made, end of story, hit the ball. If the player disagrees with the ruling, make the case AFTER the round is over. But until then, just play.
You read it here first.
What Bucket of Balls is For
When you go to the range, evaluate your shotmaking in a realistic way.
In seven balls, say, you will hit one that is just PERFECT. You will hit four that you would take on the course all day. You will hit one or two that aren’t quite up to snuff, and every so often you will hit one that is, YEEEGH!
What you should try to do every time is hit one of the middle four.
That perfect shot? Admire it, and move on. Those shots just happen, and if you try to reproduce them, you just go backwards. When the moment is over, go back to hitting one of the middle four.
The ones that aren’t up to speed you can live with. You’re a recreational golfer; they’re going to happen.
The cringeworthy shot? That one demands a reset. Reproduce that swing, which you can do because it is so far away from your usual swing that the glaring error should stand out in hindsight.
Practice the right swing a few times to get the particular wrinkle ironed out, then go back to hitting one of the middle four.
So. Don’t chase perfection, fix the glaring error, and hit shots that are good enough.
Over time, the good enough shots will become more frequent, and better, which is what you are after. And the ones that make you look like you took up the game last week will disappear.
An Easy Way to Shoot Lower Scores
Following yesterday’s 58 in a LIV Tour event, Bryson DeChambeau had this to say to the press:
“Yeah, so for any junior golfers out there, it’s probably the best thing you can do when trying to learn how to score. You go up to the red tees and try and shoot sub-60 rounds, for a good aspiring junior golfer that’s trying to be a professional golfer.
“You just go to the front tees, try and shoot under 60. If you can do that and you consistently are able to do that every single round you play, get in that comfortable mind of, okay, I’m 10-, 11-, 12-under, let’s keep going, pedal to the metal, that gets you in a great mindset.
“That tremendously helped today, being able to say, okay, I’m 10-under; well, I can’t stop. I’ve got to keep going. I’ve got to birdie 17, birdie 18, let’s go, and having that sort of — I’m not really going to say it in front of the media, like — Yeah, sort of the F-you mentality, like let’s go, let’s get it done. It’s something that led to me shooting 58 today.”
Bryson is exactly right. Are you trying to break 90? 80? 100? Always close, but no cigar? Go the forward tees and get it done. Over and over. Keeping doing it again and again.
You’ll get comfortable shooting those low scores and when you go back to the tees you normally play from, you’ll keep on doing it not because of your skills, but because of your new mindset.
Staying Behind the Ball
A critical piece of the golf swing is to stay behind the ball, or as I like to say it, stay back. My latest video shows you what that means and how to learn it.
Byron Nelson, in his book, Shape Your Swing the Modern Way, said, “swing out from under your head.” Here’s the passage:
“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.]
Rhythm in Golf Revisited
For a long time, I though that the rhythm of the golf swing was 3:1. There is a book you can still get, called Tour Tempo (it should have been called Tour Rhythm) that says so, based on videotape evidence.
You can read it all over the internet, too. 3:1. Everyone has bought into it. The trouble is, it’s not quite true. Leave it to me to say so.
Let’s remind ourselves what rhythm is. It is the relative duration of the component parts of a movement.
3:1 is the rhythm of the clubhead’s movement. The clubhead takes three counts to go from address to the end of the backswing, and one count to get back to impact, all counts being equally paced. That part is true.
But the rhythm of the clubhead is not the rhythm of the golf swing. It is the result of the golfer swinging with the proper rhythm, which is 1:1.
The body turns toward the ball at the same speed it turns away from it. And since the distance turned through in each direction is the same, the result is a 1:1 rhythm.
The trouble with ignoring the rhythm of the swing is that you try to do whatever you can to get a 3:1 clubhead rhythm at the expense of an easy rhythm for your golf swing.
You try to time your backswing and forward swing so you get a 3:1 clubhead rhythm, when all you have to do is swing at a 1:1 torso rhythm and you’ve got it.
How easy is that?
Yes, I know there are professional golfers who don’t have a 1:1 swing rhythm. Hooray for them. But the large majority of pros do. The ones who don’t are highly talented athletes who can make it work.
Make your swing simple. Take your mind off getting the right clubhead rhythm and put it on what produces the right clubhead rhythm. Much easier.