The last surviving founder of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, Marlene Bauer Hagge, died Tuesday at the age of 89.
She began her professional career at the age of 13. She won 26 professional tournaments including the 1956 L.P.G.A. Championship. She is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Read obituaries in the New York Times, Golfweek, and lpga.com.
Golf Digest just published an article saying that the proposed golf ball rollback for professional tours might backfire. In time, a small number of elite golfers might figure out how to get their swing speed high enough to negate the changes in the ball.
By getting their swing speed up to 140+ mph, a few professional golfers could hit the shorter ball up to 350 yards. Everyone else would be left in the dust.
One solution would be to use course design and setup to penalize wayward drives more than is done now. That’s kind of expensive, though.
David Feherty once suggested making the ball bigger, which is known to cut down on how far it flies.
All this is guesswork. Leave it to The Recreational Golfer to come up with a foolproof solution: the exploding golf ball.
We would require a golf ball design that makes the ball disintegrate when struck at a swing speed of greater than, say, 135 mph.
BOOM! Cloud of dust! Tee up another, podner, you’re hitting two.
Not only would it solve the distance problem, it would be widely entertaining. Can you imagine the cheering? And the little cloud of white dust rising up over the tree tops from the number seven tee that you can see from way over at number 14?
And Jim Nantz saying, “Oops! Got another one!”
And think of the pressure on the guys with the big guns! Not, am I going to hit the fairway, but, is my golf ball going to blow up?
And Tour golf on TV, which has become about as boring as competitive cornhole, would become as popular a TV sport as any. Even more than World’s Strongest Man competitions.
Problems solved. You’re welcome.
—–
I hope this mildly amusing post has entertained you and taken your mind off, for a while, the impending debt limit crisis. (I just had to say that.)
I turn from golf for a moment.
The Republican House refusing to increase the debt limit is not holding a gun to President Biden’s head. It’s holding a gun to the nation’s head. Your head.
If you live a congressional district with a Republican representative, write and urge your congressman/woman to vote in favor of increasing the debt limit and thereby avoid an economic nightmare. Thank you.
1. I’ve been doing something lately that has improved my ability to take the putter way from the ball on a straight line and return it on a straight line.
I rest the sole very lightly on the ground, not hovering it off the ground, but just lightly touching, instead of resting the putter on the ground with all of its weight.
What this does is avoids my having to lift the putter off the ground ever so slightly before I swing it back. The lifting motion can cause me to lose stability in my swing and take the putter back at an angle and spend effort to get it back on line. Not a good way to putt accurately.
I am sinking more putts than before, and this might be a reason.
2. Ever since we have been able to keep the flagstick in the hole when we putt I have been doing that.
A few days ago, though, I had a left-to-right breaking putt of about ten feet for a birdie. For some reason I walked up to the hole and took out the flagstick. I didn’t think about whether or not to take it out, it just seemed like the thing to do.
Sank the putt.
Maybe I’ll do this from now for putts I think are makeable. For approach putts that I can only expect to get close, having the flagstick in gives me a better idea of what the distance is.
3. Speaking of approach putts, for really long ones, 30 feet or more, I have been hitting them with an open stance.
Being turned a bit toward the hole puts my right hand, which has a great deal of sensitivity to propelling an object to a certain distance, as yours probably does, too, in control of the stroke.
The result is hitting the long ones closer than before.
This season, try building your golf around this challenge:
Play to avoid scoring a double bogey or worse.
Hint: play for easy bogeys instead of hard pars.
Don’t worry, the pars will come. Just play to avoid the big score and see what you get.
It’s easy to say there is one swing for your driver, hybrids, and irons. And that’s right. One swing is hard enough to get right, and one swing works.
But getting that one swing doesn’t solve your problems because you have to be able to use that swing on all your swinging clubs (I’m excepting your wedges and the putter.)
The club that is hardest to apply this concept to is the driver. It’s longer, it’s lighter, the swing is flatter, and you’re standing farther away from the ball. The 6-iron feeling, for example, just isn’t there.
The key to any swing, but especially the driver swing, is that in the forward swing, the body turn and the arm swing must be coordinated. They don’t each do their own thing and hope it all comes out good in the end.
What I have found works so well is the feeling that the hip/body turn carries the unmoving upper body assembly at the start of the forward swing.
As the turn continues, upper body momentum builds up, and a graceful and flowing release of the arms that times itself occurs, to swing the club through the ball without any effort of your own.
All this feels like one continuous movement. No parts, just one long, flowing movement. Watch the pros on TV swing their driver to see what I mean.
Practice your driver by creating this feeling as you swing it through the air (no swinging at golf balls). Over and over. Every swing feels this way; they are all identical.
Try that and see what you get.
It has been since January 2022 that I posted an updated version of my updatable golf book. I have spent the interval developing the swing principles contained in A Basic Golf Swing to arrive at what I really want to say.
BLGB is a comprehensive golf instruction book that helps you to score better in two ways: hitting better shots, and avoiding bad ones.
Play well, and have fun.
I put up three posts in the earlier years of this blog on how to choose the right set of tees. The posts were all too long and took too much time to get to the point.
Add your average driver distance (carry plus roll) to your average 7-iron distance (carry only) and multiply by 16.
The end.
A question many golfers as themselves is, why is a six-foot par putt (say) easier to sink than a six-foot birdie putt?
There has even been some research done on the question.
This what I think, and it’s kind of an easy answer.
You probably have lots more six-foot putts for par than for birdie. You know if you miss this one, another opportunity will come later in the round and you’ll probably sink it.
A six-foot birdie put, on the other hand, comes around maybe once every three rounds or so for most of us. We don’t get a chance like this very often and we have to make advantage of it when it comes up. And that is the problem right there.
I remember a round I played on a course that has fiendish 17th hole. Par 4, somewhat longish, with a bunker on the left guarding the entrance to the green. Even hitting the green with your second is hard to do.
The pin was in the back left. I hit a hybrid which drew perfectly and ended up eight feet past the hole.
Getting a birdie here would be a feather in my cap and I knew I would never have another chance like this again.
Of course, I missed the putt.
The urgency to get an unexpected birdie putt into the hole takes us out of our usual process, our usual mental approach to the putt.
Instead of knowing what we are doing, and being as comfortable with it as if it were a par putt, we are really uncomfortable because there is so much at stake. We are mentally adrift.
We start hoping the ball into the hole instead of hitting it in. And that’s the difference.
Think this, regardless: If the ball goes in, it goes in. If it doesn’t go in, it doesn’t. There’s nothing more to it.
Now if it were an eagle putt…
Jack Nicklaus was quoted in GolfWRX today about what he thinks are the six most important shots at Augusta. These are the ones you really have to pay attention to and know how to hit. Not to mention the catty remark about the rest of the course.
“Everybody knows Augusta pretty much, there’s [sic] about six shots at Augusta that you better pay attention to.
“Your tee shot at two, your second shot at 11, tee shot at 12, your tee shot at 13 and the second shot at 13, and the second shot at 15.
“I don’t think 16 – that doesn’t bother me, I don’t think I’ve ever hit it in the water there.
“So those six shots, if you play those shots smart, play them intelligently, and put them in the conservative side of the ledger, the rest of the golf course is not very hard.”
Elsewhere, one of the old guard is worried about the camaraderie or lack of it at this year’s Past Champions dinner. We know Greg Norman won’t be there, so it should go just fine.
The only thing I think of that could go wrong is that there would be nothing on the menu that noted rural Florida epicure Bubba Watson is willing to eat. Fix him a bowl of Cheerios.