I went to the range a few days ago and hit a medium bucket of balls. I got a lot of things done.
Then I went to the practice green. There must have been about fifteen other guys on the range, but I walked onto the practice green alone.
And I stayed there alone until I went home about 45 minutes later.
Happens all the time. Like it’s my private practice green. I just don’t get it.
Shooting good scores overall is more a matter of avoiding a high score on a hole than of getting a low one.
These three things put a lid on it:
1. Get the ball in the fairway off the tee. If you don’t hit a driver well, leave it at home.
2. Get the ball on the green with your first short game shot. Down in two is great, down in three is O.K., down in four is a big no-no.
3. Sink putts from under four feet. That takes lots of practice, but it’s worth it.
Short game swings are not abbreviated versions of the full swing. The pitching and chipping strokes are each their own animal.
Two things are common to both of them, though.
Light grip pressure. Slower tempo.
These are finesse shots. You are not banging the ball. You are caressing it.
This is where the short game begins:
Light grip pressure. Slower tempo.
This is going to be a difficult post to write. Not because of what I have to say, but because events will likely overtake it hours after it goes live and I’m not going to keep writing posts to stay with it all.
Greg Norman, the quintessential Australian alpha male, is shooting himself in the foot almost daily and it would be amusing to watch if it weren’t so tragic.
Norman’s latest salvo is in reference to the hit squad that Mohammed bin Salman sent to Istanbul to murder and dismember Jamal Khashoggi for the crime of publishing newspaper articles critical of the Saudi regime in general and MbS in particular.
Norman’s response? “From what I heard and what you guys reported, just take ownership of what it is. Take ownership no matter what it is. Look, we’ve all made mistakes, and you just want to learn from those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward.”
I have made mistakes I my life, but they did not involve murdering somebody.
As if Norman wants MbS to say:
“Oops! I shouldn’t have killed that guy. My bad! I’ll try to do better, O.K.? Now what say we all go grow the game of golf!”
Backpedalling furiously, LIV Golf released this statement:
“The killing of Jamal Khashoggi was reprehensible. Everyone agrees on that, including Greg, as he has said as such previously on many occasions. Greg also knows that golf is a force for good around the world and can help make inroads toward positive change. That is why he is so excited about LIV and that was the point he was making.”
So growing the game of golf in Saudi Arabia will change MbS to a kind, loving, benevolent despot.
Right.
See this article from Al Jazeera about even more stuff that teaching Saudis how to hit every fairway and every green won’t cure.
Greg, at some point you have to stop. We can see what you’re trying to with golf, and we have no argument with it. But you have attached yourself to some of the slimiest people on Earth to help you, and their slime is starting to stick to you.
Not that I care, really.
I’m going to remind you of something that I know has happened to you many times.
You’re in the fairway standing over the ball, your mind seems to be blank, you swing the club, and hit a tremendous shot and think to yourself, “Where did that come from?”
This happens a lot at the range, too. The first ball you hit with just a warming up swing is the best of the bucket.
The reason these things happened is that there was Nothing your mind.
I didn’t say there isn’t anything your mind. That’s different. There is something on your mind, and the name of that something is Nothing.
You’re not thinking of technique, you’re not thinking of results, not anything like that. You have cleared you mind of all that, but have not emptied it. Was you are thinking about now is Nothing.
What I mean by this is the feeling of a moving mind. that, and how to obtain it, are through described in Chapter 2 of my book, The Golfing Self.
The following golf-oriented exercise shows you a way to obtain this feeling.
I want you to take two practice swings, but without stopping between them. Start in your address position, then swing back, through, back again from there, and through a second time. Back through, back, through, two full swings in a continuous motion.
The first swing will probably be a bit clunky, like you’re trying to make a swing, but the second one will be quite relaxed, graceful, and, well, just a swing.
If you just let the second swing happen, you will have the feeling of Nothing in mind. At that point, step up to the ball and start your stroke with that feeling of Nothing still in mind. Go right away. If you delay too long, the feeling will fade away and you will be right back where you started.
Don’t hurry, just don’t dilly-dally. Step up to the ball and go while the feeling is fresh.
Practice this at home without a ball (of course). A lot. What you might have thought to be a random occurrence can become a reliable feature of your game.
For the longest time I would shank pitch shots. Not constantly, but occasionally, and I never knew when one would pop out.
I tried everything I could think of to fix it. Nothing worked. So I gave up and signed up for a lesson.
The pro said, “Let me see you hit a couple.” So I hit four or five 65-yard pitches as pretty as you please.
Then he said, “Hit them half that distance.”
I did, and sure enough, on the third try, the ball went shooting off low and to the right.
I turned to him said, “There it is!”
He said, “That wasn’t a shank.”
I said, “Then what was it?”
He said, “Your clubface was wide open.”
“You’re opening the clubface when you take the club back, and sometimes you don’t get it closed, so the clubface is still wide open when you make contact. The ball goes where the clubface points.”
So he taught me a radically a different pitching stroke that I’m not going to try to describe to you because this YouTube video with Lee Trevino shows you exactly the stroke the pro taught me.
If you shank pitches there’s a chance you are really doing the same thing I was doing and this is the cure.
Watch how Trevino doesn’t break his wrists when he takes the club back at 0:38. There is NO WRIST SET. The shaft and the left arm are in a straight line (3:27). That is the key.
This is a Steve Stricker video. Watch the whole video, it’s short, but pay attention at 1:10. No wrist set, as he says.
It is said that the long pitching stroke is a miniature swing. Not true. Not true at all. They are entirely different strokes and need to learned separately.
These are the key feelings I have identified after working on this shot for several months. The left arm (right arm, for you lefties) stays straight when you take it back. That arm feels like it is reaching out to the side, not swinging up in a circle.
The club feels like the shaft is sticking straight out to the side and the wrists have not broken at all. If you look, you will find neither of those things are true, but it will feel like they are.
Then you turn and swing the arms/hands/club assembly through the ball without changing any of these feelings I have described. Without changing the feelings. But do not force them.
Not only do I not hit those shooters anymore, but I am deadly accurate. If I get lined up at the pin that’s exactly where the ball goes.
You can do that to.
——-
Note: Some of you are having trouble seeing the videos. They show up just fine on my iMac. Here are the links to the videos. If you can’t see them in the blog, let me know, tell me how you are viewing the blog, and I will try to fix it. Thank you very much.
“https://youtu.be/JbkLDwa1Nxc”
“https://youtu.be/0NYjM5UkxZQ”
Now that we have dumped long irons for good, the new bad boys in our bag are fairway woods. I couldn’t hit those off the ground, either, so when hybrid irons came along, I switched and that made a huge difference in my long-distance game.
But still, I took fairway woods to be a challenge because they can’t be THAT hard. Turns out they are.
So I went to YouTube and looked at a lot of videos about how to hit fairway woods and tried the tricks. No luck.
The next step was to figure it out myself, which I love to do, because I usually come up with something I haven’t heard before that works.
I thought, where are the hard parts?
The first hard part is that the club is so much longer than irons are. When we swing one we don’t feel the connection between our hands and the clubhead, which makes us worry about even being able to get the clubhead on the ball.
The problem is that your hands are on the wrong part of the handle. You have to be holding the club at its balance point. Then you will feel clubhead in your hands even though is is over three feet away from them.
Second hard part: the loft of my irons gives me great confidence that I can get the clubface under the ball. It seems all we can do with the FW is bounce it off the ground behind the ball and get nothing much out of the shot.
We still have to be hitting down somewhat, to get the ball first-ground second impact. You do that by thinking of where you want the clubhead to hit the ground, not behind the ball or at the ball, but a bit in front of it.
And of course, your hands must be leading the clubhead.
There is a one last thing, though, which should go without saying.* Use your standard golf swing. Do not think you have to do something different to get the ball in the air or hit the ball a long way.
Use your standard swing with your standard tempo and your standard rhythm and let the club do what it was designed to do.
Maybe fairway woods aren’t part of your game. You prefer hybrid irons and you don’t even have a fairway wood. No matter.
You have to have a decent swing to be able to hit a decent fairway wood shot off the ground. It’s worth learning to hit this club for this reason alone. It will improve everything else.
*I wish I had a dollar for every time somebody says, “It should go without saying…” and then says it anyway.
I devote this blog to giving you my opinions on what to do and describe to the best of my ability how to do it.
Most of golf instruction is about getting the causes right to attain the desired effects, but that doesn’t always work. If it did, because of all the great instruction out there, everyone would be a single-digit handicapper in their spare time.
Sometimes we have to skip the causes and go right to the effect. Learning golf’s most critical skill is one of those times.
I have tried many drills you can find on line about how to find the center of the clubface. I wanted to see if they worked.
They didn’t. The common fault is that the drills involve a complicated setup that has nothing to do with being on the tee box or in the middle of the fairway with just you, a club, and one ball. We’re going to try it my way.
I want you to do two things. Start with a iron you hit well enough and slow down the swing. Slow it way down. That’s the first step.
The second step is to think, just before you take the club away, “center of the clubface.” Give your unconscious mind that thought and let that mind guide your swing to achieve that result.
Direction, slow swing, unconscious control. Those are the keys right now. Do not be concerned with how far the ball goes (although it will go farther than you expect it to).
Direction, slow swing, unconscious control, to meet the center of the clubface. Over and over.
Gradually you can speed up your swing and switch to other clubs. As you swing faster, guidance by the unconscious mind becomes more important. I would leave the driver alone until you get really good at this.
This drill trains your conscious mind to first, to give the right instruction, and second, to stay out of the way while the unconscious mind carries out the instruction.
I do a pretty good job of finding the center of the clubface. This is how I learned to do it.
A few days ago, I was taking to a former teaching pro about the swing. We got into the idea of coiling in the backswing.
In most of what you read about that or hear about that on YouTube videos, the pro is talking about winding up as you swing back to create and elastic tension that snaps the hips back to begin the forward swing.
Sounds good, but muscles don’t work that way. You can coil up all you want to the finish of your backswing and sit there all day without any feeling of resisting a strong pull to uncoil you.
Coiling is still a good idea, but we have to think about the meaning of that word in a different way.
Think of unscrewing the lid of a wide-mouth jar a half turn. Then screw it back to where it started. The path it takes when you screw the lid back on that half turn IS THE SAME PATH IT TOOK WHEN YOU UNSCREWED IT. Let’s bring that to the golf swing.
We start at an address position and wish to bring the clubhead back to the same place with the same orientation at impact.
We start the process by taking the club back to a stopping point, then we reverse the direction of the swing. All we have to do to achieve the goal stated above is undo the things we just did.
Whatever you do when you take the club back, undo that exactly when you swing the club forward. This means when you turn your body back in a certain way, turn back in that same way. Coil, uncoil.
I’m thinking of your torso here. You legs will do different things naturally.
Develop a golf swing in which what you do going back is easy to undo going forward. The less you do taking the club back, the less you have to undo when swinging it forward, making it easier to bring the clubface back to where it started.
(We’re talking about coiling your body, but as well if you do things with your wrists going back, you have to undo those things coming forward, and that won’t always be easy.)
True that when you watch the professionals on TV they don’t always follow this advice. Jim Furyk. Miller Barber when I was learning the game.
But you’re not a pro. You don’t have hours to spend every day to grooving an unorthodox swing.
Do, undo. Build a swing that does that.
Shirley Spork, a founding member of the LPGA, died yesterday at the age of 94.
Read obituaries in the New York Times and at the LPGA website..