All posts by recgolfer

mental game

How to Profit From a Post-Round Review

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After a round of golf, what do you think back on? Do you talk about the score you could have had if only you had done this or that? Most people do. How about the good shots? Do you spend much time on them? I think we tend to take our best shots for granted, even the 45-foot putt that we had no business making, but in remembering the good shots lies the key to better golf.

The bad shots happen. Let ‘em go. Remember only the good shots. You have the ability to hit them or you wouldn’t have done it. Build on them. Remember what they looked like, and most importantly remember what it felt like, not just physically, but mentally, as you were hitting them. This feeling of mind is what will lead you to hitting more good shots just like them.

You might say “How can you remember a feeling,” but just as the image of the shot persists in your memory, so the does the memory of your mental state during the shot. That might not be something you’re used to remembering, but it’s there. You just have to look for it. Don’t worry, it’s not hiding. Just start thinking back and you’ll find it right away.

Why is this important? It’s because the mind leads the body. The state of the mind directly influences the state of the body, and thus its performance. The difference between a good shot and a bad one is a matter of mind, not of technique.

When you have a clear idea of the state of your mind when you hit good shots, you can then teach yourself to repeat that state of mind at will. How? Before you hit any shot, in practice or in play, retrieve that feeling of calm confidence, then hit the shot. Constant repetition is the key to developing your mind in this way–it’s not there for the asking.

By doing this, you will develop good shot-making skills much faster, and you will achieve the mental consistency you need on the golf course.

The second thing to review is the mental decisions you made. Affirm your decision-making process when it led to you to the right decision, and correct it in review when there was a flaw–not for the purpose of saying, What if, but to get it right the next time. This is teaching yourself to think like a golfer.

The last thing to do in your review is look for shots that keep your score up because you don’t know how to hit them–chipping out of the rough might be an example. Then fix them. If you had a headache, you’d take an aspirin right away, wouldn’t you? So if part of your golf game is giving you a headache, get a lesson. Right away.

The scorecard in your hand is a blueprint for how to play better if you look at properly. It’s not about “What I did,” but “What I’ll do.”

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

practice

Build Your Swing One Club at a Time

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A teaching pro once told me that when he was getting ready to play in a tournament, he did nothing but putt and hit wedges. Lots of wedges. He explained why, but I didn’t really get the point until about two years ago.

For a long time, I didn’t have a very good pitching stroke. Those 50- to 100-yard shots were pretty tough. So I finally decided that whenever I hit a bucket, half the bucket would be devoted to hitting pitches. In just a few months, I got the stroke down and the results were magnificent. Each shot was crisply struck, took off with authority, went straight, arched high, and stopped near where it landed.

Then I put two and two together. Why not build the swing I use for pitching into the swing I use for full shots? This is what the pro was talking about. He was bringing all the right elements of striking the ball—-tempo, releasing the club through impact—-into the full swing. The full swing is just a longer pitch.

I want you to try this. Start working hard on your pitching game with your sand wedge. Get a lesson if you have to. When you’re hitting pitches that fly high, straight, and bite when they hit, you’re ready to learn how to extend that same swing into your full shots.

Now go through the bag one club at a time. Learn to hit your pitching wedge this way. Hit some pitches with your SW, then hit your PW. Keep going back and forth until your SW and PW swings feel the same. Then move on to your 9-iron, and again alternate between your SW and 9-iron. When that’s successful, move on to your 8-iron, same process.

Never move to the next club until you are completely confident with the one you’re working on. This carries confidence over to the next club. Otherwise, you carry over doubt, and the program beaks down. It might take you a week or more to get it right for one club. Keep at it, one club at a time, until you’re hitting your driver with this same, smooth swing. When in doubt, go back to the wedge. In fact, never leave the wedge. That club is your foundation.

Let me assure you that I don’t mean for you to swing your 5-iron or your driver with the identical swing that you use with a sand wedge—-short, small, and without much clubhead speed. As you move up to longer clubs, the swing feeling you carry over from the sand wedge will naturally adjust to swinging a longer-shafted and straighter-faced club as it was designed to be swung, but with the same light feeling that you use with the sand wedge. The result will be a shot that goes straight, and you won’t lose a yard from what you had been getting.

I cannot overstate how easy it is to learn how to hit the ball straight if you use this approach. If you are willing to throw out your old swing and its bad habits, such as lurching into the ball, guiding the club into the ball, swinging with a tempo that is far too fast, etc., you can become the accurate and consistent ball-striker you long to be. Commit to this program and you’ll improve so much it will be like you’re a different golfer.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

short game

Short Game Variables

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The fun of the short game, as well as its frustration, is that you will never hit the same shot twice. There will always be a different lie, a different amount of fairway to cover, a different amount of green, different contours, different green speeds, all of which add up to having to use your imagination to a degree if you want to get the ball close to the hole. That means being aware of the variables of short shots and being able to control them. Then you can add a little of this or take off a little of that to tailor your shot to the precise situation in which you find yourself.

There are only five variables affecting the shot: loft, angle of approach, club path, clubface alignment, and clubhead speed. The parts of the shot that these variables affect are distance, direction, trajectory, and spin. The art of the short game is in controlling those variables.

Loft affects how high the ball flies in the air and how far it rolls after it lands. A high-flying ball, for example, gets over obstacles and stops quickly when it lands. All that counts is loft at impact. Vary loft with the club selected, by de-lofting the clubhead at address, opening or closing the clubface at address, varying ball position at address, and by varying the angle of approach.

Angle of approach is the angle to the ground the the club makes as it meets the ball. The clubhead can be moving parallel to the ground, or coming down at any selected angle. The closer to parallel the clubhead is traveling at contact, the higher the ball will fly because the effective loft of the club is greater. Angle of approach also affects the amount of spin that is applied to the ball. This variable is best controlled by ball position at address. The closer to your right foot the ball is, the steeper the club will come into the ball. A more or less wristy swing will also affect this angle.

Club path governs the direction the ball will go after it is truck. It is not the only influence, though. There is a complicated relationship with the clubface alignment that is the true determinant of this direction. The ball will tend more toward where the clubface is pointing than where the club is being swung. An open or closed clubface, best set up at address, also puts sidespin on the ball, affecting where the ball rolls after it lands.

Clubhead speed determines how far the ball will go after it has been struck. Also, the faster the clubhead is moving, the more spin that is applied to the ball. Swing speed can be varied by changing the tempo of the swing, changing its length, how the club is released through impact, or by gripping up or down to change the length of the club.

The alterations you make in the shot to affect these variables interact. When you make two alterations, they can work in an additive way or negate each other. Be aware of that when you test these alterations around the practice green. Pay attention as well to the degree of alteration needed to achieve a desired result. Remember that the test is how distance, direction, trajectory, and spin are affected.

A final variable is the ball itself. A Tour ball accepts more spin and is more responsive to variations in the stroke. It will also accept more spin in a full shot, so if you curve the ball to a pronounced degree when you swing, a Tour ball might not be the best choice in spite of its value around the green.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

putting

An Experiment With Uphill and Downhill Putts

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Short post today. Yesterday morning I was at the range and I tried something different on uphill and downhill putts to get the distance right. For the uphill putt, I gripped the putter at the very end of the handle. My left little finger was barely on the club. That has the effect of lengthening the club, giving the stroke a little more speed without any more effort. I usually leave uphill putts short of the hole, and this trick did get the ball closer.

I tried the opposite for a downhill putt, by gripping down from where I usually hold the putter, thereby shortening the club, which takes off speed. That didn’t help as much, though I must say that I’m pretty good at downhill putts already and don’t need this kind of assistance.

You might try it, though, lengthening or shortening up on the grip to adjust for slope. Then you hit the ball using the same pace as you would for the length of putt you are facing as if it were a putt across level ground. I can’t say anything conclusive about this trick, because I only played with it for a few minutes. It’s just another variable that might help.

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rules

Know the Rules: Ball on a Cart Path

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It’s not unusual for a golf ball to wind up on a cart path. It’s also not unusual for a player not to know what to do.

A cart path is an immovable obstruction (See Obstructions, Definitions; Rule 24-2).

You get a free drop from the cart path, but it has to be taken at the right spot. That spot is based on the nearest point of relief. Many people think this point is off the side of the path closest to where the ball is resting, but that is not so. Remember that the nearest point of relief is the spot where the ball would lie when you take a stance, with the club you would normally use to hit the upcoming shot, in the direction you would be hitting it, and not be interfered with by the cart path in any way.

The best way to determine the nearest point of relief off a cart path is to establish a point of relief on each side of the path, marking each one with a tee, and then measuring from the ball to each point to find which point is the nearest to where the ball lies.

Once the nearest point of relief has been found, measure one club-length away from that spot, but no nearer to the hole, and put another tee in the ground. Use any club you like to make that measurement. If it’s your driver, take off the clubhead cover first.

Pick up your ball from the cart path and drop it so it hits the ground somewhere between the two tees and behind the line between them. As soon as you have a legal drop, play on.

If the ball rolls back onto the cart path, you must drop it again. If the ball rolls onto the path again, you must place the ball as close as possible to the spot where it hit a part of the course, usually the ground.

What happens if the cart path is right next to a bush, and the nearest point of relief is inside the bush, and one club length from it would be either inside the bush or in a place where the bush obstructs your swing? You can substitute “tree” for “bush” and the problem is the same. Those objects are not obstructions, but part of the course, so you get no further relief from them.

The answer is that you might be better off playing the ball as it lies on the cart path. Just because you can take a drop doesn’t mean you have to take a drop. Once you pick the ball up, though, you are obliged to drop it, so think about it first.

Once again:
1. Find the point of relief on each side of the cart path and drop the ball within one club-length of the point closest to the ball, but no nearer to the hole.
2. If it is difficult or impossible to play from there, you might have to play the ball as it lies on the cart path.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

center of the clubface

A Critical Golfing Skill

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Two days ago I suggested that you might find it rewarding to spend a year starting over and learning to hit the ball the right way instead of putting patches on your mistakes. Let me spend today’s post talking about what it means to hit the ball the right way. That means to hit the ball on the center of the clubface every time.

To get consistent results you have to hit the ball consistently. There are many variables you can put into your shotmaking, but there must be one constant that those variables play off of, and that constant is hitting the ball on the center of the clubface.

If you want a good short game, you don’t build it around a bagful of shots. You build it around a predictable response every time you hit the ball, and the only way to do that is to hit the ball off the same spot of the clubface every time. Then you can add on variables that make the ball do this or that, but you know that when the ball does something different it was because of the variable you added on, and not from missing the strike.

It pays to know how far you hit your irons, but if you hit the ball on different places on the clubface each time, you will never be able to take advantage of that knowledge to get the ball close to the pin.

We all know about putting, don’t we? Every piece you read on putting that goes into it in any depth stresses the importance of hitting the ball on the sweet spot. You might have the perfect stroke for a twenty-foot putt, but if you miss the sweet spot, the ball will only roll eighteen feet. And off line.

If you can hit the ball on the center of the clubface every time, you don’t have to practice very long to get your feel for a particular shot. Hitting the ball all over the face leaves you confused at the range and guessing on the course.

So if you want to take me up on the one-year program, spend it doing this. It is the end of the golf stroke. Swing mechanics are the means. To learn ball-striking with this end in mind, you will have to swing the club correctly, no matter what the shot is. You can’t hit the ball consistently on the middle of the clubface without doing a lot of other things right at the same time.

Start with your putter and see if what I just said isn’t true. By the time you have developed a stroke that lets you hit the ball on the sweet spot consistently, you will also have developed a stroke that returns the clubface square to the starting path and moving in line with it. It can’t happen any other way. Then transfer that awareness to the rest of your game, one shot at a time, one club at a time.

Let me end with a story about Ben Crenshaw. This is from the days when metal drivers were being introduced to replace wooden drivers. A rep approached Crenshaw with the pitch that the metal driver would make it a lot easier to hit the ball off the sweet spot. Crenshaw took the driver out of his bag, showed the rep a worn spot on the center of the clubface about the size of a dime, and said, “I don’t have any trouble hitting the sweet spot.”

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fundamentals

Maybe You Should Start Golf Over

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Be honest. If you’re not very good and not getting better, you know it. You don’t have to tell me, you don’t have to tell anyone else, and it’s not a judgmental thing. But if you don’t hit good shots very often, and you want to do better, what do you do? You take lessons, and practice, and play, and nothing changes, or maybe it changes a little, but not in the way you want it to.

Today I’m going to talk about how your entire approach to improving might be what is holding you back. There will be no swing tips here, no instructions on how to hit a new shot that will turn everything around, just a sit-down discussion on why starting over might be the best way to free you up to be the good golfer you believe you can be.

Last Sunday I went to visit my son for Easter dinner. He’s learning golf as an adult. He’s 37 years old right now, and has been at it for about six or seven years. This is how he started–get some clubs, go to the range, swing away. Maybe if you’re an original genius, you can get away with this. An example is our current Masters champion, Bubba Watson, who is entirely self-taught. My son is not that way. Might not be you, either.

A few years ago, after suffering through round after round of whiffs, shanks, and 10+ lost balls per round (I’m not kidding. I play with him.), my son decided to take some lessons. The lessons are going all right, but he doesn’t have them that often and I’m not sure what he’s practicing in the meantime. He does want to become a good golfer, though.

So when we were sitting in the TV room before dinner, I told him something quite plain. I said, you are playing with a weak foundation. The way you swing now still has many remnants of a swing based on a conception of movement that contributes little that is good to hitting a golf ball well or at all. What you’re doing now is putting patches on patches, trying to fix a swing that is unfixable.

I said, you have to be willing to start over again. Learn how to do it right from the ground up. Learn how to putt. Learn what a professional putting stroke is. Learn how to look like a pro, feel like a pro, and move like a pro when there’s a putter in your hands. Get a conception of movement for this little stroke that is different from the one you have now. And then when you have it, move on to chipping with the same goal. Look, feel, and move like a professional golfer with those little shots.

If you keep doing this, I went on, working your way up to a full swing, then after a year of steady effort, you will be the golfer you want to be–someone who is in control of every shot. You will be someone who knows the ball is going where he intends rather than someone who hopes the ball will maybe go there this time. You will be someone who can plan his way around the course because you know that your plans will work out more often than not.

Reader, I don’t know where you are in your game. I don’t know what kind of a foundation you have for golf and how much you’re improving, if at all. I understand that the way you play now might be all right with you and that making a serious, time-consuming commitment to golf beyond what you’re giving the sport right now would take you away from other things more important to you than golf.

If that’s not you, there is no reason why you can’t be a much better player than you are now if you are willing to devote one year to a program like I outlined above, working your way up from putting to swinging. One year is not a very long time to spend on earning a lifetime of first-class golf for yourself. This is a shorter time than it would take to learn to play a musical instrument well, or speak a foreign language well.

Start over. Instead of spending your time on correcting things that are wrong, spend your time learning only things that are right. If right things are all that you do, how can you go wrong? With a golf game built on that kind of a foundation, the way is clear to being as good as you want. Be my guest.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

putting, short game

A Morning Around the Practice Green

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I went to the range this morning to get a little practice in before I settle down to watch the Masters broadcast. I took a putter, and 8-iron, and four balls. I started chipping with the 8-iron to holes different distances away to see how close I could chip effectively with it, and how far away. I plan on doing that with all my chipping clubs, 6-iron through sand wedge. Someone else can chip with their lob wedge, but not me.

In addition to finding out what I wanted to know about the 8-iron, I found an effective way of judging the strength of the stroke. It’s fairly intuitive. I was just looking at the hole and waiting for a feeling to appear that said, in its own way, “This hard.” It is a feeling that is in your mind, but is felt in some way in your body, too. I found that if I executed that feeling with my body turn, and not with my hands and arms, my distance control was really good. When the feeling got into my hands, all was lost.

As for putting, I worked on approach putts by dropping balls at 20, 25, 30, and 35 feet, then putting them toward a hole. Again, looking at the length of the putt and letting the right feeling of power to infuse itself worked like a charm. For these longer putts I am finding that the best power generators are the oblique muscles of the abdomen. They are big muscles, not subject to flinching, and are the muscles of the moving stroke farthest away from the hands, which are the last source of power you should consider.

Short putts: Remember how, in the real old days, golfers would putt their putter in front of the ball, then lift it over to the back and make their stroke? They were checking to see if the clubface was square to their starting line, and that is easier to do without a ball in the way. If you have an alignment mark in the top surface of your putter, all the better. Mine doesn’t, so I drew one with a Sharpie.

You put the putter in front of the ball, line things up, lift up the putter and replace it behind the ball without disturbing the alignment of the mark, and stroke along that line. Works great. You don’t have to spend all that time fussing with the mark on the golf ball.

One last thing. Two last things, actually. Set the putter down gently so it barely touches the ground. That gives you a freer start to the stroke. Keep looking at where the ball was for a few seconds after you have hit the putt. I don’t know why, by this greatly improves your accuracy.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfers.com

rules

Know the Rules: Dropping the Ball

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There are times when you can drop the ball to get relief from an obstruction, or when putting a ball in play after a penalty has been incurred. We’ll talk about those situations later, but today I want to go over the procedures surrounding dropped balls. They’re not simple. Actually, just dropping the ball is simple. You hold the ball out at shoulder height and arm’s length, open your fingers, and let it go. Enjoy the ride down, because all the fun starts when the ball hits the ground.

Once the ball is dropped and comes to rest*, it is in play unless it: (this is straight from the rule book)

(i) rolls into and comes to rest in a hazard;
(ii) rolls out of and comes to rest outside a hazard;
(iii) rolls onto and comes to rest on a putting green;
(iv) rolls and comes to rest out of bounds;
(v) rolls to and comes to rest in a position where there is interference by the condition from which relief was taken under Rule 24-2b (immovable obstruction), Rule 25-1 (abnormal ground conditions), Rule 25-3 (wrong putting green) or a Local Rule (Rule 33-8a), or rolls back into the pitch-mark from which it was lifted under Rule 25-2 (embedded ball);
(vi) rolls and comes to rest more than two club-lengths from where it first struck a part of the course; or
(vii) rolls and comes to rest nearer the hole than:
  (a) its original position or estimated position (see Rule 20-2b) unless otherwise permitted by the Rules; or
  (b) the nearest point of relief or maximum available relief (Rule 24-2, 25-1 or 25-3); or
  (c) the point where the original ball last crossed the margin of the water hazard or lateral water hazard (Rule 26-1).

In any of these cases, you must re-drop the ball, without penalty. If the re-dropped ball does one of these things again, you must place the ball as near as possible to the spot where it hit the ground on the second drop. Fortunately, most of these cases are rare. The ones that occur most often are (v) and (vii).

Deep Rules: If the dropped ball comes to rest but then moves again, it is played as it lies without penalty. If the dropped ball is not recoverable, such as it rolls into a pond, another ball may be substituted.

All of this is found in Rule 20-2.

The penalty for an illegal drop is one stroke, but if the mistake is corrected before the ball is played, there is no penalty (Rule 20-6).

*More Deep Rules: “Comes to rest” is the operative phrase. The ball does not have to hit the ground. It only has to strike part of the course. If it comes to rest in a bush without hitting the ground, it is play. If it strikes a branch on the way down, it has struck a part of the course and in play where it comes to rest, except for (i) through (vii) above.

Practical advice:
Many times you will be dropping the ball onto less-than-ideal ground. Since the ball is held an arm’s length away from you, it’s hard to tell exactly where the ball will hit the ground and end up. You want to be left with the best lie possible within the limits the rules allow. You should therefore practice dropping the ball, so you can predict just where the ball will land. When it comes time to drop the ball on the course, you’ll know how to drop it on the best spot of ground, again, within limits, to increase your chances of getting a good lie after the drop. And no tricks. It’s a gravity-fed drop only.

My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.

commentary

Payne Whiffs the Discrimination Issue at Masters Press Conference

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Yesterday, Masters chairman Billy Payne faced questioning from reporters about the continuing absence of female members at the Augusta National Golf Club. He handled the issue as poorly as a 30-handicapper dealing with a downhill slider on one of Augusta’s bikini-waxed* greens.

Payne’s stock answer to the question was, “That’s a membership issue,” hoping the assembled press would get the hint and realize where they were and whom they were talking to, and start minding their manners. In other words, golf’s equivalent of being in church and speaking to the head prelate.

Apparently the press hasn’t drunk the Augusta Kool-Aid, because the questions kept coming. Apparently, too, Payne had only one answer scripted because he didn’t expect to have the same question asked more than once after he gave the word. Since he was prepared with only one answer, that’s the answer he kept on giving, and it got worse every time.

In my April 2 post, I suggested that Martha Burk should work this issue from the inside, through the golf organizations that have leverage. Now that the press has picked up on the points in that post (are people in high places loyal readers?) that will be another point of pressure if they don’t let go, and keep asking the question after the Masters is over. At the Players Championship press conference. At the U.S. Open press conference. At the PGA Championship press conference. Keep the ball in the air.

Now I know this is a golf instruction blog and that’s what you expect to read when you dial it up. There’s another Know the Rules post coming tomorrow. This issue is important, though, and I am using this space to add my voice to the list of people who don’t believe that Augusta is above criticism or accountability in the golf world, and that we have a duty to ask why ANGC is getting by with flouting the rules that the rest of this country has to live by, and the golf world thinks nothing of it.

I hope to see a fine tournament ending with Webb Simpson and Keenan Bradley playing off in a battle of belly putters. But let’s not allow the issue of female membership die as soon as the honorary starters tee off tomorrow.

* So described in 1994 by Gary McCord in his final** Masters as a broadcaster.

** Per request/demand of the Masters Tournament Committee.

See also Finchem Whiffs Discrimination Issue at Ponte Vedra Beach