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anchored putting, commentary

Tiger Woods Weighs In On Anchored Putting

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We’ve all been waiting for the shoe to drop in this issue, and yesterday, it did. Tiger Woods stated that the belly putter does not square with what he feels to be “implicit in the art of putting,” which is a “controlling the body and club and swinging the pendulum motion.” Fair enough. That’s a pretty good description of all the elements you need to hit a ball, lying on the ground, with a club, and have a reasonable idea of where the ball is going to go.

What that has to do with belly putters, though, is beyond me. The motion Woods describes is an exact description of both the way Woods putts and the way Webb Simpson putts. If you wanted to distinguish between the two styles, that description doesn’t make the distinction. I willing to let that go as him saying what he thinks, and he can certainly put in his two cents just like the next fellow.

Woods, however, does not want to solve the problem by outlawing anchoring a putter against a player’s body. He wants to eliminate belly putting by regulating the length of the club, and that is an entirely different matter.

“My idea was to have it so that the putter would be equal to or less than the shortest club in your bag,” Woods said. “And I think with that we’d be able to get away from any type of belly anchoring.”

Yes, we would, but that would at the same time take the game away from thousands of golfers who have a difficult time with short clubs. I take this personally, because one of those golfers could be me.

[Note: The Rules of Golf say: “The overall length of the club must be at least 18 inches (0.457 m) and, except for putters, must not exceed 48 inches (1.219 m).” Why woods, hybrid irons, irons, and wedges may continue to be constrained by the 48-inch limit, but a putter could not, can be discussed, but separately.]

Last week I had surgery on my spine to correct an urgent condition. In three months I am going to have another spine operation to correct something else. I have known for years that all this would would have to happen sometime, and now is the time. What I am concerned about is the future.

I am hoping to be back out on the course in July, at least chipping and putting. I would like to putt with my 48″ split-grip putter that for most golfers would be a belly putter, but since I’m 6’6″ tall, is merely a different putter. It does let me stand up straight when I putt, though, and that is a big help to me over using a putter that was built for someone a foot shorter than I am. Essentially, it lets me putt like everyone else does. This putter lets me play.

My personal concern is over where my back will take me in the coming decades. If Woods’s plan gets adopted, will I have to give up golf if the time comes that I can’t bend over enough to putt with a putter that is required to be shorter than I can manage without discomfort? Could the rules of golf be changed such that a large class of golfers might be shut out of the game?

In all the discussion of belly putters, you keep hearing, “They’re not fair.” Well, Woods’s plan is not fair. This not just his game. It’s my game too, and shutting me out, and others like me, in this way is not fair.

I have written about belly putters in previous posts, and likely will write more about them this year when two more major tournaments are won by players using them. But this plan, this one needs to be deep-sixed. If the belly putter is harmful to golf, then Woods’s club-length plan could be fatal to many of us.

equipment

My Two Golf Bags

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I like to have fun with the clubs I choose for my bag. A particular makeup means that you have to play the game in a patricular way. There’s no harm in that, and it makes it more fun to mix things up every so often. It makes you create, and the rewards of doing that successfully are great.

This is my short bag: driver, 2H, 4H, 7i, PW, SW, putter. I play pretty well with just these seven clubs. If you only think before you hit, there really isn’t any shot that you can’t pull off. It’s just not automatic. Seven clubs make the bag a lot lighter to carry, too.

This is my long bag: driver, 2H, 3H, 4H, 5H, 6-9i, PW, GW, SW, LW, putter. I look at the length of the longest par 3 I will be playing today and take the 2H or 3H as appropriate, leaving the other at home. Four wedges give me lots of pitching flexibility, and make chipping formulaic.

I have felt for many years that I won’t put clubs in my bag because a manufacturer wants me to. They go in because there is a reason.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

short game

Short Game Style

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I watched almost the entire broadcast of the Waste Management Open from TPC Scottsdale this weekend. That much golf made a strong impression on me in one regard. When a player had to chip onto the green from about 5-20 yards, he would, far more often than not, get the ball in the air just enough to land it on the green for it run the rest of the way to the hole. Only in a few cases where there was no other choice did anyone fly the ball up to the hole so it could land and stop. Even Phil played chip and run.

I noticed, too, this last summer when I went to the LPGA’s Safeway Classic in Portland. Everyone was running the ball up to the hole if the option was there.

It wasn’t hard to see why, after a time. They’re not trying to get the ball close to the hole. They want it to go in. A rolling ball has a much greater chance of doing that than a ball that comes out of the sky and bounces a few times. They want their chips to approach the hole, instead, like a putt.

Now throwing the ball up there with a lofted wedge and having it land two feet away is impressive. You get lots of “Nice shot!” comments from your playing partners. The pros, even though they could stop it two feet away all day, clearly don’t think they can make a living with that shot, so they don’t use it unless they have to. Neither, I suspect, should you.

Part of the problem is that we have the idea that pros do all their chipping with a lob wedge or a sand wedge, so that’s what we want to do, too. Maybe a few of them do, but that’s not what I saw on TV. I saw them use just enough club to get the ball in the air and many times you could easily tell that they were using 7-irons, 8-irons.

If you’re a flyer, even though you’re good enough to get up and down, consider that you might be eliminating the chance of the “up” being the only stroke you need to make. There are lots of things about professional golf concerning the swing that many of us will never be able to do because of the vast differences in physical talents and abilities between them and us, but anybody can play the short game the way they do. And running the ball is how they play it.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

golf courses

Five Scottish Golf Courses You Should Know About

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Everyone wants to go to Scotland and play the famous courses. If they don’t, they should. It’s the home of the game, it’s where golf architecture was born from a marriage between the land as it was found, and the game to be played. These five courses are not on the Open Championship rotation, but they are very bit as challenging and would comprise a wonderful itinerary if you decided to make a pilgrimage.

1. Cruden Bay. A major course on the east coast. The opening drive on a 416-yard par 4 pitches down along the coast. From there, the rest of the course winds among shaggy sandhills which make a course that should not be missed.

2. Nairn. The site of British Amateur and Walker Cup competitions, Nairn is duneland golf — fast but narrow fairways with the sea always in view.

3. Western Gailes. This course serves annually for Open Championship qualifying. Holes 1 through 11 are the essence of links golf. Hummocks, bunkers, and greens exactly where they are supposed to be, tucked between the railroad line and the sea.

4. Brora. This is the northern-most course of quality in the British Isles, designed by James Braid. Notice the fence surrounding the green. Sheep graze freely on the course, and the fence is to keep them off the green.

5. Royal Dornoch. Donald Ross grew up on this course and every architect visits it and studies it. This is the course Tom Watson said he would choose if he only had one course to play on.



To read more about these courses, I strongly suggest the book, A Golfer’s Education, by Darren Kilfara. This Harvard student provides masterful descriptions of these courses and his experiences on them which he played during his year abroad at the University of St. Andrews.

shot-making

Total Command of the Golf Ball

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If you want to be a golfer who has the right shot for every occasion, you need to be able to control distance, spin, curvature, and trajectory. We will reduce direction, the fifth characteristic of a golf shot, to being able to hit a straight ball and assume that you already know how to do that, since the other four controls are variations of this shot and depend on your being able to hit it.

Please don’t think, though, that I’m going to tackle that project in this post or in a series of posts. I want you to really learn how to do all those things, not just get a general idea, and you do that by signing up for a series of lessons of your own design. This is what you would tell the pro you want to learn.

Say you hit your 7-iron 145 yards. To get the ball close to a pin with a 7-iron, that one distance isn’t enough. You need to know how to hit it anywhere between 133 and 145. That’s lesson number one.

Sometimes when you’re chipping you need to put on spin so the ball will stop. Other times you need to take spin off so the ball will run. Ask the pro how you hit each shot, with the same club.

Sometimes you would like to bend the ball a little bit into a tucked pin. Other times you need to bend the ball a lot around a tree. Learn both shots, curving left or right. Find out how to do that.

Hitting shots into the green with a higher or lower trajectory will get you closer to the pin by design rather than by chance. With a pin in front, a high shot that sits quickly is best. A lower shot that releases is how to get to a pin in back. Hitting into an elevated green calls for a higher trajectory. Controlling trajectory is a vital skill for playing on a windy day. All of this is the fourth lesson.

None of these things are difficult to do, and winter is a good time to learn how. Your teaching pro will be delighted to spend time with you on these matters, since few golfers ask about them. Afterwards, just keep these skills in practice to be in command on the golf course.

practice

Remembering Your Golf Swing

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One reason why the golf swing is so difficult is that many golfers do not have a good idea from one day to the next just exactly how they swing the club. They often rely on the groove they got into last time at the range, but the move they thought was The Difference can’t be found the next time out. Now what?

You would have to have daily lessons and daily practice to remember every detail in your golf swing and know just what to do to correct yourself when something goes wrong. The best bet for a recreational golfer is to remember how to perform five critical parts of the swing and just work on performing them the same way every time. If so, what happens in between has to be happening the same way, too.

The five parts of the swing to remember are: the takeaway, the end of the backswing, the start of the downswing, impact, and the finish.

Takeaway defines your club path and the plane of your backswing. The end of the backswing is the furthest limit of your being able to feel that the clubhead is still connected to the ball. The start of the downswing can be led in many ways, but never with your hands. Impact is, of course, impact, but it is a dynamic position, one of moving through, not of arriving at, a spot. The finish is where this all leads to. When the finish is right, likely everything that came before it was, too.

You can practice each one of these positions separately. The task is to memorize what each one feels like, installing the feeling into our subconscious awareness so that the movements in between will automatically seek the next position. When you play, you could take a slow practice swing to rehearse hitting all the right feelings.

Good golf is not played by having a great swing. It’s played by making your best swing more often. Learning these five basic positions, given a fundamentally sound grip, stance, posture, and alignment, will take care of that.

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

equipment

Long Irons

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I get a few ideas for what to write about in this space from the keywords that people use to find it. Lately there have been a few searches concerning long irons. I give you from today’s list:

faster swing speed with long irons
how far do you hit a 4-iron
anyone play gi irons in their long irons?

These are good questions that deserve good answers. Most of us feel comfortable up to about 160 yards and then from 200 yards and up. It’s that gap that we find difficult to fill. We’re still trying to hit the ball a selected distance, and straight, and that’s not easy for a recreational golfer to do.

You have two options in terms of equipment — long irons or hybrid irons. Long irons were what I grew up playing with. Iron sets came 2-9. The pitching wedge was a separate purchase. In those days, instruction books had sections, and golf magazines had tips, on how to hit your long irons. There were as many of those articles then as there are “How to get out of a bunker” articles today. They were the clubs recreational golfers just couldn’t get off the ground or hit the distance advertised.

It’s the same thing today. Long irons are still hard to hit. I can hit a good shot with my 4-iron about two out of three times, with my 3-iron about one out of three times, and my 2-iron is strictly to be hit off a tee. At least that’s what I would have said if you had asked me eight years ago.

I went to a Ben Hogan demo day at my driving range and tried out one of these new hybrid clubs. I borrowed a 3. The first ball I hit, with no expectations, was as good as any 3-iron shot I had ever hit. Same thing for the next two balls. Three rockets in a row. I needed no more convincing, and a few weeks later bought a 2, 3, and 4 Ben Hogan hybrid, which I still use in addition to the 5 which I picked up three years ago.

So let’s get to those questions.

faster swing speed with long irons — you definitely need a high swing speed to hit these clubs well. If your drives carry about 250 yards, that’s 250 in the air, not air plus roll equals 250, then you have enough swing speed for a long iron to give you its due. You don’t swing faster with a long iron. You swing with what you have. If you don’t have it with your driver, you don’t have it, period.

how far do you hit a 4-iron — as far as I hit my 4-hybrid, but not nearly as often.

anyone play gi irons in their long irons? — honestly, if you use gi irons, you don’t have a long iron swing.

Sometimes I take my long irons to the range and hit them just for fun, but I would never play with them. There’s no reason for you to, either, not when you can use clubs that are so easy to hit it’s almost cheating.

See also Yes, You Should Play Blades

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

anchored putting

Belly Putters – Part II

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When Keegan Bradley won the PGA last summer and used a belly putter, and Webb Simpson won twice with the same, the BP controversy erupted. Everybody had an opinion about the long stick, and I wrote the definitive piece myself. In the December 2011 Golf Digest, there is a huge section about the pros and cons of “unconventional” putting.

The people who say that anchoring the putter to your body in some way, “Just isn’t golf,” are probably just upset because they didn’t try it themselves sooner. I don’t mind if you anchor the putter. If you want to get a long driver and anchor that, fine with me.

We don’t anchor the club we swing because if you want to hit the ball a long ways, you have to wind the club around your body and unwind it back around so you can give the ball a good whack. That’s physics, and that will not change because there’s no other way a human can hit the ball a long way.

On the putting green, though, you’re not trying to hit the ball a long way. You’re trying to coax the ball across a manicured surface into the hole. Winding the club around you isn’t the swing model that applies here. Why would anyone think it should?

Why would anyone think that because you have to hit a 5-iron in a particular way, that you automatically have to hit a completely different shot using a miniature version of that same way?

Another argument you hear is that the belly putter gives the players who use it an unfair advantage. Over . . . ?? Players who don’t use one? Then they should use one!

All the grousing comes down to tradition. Ah, tradition. The way we have always done it. It was good enough for me, so there’s no reason to change things. What about the records, etc.

Well, there is only one tradition in golf. That is, you hit a ball sitting on the ground with a stick, with your own effort, until the ball goes into a hole. Period. As long as that doesn’t change, it’s golf.

Let’s not forget that more than fifty percent of putting comes down to how you use your mind. People who think that a different style will revolutionize putting are neglecting the power of the mind in playing good golf. Which would help you sink more putts — a different club, or more confidence?

All the grousing over the belly putter neglects that first fundamental. You can belly putt all you want, but if your mind gets agitated on the green, I’ll beat you one-handed with my Bulls-Eye.

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

playing the game

Keep the Long Clubs at Home

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Handicap golfers get into trouble by hitting shots with clubs they can’t handle well. I’m thinking of the longer clubs, the driver and the long irons/hybrids. Because these clubs have a straighter face, sidespin is accentuated, exacerbating your slice or hook. Because you’re aiming at targets fairly far away, identical errors in accuracy are magnified relative to shorter clubs.

The longer swing makes it harder to contact the ball squarely. It’s harder to get the ball in the air, too. There are too many ways to go wrong. You will therefore save yourself strokes if you follow this rule:

Never use a club that has less loft than your average score over par.

If you aren’t breaking 100 (28 over par), the 5-iron (32 degrees of loft) is your big gun. Break 90 regularly and you can move up to a 2-iron/hybrid. Drivers are for golfers who break 80.

By following this rule, the ball will be in the fairway much more often because you will be hitting straighter shots. Trade occasional distance for habitual accuracy, and you will get to the green in fewer strokes than you do now.

Yes, you won’t be shooting for par on every hole, but since you’re a handicap golfer anyway, par is not always your expectation. What you will remove from your scorecard are the doubles and triples.

You will also learn more about playing the game because your ball will more often be in a position for you to play a hole by attacking it rather than by recovering from wayward shots.

I know the driver is loads of fun and it feels great and you impress your buddies when you nail a long one. But if you want to shoot a lower score than they do, this might be the way to go.

See also Ten Easy Ways to Play Better Golf

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

practice

Three Shots this Winter

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Unless you live south of the 35th parallel, you aren’t playing a lot of golf right now. That’s good. It means you can take the time to practice three shots which, if you get really good at, are going to cut strokes off your game by the relative fistful.

These shots are the 7-iron approach, the chip from 10-25 yards, and the 30-foot approach putt. If you can hit the first one well, then all you have to do is get the ball past the 150-yard marker and your next shot will put the ball on the green. The second shot covers the chips you hit more often than the greenside chip, and is the shot that I would guess loses you more strokes in your short game than any other. Get 30-foot putts close and you will cut way down on three-putt greens and become a better putter from everywhere else, too.

When you go to the range, take a 7-iron, a sand wedge, and a putter. Practice these three shots only. In a one-hour visit to the range, spend twenty minutes on each one. These are not the only areas where you lose strokes regularly, but they are the easiest places to get lost strokes back with dedicated practice.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about the driver. You do have to get the ball in the fairway or what you do next to the green won’t count for much. So hit a fairway wood or long iron off the tee with your 7-iron swing. Keep the ball in play and make some putts. It’s a simple game.