All posts by recgolfer

rules

Villegas DQ’d at Kapalua

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Camillo Villegas was disqualified last week for signing an incorrect scorecard. He broke Rule 23-1 and did not know he had. He signed his card without the penalty, and when TV viewers spotting the infraction called in, rules officials determined the viewers were correct and disqualified him. His comment as, “There are a million rules, and no one can know them all.”

The debate crops up once more: should TV viewers be able to phone in violations, and should players be DQed if the notification happens after they have signed their card?

Unlike other sports, where there are rules officials on the spot covering a small area of the field of play, golf is played over 150 acres with only a handful of rules officials acting where requested.

So we expect the players to be the referees their own game. It is asking too much that we also expect them to know the rules we trust them to enforce? What else could we think? The players, though, don’t know the rules. No one is certain if they even care to.

Rocco Mediate is quoted in the January 14, 2011, Golfweek magazine when asked how well PGA players know the rules, on a scale of 1 to 10. “Maybe a 5 — and that’s being nice,” he said. Bubba Watson, who was in the Villegas group, said, “I probably wouldn’t have known that rule, either.”

The issue that tournament officials want to avoid is having to walk the line between ignorance and dishonesty. Is a player truly ignorant of a rule, or just claiming to be so he or she can get away with something?

The way to avoid walking the line is to not have a line. When a rule is broken, and no penalty is taken at the time, whatever penalty the rules provide must be assigned retroactively if the violation becomes known. The question of cheating never gets asked.

We’re left with the fact that the absence of on-the-spot referees means matches are being supervised by people who know less about the rules than guys I play with on Tuesday morning do. Not only that, but even though I’m not a rules maven, and I didn’t know about Rule 23-1 until this issue came up, I do know that when your ball is moving, all you do until it stops is watch it. Couldn’t we expect a world-class professional to have the same amount of sense?

Of course a violation should be phoned in if it is noticed, and relevant penalties applied. One golfer suffers if it does, but the entire sport suffers if it does not.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

drills

An Easy and Valuable Swing Drill

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There’s a rule of the golf swing that good golfers everywhere apply. Fourteen clubs, one swing. Well maybe not your putter, but no matter what club you have in your hand, use the same swing with it as you use will with all the other clubs.

Golf is difficult game, and a good golf swing is difficult to learn. We all know this. Golf is even harder if we think we need one swing with the short irons, one with the middle irons, one with your long irons/hybrids, and another with your driver. That’s just too much to ask, and thankfully, you don’t have to pay golf that way.

Learn one swing and swing very club with that same one swing. Of course, as you go from longer clubs to shorter clubs, the swing plane changes, but it’s the same swing otherwise.

The foundation club for your swing is the 9-iron. This is an easy club to hit, does not encourage you to swing hard, and is a small swing, which lets you feel very clearly what is going on with your body when you do swing. Practice hitting the 9-iron a lot at the range to build into your head the principles your teaching pro gave you. When you are hitting shot after shot with a 9-iron and smiling every time, you’re ready to extend this swing to the rest of your bag.

Take your 9-, 7-, 5-, and 3-irons or their equivalents in hybrids and fairway woods, and your driver, to the range with you. Warm up with your 9-iron only. Now hit one ball with a 7-iron, imitating your 9-iron swing. Put the 7-iron away and hit another ball with the 9-iron. Now take out your 5-iron and hit a ball, again imitating your 9-iron swing. Repeat with 9-iron and 3-iron, and 9-iron, driver.

So again, your sequence of shots looks like this: 9-7-9-5-9-3-9-D. Work that eight-shot sequence over and over. Every swing you make, no matter which club you’re swinging, should feel like it’s a 9-iron.

On another day you can bring the even-numberd irons and hit 9-8-9-6-9-4-9-2-9-FW.

There’s movie of Ben Hogan hitting irons, shot from a down-the-line viewpoint. A caddy waits in the distance to shag the balls Hogan hits. He works his way from the 9-iron to the driver, and the only way you can tell that he is swinging a different club is that his caddy is in a different place than before. And I mean the only way. The swings are identical.

If you school yourself to hit every club with just one swing, not only will you make the game a lot simpler, you will get this benefit in addition: you will hit the ball better. Too often when we take longer clubs we think we have to take over the shot instead of letting the club do what it was designed to do.

Distance? You will be amazed at how far you can hit a 5-iron if you just let the club do its work. Accuracy? The One Swing concept leads you straight to it.

Try it. I guarantee you will hit the ball better, shoot lower scores, and have more fun.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

shot-making

Golf’s Nine-Shot Drill

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Last fall I started a series of golf lessons to move me beyond my self-imposed limits. The instructor told me to do a nine-shot drill: learn to hit each combination of trajectories, high, medium, and low, and combine that with three shot shapes, fade, straight, and draw. That’s nine different shots.

The reason? To unlock my mind from the technical aspects of making a swing and learn instead to visualize a shot and let that visualization be the mental basis of my swing.

Since I’m a high-ball hitter, and fade easily, those shots were pretty simple. But any shot that had to fly lower than normal, or any intentional draw, that was tough.

So I worked on what I knew, and figured out what I didn’t. I came up with four different ways to fade, to find the one that was the most reliable. I knew how to hit a low shot, but didn’t know that I knew. I just didn’t know what a low shot is supposed to look like.

Then there’s the draw. A draw can turn into an ugly hook without notice. It’s here that I would get my double-cross–setting up for a draw and hitting a fade–because deep down I was nervous about it. Until I figured out how.

“Tell me how,” I hear you cry. All right. Here’s how it works for me.

Fade: Set up left of target, clubface aimed halfway between stance and target, swing along stance line.

Draw: Set up at target, aim clubface right of target, swing inside-out to the right of that.

High: Set up with the ball more forward, weight more on the right. Transfer less weight than usual to the left on the downswing. Tends to go left.

Low: Set up with the ball more to the back of center. Use normal weight transfer and follow through low. Also called a knockdown shot. Tends to go right.

If you want to try this drill, you’ll have to experiment with just how big all these adjustments need to be. Hint: less than you think.

There’s no reason anyone who makes solid contact 3 out of 5 times can’t learn to do this, and your everyday straight shot will improve immeasurably, too.

Go ahead. Open up a new world of golf for yourself.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

putting

On the Green: Charge or Die?

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Over the years, golf philosophers have debated whether a player should charge putts toward the hole or knock them gently up to the cup. Both styles have their advocates with strong records on the green. What should you do? The answer is easy: both.
If you think about it for a moment, it’s easy to see that this is the best strategy. Each putt must be dealt with on its own terms. When you adopt one style, you wind up being good on some putts, but weak on others. Here’s how to decide which approach to take and when.
Start by looking at the length of the putt you face. If you look at a putt and think to yourself, “I can make this,” it’s probably a short putt of 10 feet or under. Your confidence that it can go in needs to be supported by your efforts. Hit this putt hard enough so that when it falls in the ball will hit the back of the cup before it hits the bottom.
What you should be concerned about are small imperfections around the hole, little bumps and dips you can’t see, that will knock the ball off line if it’s traveling too slowly. When you have a makable putt like this, give it every chance to go in. If you miss, you’re likely to have less than two feet coming back. Never up, never in.
Let’s step farther away from the hole now, and look at a putt that you know you don’t have a great chance to make, but you know you can leave close. This could be 20 feet away. Your object is to get down in two. Believe me, that’s all the pros want from here.
This is where you become a die putter. Judging the force of the stroke is more critical from this distance. Running the ball beyond the hole could leave you with a testy putt coming back and now you’re looking at a three-putt green. Just think about hitting this putt up to the hole. If you do, you’ll have an easy tap-in left over, and you’ll be around the hole often enough that some of them will go in.
Go back farther. We should be about 40 feet or more from the hole. Making this putt isn’t even a consideration, and leaving it tap-in close might be to much to ask. Here’s where we adopt a third strategy. Imagine a circle around the hole, maybe lined out in white chalk, about five feet across, and you want your putt to end up inside that circle.
Thinking about the hole from here will get you to thinking too much about direction and not enough about speed. Speed is the only thing you should think about from here once you have a general idea of the line. Having such a large target also serves to take the pressure off making a precise putt from a long way off. With a more realistic goal, there is a greater chance that you will achieve it.
Three kinds of putts, and a different way to think about each one. That’s the way to become a better player on the green.
improvement

New Year’s Resolutions

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Now I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, you need to understand that right off. Why would you want to wait until the calendar changes to a new year to start doing something that you know is good for you, when you could start any time? If you know it’s right for you, do it now.

Golf is different, though. We have a season that has ended, at least for those of us who live in the cold, rainy north. It’s time to prepare for the opening of the 2011 season, which means New Year’s resolutions are OK.

The point of a resolution is to stop doing what you were doing, and start doing something else that takes you in an entirely different direction. Doing the same thing better doesn’t count. You tried all summer to do the same things better, and where did that get you?

Do something different. Do the thing(s) that you know you should be doing but haven’t had the gumption to try. Those are real resolutions.

I made my resolutions in October, and started working on them. This list includes them and a few things that have to wait for the new year.

1. Play from the red tees in January and February. The shorter course will let my hit scoring shots more often (short irons on down), and shoot better scores. The subconscious mind only knows what  you shot. It doesn’t know the difference between the red tees and the whites. Or the blues. Great for your confidence.

2. Stop playing smart golf. Play the course straight up. If a particular hole demands a shot I don’t have, learn the shot instead of always letting the hole win.

3. Play different courses to get a complete golf challenge. Being good on just one course doesn’t mean you are a complete golfer.

4. Be mentally composed before very shot. Easier said than done, but imperative for playing good golf.

5. Take my game to the course. Meaning, play the shots I want to hit rather than the shots the architect wants me to hit.

6. Look at where I’m hitting into with a clear mind so I see what is really there.

7. Take playing lessons.

Seven is enough. Doesn’t have to be ten. What are yours?

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

people

Count Yogi

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People these days are catching up to Moe Norman, the straight-hitting Canadian savant who might have been the best ball-striker to ever live. There’s even a movie coming out about his life. There’s a golfing school based on his swing, called Natural Golf. Moe Norman — the best golfer you’ve never heard of. Except he isn’t.

Count Yogi is.

Real name, Harry Hilary Frankenberg, born in 1906. The story goes that he was standing in a corn field, long before Shoeless Joe, and heard a voice say to him, “your brain is your body’s greatest gift – use it. Watch the ball with your eyes, but put your brain eyes (like a blind person would) on the end of your stick (club head). Take the stick back and return it, circling under to loosen, standing tall and straight with perfect relaxed posture.”

Whatever that means, it meant something to him and he became a marvelous golfer whose list of accomplishments you can read on many web sites.

His five-word mantra about golf was, “Simple game. Nothing to it.” It was all about controlling the clubhead, and “you should always be loose, boneless, muscleless, effortless, because when you are, you can mentally control the clubhead.”

The backswing: pull it back “to control,” one of his students said. Farther than that and you’ll lose control.

”I have always been a consistently straight golf-ball hitter because I have eliminated virtually every idea suggested in numerous instruction articles in books, magazines and newspapers. I keep the swing simple and think only of being relaxed, graceful and smooth.”

“I play with an infallible mental routine and have ever since I was a little boy. I don’t play with my hands, my wrists, my arms, my age or my strength. I play with 100% brain.”

He had a five-step setup that was a key element of his swing, which helped him take the body out of the swing, his thinking brain out of the swing, and just use his natural motion controlled by his subconscious mind.

Listen and watch him go through the steps in this video.

Yes, he’s off balance at the end of his swing, but don’t let that bother you. There are other videos of him swinging that I recommend you look for, because they show a swing of great beauty and effect. The key point for me is that he wants you to let your natural instincts take over. When you’re standing over the ball, reviewing your swing thoughts, worried about the result of the shot, whether you can pull it off, and all the other self-talk you conjure up, none of that has anything to do with what you’re about to do—hit the golf ball.

If you can find a way at all to quiet that part of your brain, and just swing, you’ll play better golf and have more fun. You can learn a lot from Count Yogi, the man who made that his life’s message.

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

drills, hands lead the clubhead

Your Wrists at Impact

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I have a two-page photo spread of professional golfers at the moment impact that I saved from an old Golf Digest magazine (July 2004). I saved it because impact is the whole point of the swing — to deliver the clubhead to the ball square, on line, and with force. I wanted to have this set of of photos hanging around so I can keep looking at them and see what it is that they all do the same way.

Cut now to Ike S. Handy. Ike is a fellow who took up golf late in life (over age 50) and in a matter of a few years was a scratch player. He won senior tournaments in Texas, has many holes-in-one, and reliably shot his age even in his 80s. Why? Because he hits the ball straight. Not real far, but straight. He wrote a book called, oddly enough, How to Hit a Golf Ball Straight, in which he explains how he does it.

I got a copy of that book, and here is the message that hits you over the head in chapter after chapter, page after page. After studying the filmed swing of a dozen of the world’s best players of his day, the one thing he found that they all did the same was that their “hands passed the ball ahead of the clubhead and their wrists were cocked at the impact of clubhead and ball.”

He says this in every imaginable way throughout the book. The hands must pass the ball before the clubhead strikes it, and the wrists must still be cocked at that moment. That is, there must still be some backwards bend in the right wrist.

Back to the photo layout. These golfers pictured are: Mike Weir, Phil Mickelson, Michelle Wie, Adam Scott, Padraig Harrington, Charles Howell III, Se Ri Pak, and Ernie Els. There are two things about them that is all the same: their right wrist is bent backwards, and their hands are ahead of the clubhead. Here’s what it looks like when Rory McIlroy does it.

Here’s a simple drill to learn how to get those wrists in the right place. Take out your sand wedge and make half swings with only your left hand on the club (right hand if you play left-handed).You will feel the proper shape of your left wrist going through impact. The practice maintaining that shape when you swing with two hands on the club.

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

books

The Golf Swing by Cary Middlecoff

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One golf book I read through once every year and then browse through continually is The Golf Swing, by Cary Middlecoff. It is a review of the development of the golf swing from Harry Vardon to Palmer, Player, and Nicklaus.

The meat of the book, though, is what he says about developing your own swing, advice contained in the chapter titled, “Your Swing.” He says little about the particulars of the swing, save a few fundamentals, but much about how to practice your swing for maximum return. I’ll summarize his advice for you.

– Every session should have a purpose, every shot should have a target, and every swing, good or bad, should be analyzed afterward. Accepting good shots without question is, Middlecoff says, “a tendency that should be resisted.”

– Keep a notebook so you can start the next session where you left off the last one, so you can take your last session’s successes and carry them forward.

– Make every shot real. Imagine a spot on your home course and hit this ball to that spot.

– Make sure you grip the club consistently. Subtle variations in the grip cause more mis-hit balls than you might realize.

– Work on the backswing alone in order to bring the club back to the same spot time after time.

– From there, learn how to start the downswing with the turning of the hips alone. “Get it clearly in mind that the hip movement automatically lowers the hands to just above hip level and starts the shoulders moving.”

– Practice without a ball so as to learn how to free-wheel the club through the “hitting segment of the swing.”

– “Program into the swing” that both arms will become straight only a few feet past where the ball was. At impact, the right arm is still bent and the right wrist has not fully released.

– Practice the parts so they become automatic. Then put them together into a full swing that allows you, when playing, to forget about mechanics, and concentrate solely on hitting the ball.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

practice

Winter Practice Plan

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After my latest lesson, the pro asked me to make up a practice plan covering the material we have worked on so far. Here it is.

Full swing
Ten shots with each even-numbered iron, the next session with the odd-numbered irons.
Ten shots with the driver, the next session ten shots with the fairway wood.
Five pitches to 30, 50, and 70 yards, the next session to 40, 60, and 80 yards.
Five shots each: high fade, low fade, high draw, low draw, medium fade, medium draw. The next session, five shots high straight, low straight, uphill lie, downhill lie, ball above feet, ball below feet. Do one pair of sessions with a 7-iron, the next pair with a 5-iron.

Short game
4 chips from one spot (one set) to different holes. Putt out. Continue until all 4 balls get up and down, minimum of three sets.
4 chips from 10, 20, and 30 yards (in different sessions) to different holes. Putt out. Continue until 3 balls get up and down, minimum of three sets.
Toss 5 balls into greenside rough and get 3 up and down. Repeat.
10 shots from greenside bunker, 5 full swings from [fairway] bunker.

Putting
12 3-foot putts in a circle around the hole.
10 putts each to 6, 9, and 12 feet without looking after each putt. Next session from 15, 18, and 21 feet. To learn distance control.
10 lag putts from 30, 40, and 50 feet.
10 8-foot putts in a circle around a hole on a slope. To practice green reading.

All this takes about 3 hours. Three times a week.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

supporting your golf

The Recreational Golfer’s Video Tips

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If you’ve been to my web site, www.therecreationalgolfer.com, you might have browsed the Tips Index page and noticed the video tips I have posted. These videos explain in pictures what would be difficult to make clear in words.

You may receive notice of new video tips when it is posted by registering. It’s just a matter so sending me e-mail and you’ll be in the list.

My book, Better Recreational Golf, explained things in pictures where possible, but having a moving picture makes it even easier to see what to do and learn how to do it.

Please join the growing group of recreational golfers who are learning how to play the game better and have more fun.