All posts by recgolfer

practice

Golf Myth – Bring Your Range Game to the Course

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Many golfers, including touring professionals, complain that they can’t take their range game to the course. They hit the ball just fine on the practice ground, but their efforts are lost by the time they get to the first tee. The reason for this is simple. The formula is backwards. Golfers should be taking their course game to the range.

What I mean is you have to play the same way in both places. The practice tee is the place where you teach yourself to hit good shots on the course, when it counts. You won’t achieve that goal unless you also simulate the playing environment as closely as you can. Now you can’t bring a golf course and all its hazards and distractions to the range, but you can bring your mental responses to them, and train your mind appropriately.

Here’s what usually happens during practice. You hit one ball after another. Pretty simple. Even though you do that to perfect a particular technique you are working on (and there should be one, otherwise why are you out there?), it’s not difficult to hit a string of good shots when you hit them with the feeling of success fresh in your mind.

On the course, where you don’t get to swing but every five minutes or so, your true skills emerge. Part of being disappointed about not taking your range game to the course is that the range game you take to the course might not be as good as you think it is.

The other thing the practice tee does, and this is even more insidious, is devalue the worth of a golf ball hit. There’s no penalty for a bad shot, and you can hit as many more balls as you need to get it right. On the course, you have one chance, one, to hit the shot you want. That’s not much pressure, really, but it’s more than you have in practice. So let’s try three things that get to both issues.

1. Never hit the same shot twice in practice. If you’re practicing a swing technique, switch clubs and aim to a different target with each new ball. Practice the technique by taking as many practice swings as you need, to feel you are performing correctly, but then step up and hit a golf shot, not the merely another ball.

Same goes for around the green. Hit the 25-foot approach putt, but if you leave if four feet short, hit the four-footer instead of bringing the ball back to try again. What you leave yourself on the green in practice is what you’ll leave yourself on the course. Learn to deal with your mistakes. The same goes for chipping. Chip once, putt it out. This will give you real incentive to chip them closer.

2. After you hit a ball, pull over another one and step off the mat, or step behind the ball on a grass tee. Get ready just like you would on the course. Pick a target, figure out what shot you’re going to hit, get your mind ready, go through the rest of your pre-shot routine, and then you can step up to the ball and hit it.

Don’t just hit range balls. Play golf!

3. Every so often, take a break. Stop hitting golf balls and just sit down for a while. Give yourself time to absorb what you have learned so far (practice), and to ask yourself to pull out a skill you haven’t used for a few minutes or more (play).

In short, the only way to learn how to play golf on the course is to find ways to play golf wherever you are.

You might be interested in this one-hour practice plan or this two-hour practice plan.

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

mental game

Scoring Your Best

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Everyone wants to shoot good golf scores, the scores that truly represent what our skills are capable of providing. Whatever score that is, if we come away from the 18th green knowing that we got the most out of every shot, we feel good about the day because we did our best.

Sure, there will be a few clinkers in there. We’re human and we’re going to miss a few shots. But what really galls us is when we look over the round and see a hole where we blew a good score, or where we blew up for no reason to make a bad one. “What was I thinking?” is the thing we don’t want to think.

So here’s how to not think it.

1. Learn to love your skills and have complete confidence in them, no doubts. Believe without question that they will take you into the scoring range of your choice anytime.

2. When you get to your ball, think through how this shot fits into the easiest sequence of shots that will get the ball in the hole from here as quickly as possible.

3. Before you hit ANY shot, look at it and convince yourself that its only outcome is the best possible shot. This is not an intellectual thing. Feel in in your gut.

If you looked at your scorecard, most of you will find that how you score on your best 15 holes represents pretty well how you play. If you had played that way for the entire round, you’d have a pretty good score. Yet, you didn’t carry it through.

We must train our mind to play 18 holes of golf, not 15 or 16. Everybody, regardless of the level of their physical skills, can learn to do that. Then, as your physical skills improve, the mental skills will already be in place for you to take advantage of your improvement.

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

golf humor, statistics

The New Golf Stats/The Secret to Golf

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Do you think that fairways hit, greens in regulation (GIR), number of putts, etc, are important stats to keep? Many golfers do, and I hear teaching pros say their students should keep track of them. There has always been this gnawing feeling that they don’t really tell us what we want to know about why we shoot the scores we shoot, and the only reason we use them is that they’re easy to count.

Enter the statisticians, the real statisticians who work at the university level, and who use analytical procedures that would make your head spin. They’re going straight to the heart of golf, and their works is starting to emerge into the mainstream.

A few weeks ago, the PGA started posting a new putting statistic, Strokes Gained–Putting. This is the brainchild of Mark Broadie, of Columbia University. It compares the putting of a particular player with the putting of the field overall. It was mentioned during the Wells Fargo Championship on May 8, that eventual winner Lucas Glover had gained 8 strokes on the field on the greens, per this new stat.

You could say his putts per GIR were low, or his total putts were low, but SG-P tells you directly what the effect of his week with a hot putter was.

Broadie’s description of the new stat is posted here.

There are several other reports I would like to call your attention to. One by Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer concludes that the pros are more likely to leave birdie putts short than par putts of the same length, showing that they are loss averse, that is, the risk for them of making a bogey outweighs the gain of making a birdie.

Another study, also by Broadie, shows that where Tiger Woods has (or had) his advantage over the field is not on the green, but from the fairway. In 2003-10, Woods had a 3.20-stroke margin on the field, but 2.08 strokes of that came from his long game, mainly his iron play, and only 0.70 shots per round from his putting, and 0.42 shots from his short game. Read it here. Tiger himself has said that his irons are his offensive weapons.

Hopefully, these new stats and ways of analyzing golf will trickle down to recreational golfers. But even if they do, they will only tell us that our irons need work, not how to work on our irons.
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This video, a mock infomercial, has been making the rounds lately. It’s John O’Hurley’s The Secret to Golf, and it’s pretty darn funny. When you watch it, pay attention to the guy in the bunker in the background.

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

commentary

Ten “Rules” We Hate

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These aren’t rules from the rule book, but practices you might find on the course where you play. They’re from today’s GolfWorld Monday, and the rules is below followed by my comment in italics.

1. No cell phones on the course, even for texting. Absolutely. For once, give your complete attention to the people who made the effort to spend four hours with you. It’s good manners, the basis of which is that because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

2. No hats on backwards. Lowers your apparent IQ by 40 points, but if you want your face to get sunburned, that’s OK with me.

3. No women before 10 a.m. on weekends. You’re kidding. Does this still go on?

4. No collarless shirts. Even my $80 Nike shirt that looks pretty darn sharp?

5. No denim. This shouldn’t be a rule, per se, but if the course isn’t a muddy mess, it’s just as easy to wear your Dockers.

6. Hats off indoors. Absolutely. You learned that when you were six-years-old. Or at least you should have.

7. Jackets and ties in the dining room. Boycott the dining room.

8. Guests can’t purchase in the pro shop; must go on member’s account. So my money is legal tender everywhere in the U.S., except in your pro shop? Am I in France?

9. No pull carts. I thought we were trying to get a little exercise here.

10. No cargos shorts or pants. Oh, good grief.

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

chipping

Three Wedge Shots That Will Save You Strokes

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In golf, a swing is a swing, but once you get a wedge in your hands, that’s where artistry comes in. When you know what you’re doing with that wedge, you will get the ball closer to the the hole than your partners thought you could, and you will never be out of the match. Here are three shots that I think you will use at least once per round, and they turn three shots into two, just like the pros say to do.

1. Say your ball is on an upslope of some kind. You have to hit over the crest of the slope with spin on the ball so it will bite when it lands and not roll all the way across the green.

Right now, you probably hit this shot with the club sweeping along the ground, which in this case is in an upward direction. That is not what to do. The slope adds loft to your club. Your 54-degree wedge is effectively a 75-degree wedge, and the ball goes almost straight up in the air. You’re lucky if it even reaches the green.

Instead, pick the wedge you want to use without regard to the degree of the slope, but to the distance the ball has to travel horizontally to get to the hole. Now, instead of sweeping the club upward along the slope, bring the club underneath the ball and gently thud it straight into the slope. There will be only a small follow-through. The ball will pop up and forward, and run softly to the hole.

This is the shot that Fred Couples hit on the 12th hole on Sunday at Augusta when he won the Masters in 1992.

2. If the ball lies instead on a downslope, the fear is that you won’t get the leading edge of the club underneath the ball, and blade it across the green. That’s an honest fear, and the next shot is to make sure that never happens.

Take a wedge that is more lofted than you would normally use for the distance the ball has to travel. Put the ball back in your stance, so far back that it is outside your trailing foot. Keep your hands centered in front of you. You hit the ball by raising the clubhead up and chopping gently down on the back of the ball, driving the wedge into the ground. The ball will pop forward with lots of spin.

Practice this shot to learn how far it flies and how much it runs. Your friends have never seen this shot before, and they will be amazed at what comes out of your funny setup.

3. The third shot is for when you’re seriously short-sided and you can’t run the ball along the ground–it has to get in the air, stop in a hurry, and you have about twenty feet to work with. This is a mini-flop, which I saw Paul Azinger explain many years ago.

Use a sand wedge, setting up with the ball in the center of your stance and the club straight up and down, that is, not leaning toward the hole. Take the club back low and bring it through the ball low. What you are trying to do is slide the club underneath the ball without disturbing it.

You can’t do that, of course, but you will get a very soft hit that makes the ball run up the face of the club and leave with lots of spin and little forward momentum. It will hit and stop. Swing slowly. Think of sliding the club along the ground at impact, not hitting something with it. A cushion of grass underneath the ball is desirable.

A big part of being a short game master is never having a problem you can’t solve. Here are three common problems, solved. Now go get those up and downs amaze your friends.

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

supporting your golf

How Solid is Your Handicap?

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[September 2018: My advice in the second half of this post about playing a variety of courses stands. The first part, about getting a USGA handicap, does not. To heck with a handicap. Just go play and have fun. Your golf belongs to you, not the USGA.]

I hope you have a handicap, an official USGA handicap. If golf for you is just knocking the ball around every so often, then, maybe it isn’t that important. But if you are a steady player, you should have one. It brings you into the company of golfers by allowing you to enter competitions. It will show you how much you are improving, you can tell how well you play on courses of varying difficulty, and if you travel abroad, many courses won’t let you on unless you can show them a USGA handicap card.

To have an accurate handicap, you should turn in every score, the good ones, and the bad ones. And you keep an honest score, counting the penalty strokes and playing by the rules. If you do, you can say your handicap truly reflects the condition of your game. But does it?

There is one other consideration — does your handicap travel? This is the important part. It’s one thing to be a 12 at your home course, which you have learned inside and out. It’s another to be a 12 no matter where you play.

A few years ago, a golfer shot a 62 at one of our local courses. He had a 2 handicap and had a day where everything went right. I looked him up on the GHIN Handicap Lookup page, which you can do if you have a name and a state, and found that all of his rounds were played on the same course.

Now you can’t argue with a 2. That’s pretty good golf no matter where you earn it. But I wonder how that 2 would stand up if he took his game to some of the other courses in the area that are, quite frankly, harder than the one he’s playing on? I wondered if he shot higher rounds on some of those courses and just didn’t turn them in. Who knows?

How well your handicap travels is the factor that makes your handicap legitimate. This isn’t about honesty. It’s about how good are you, really?

If you play a rotation of courses, you now that certain courses demand shots that are different from other courses. One course I play is a first-shot course. Get your ball in the fairway, and you’re home free. Of course, that isn’t easy to do, and a price for missing is paid. Another course has high rough around the greens that demands chips I never hit anywhere else, and so on.

I would suggest, as a general rule, that you the twenty scores in your handicap mix should at any time be made on at least four different courses, and the ten scores that determine your handicap should come from at least three.

That would give you the assurance that when you go to a new course, you won’t get a big surprise by finding out there are big holes in your game. This will also give you the joy of rounding out your game, and knowing that wherever you go, there isn’t a challenge you can’t handle.

If you don’t have a handicap, join a club to get one. The USGA’s definition of a club is quite permissive. It doesn’t necessarily mean an expensive membership in a private or semiprivate club. Your local muni should have a mens’ club or women’s club you can join for maybe $40 per year, and you’re all set.

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

people

Seve Ballesteros (1957-2011)

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After a long bout with the effects of a cancerous brain tumor, Seve Ballesteros died in Spain today at the age of 54.

He won five major championships, two Masters and three British Opens, is the career European Tour wins leader with 50, and won six times on the PGA Tour. He was also a force in Ryder Cup competitions, bringing the European to team to parity and then superiority over the American team in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

European players today give him credit for elevating the status of the European Tour in the same way Arnold Palmer did for the PGA tour in the early 1960s.

Ballesteros was best know for being a fierce competitor, and for having an imagination and scrambling skills that left him never out of a hole no matter where he was playing from. Stories of recoveries from impossible positions are legion.

He had dashing good looks and was the definition of golfing charisma. In my experience, no golfer since Palmer has been as magnetic while in the hunt as Ballesteros, and that includes TW. If he was leading or challenging the lead, you had to watch.

While someone is alive, we can still say that we live in their era, even though their productive years have passed. The Ballesteros era is now over. He was one of a handful of players in history who truly changed course of professional golf. Those of us who saw him leave his mark are richer for it.

NY Times obituary

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

practice

Executive course as golf’s proving ground

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I think the main reason I continue to play golf is that it is, for me, a giant puzzle to solve. There has to be a way to build a swing that hits the ball straight every time. All I have to do is experiment with this or that, and I’ve got it. I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy any more, but I do believe in this.

My current fix involves strengthening my grip a bit, and a new (for me) way of getting my weight to my left side while staying behind the ball.* Now I’ve hit lots of practice balls in my back yard and these two, I like to call them “adjustments,” are working well. But I don’t want to go out and play until I’m sure they’re going to work.

Enter the executive course. There’s one near my house that is just over 1,000 yards long. I hit these clubs off the tee: wedge, wedge, 5-iron, 9-iron, 6-iron, wedge, 2-hybrid, wedge, driver. That’s five full swings, enough to see if what I’m trying out really works.

Now while this course is not a driving range, I try to play when it isn’t busy so I can hit a few balls off each tee if I need to. There’s something about hitting a ball to a live green that you just can’t duplicate at a driving range. Especially when on two of the holes the out-of-bounds fence is only five yards off the left side of a small green.

So if I can hit the ball well here, I know I can take it to the big course. Actually, hitting the ball well isn’t as important as finding out that the adjustments won’t lead to disaster. I’ve had a few of those outings on the executive course, and I’m glad I went there first.

I’m going out this morning to give these two new things a try. Every time I do this, I go out thinking, “This time, I’ve got it!” And sometimes I do. I’ll let you know. In the meantime,

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

*Swing in super-slow motion. In the early stages of your downswing, shift your weight to the left while you keep your head right where it is. It’s hard to figure out how to do this when you swing at a normal speed, but when the swing is slowed down enough, you can easily see how to do it.

brilliant ideas

How To Fix the World Golf Rankings

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Since there isn’t much of interest happening in the golf world right now, much discussion in the media is turning to which undeserving player most/least (they can’t decide which tack to take) deserves to be #1 in the World Golf Rankings. (Actually, the fuss is over why TW is #7 or so, when in the last year he has been playing like #25, but no one wants to come out and say that).

And while we’re at it, why don’t we criticize the formula itself, which we’ve never paid attention to until now? The formula puts Lee Westwood at #1, but he hasn’t won a major championship. So what? He plays consistently well more than anyone else in the world. You can make a case that player is deserving of being #1. Not a great case, but a case.

The Rankings formula is too complicated. Again, so what? It’s a complicated matter to compare over a thousand golfers playing on six different tours, most of whom have never had head-to-head competition with more than a few hundred. That’s a complicated feat to pull off.

But the real problem is that a two-year period is too long to carry over performance. Now we’re on to something — the Tiger thing actually. They way he played in 2009 is nowhere near how he’s playing today, or did in 2010. That’s the formula’s biggest flaw, and the one easiest to fix.

Golf’s ubiquitous ranking system is the handicap. The USGA has one, the R&A has one, I think. While the handicaps are rating systems, they can easily be turned into ranking systems.

Base the Rankings on performance in the same vein as my handicap and your handicap is based — on the 10 best of the last 20 tournaments (instead of rounds), with a thirteen-month limit. Not enough tournaments, you’re off the Rankings list.

What everybody wants to know is, who is the best golfer in the world right now? What someone did two years ago, even though those results are down-weighted currently, is no indication of current performance. The USGA recognizes this, which is why they keep dropping off rounds as I add new ones on. They want to keep my rating (handicap) current. If it’s good enough for me, it’s good enough for the pros.

Now I can’t tell you what the Rankings would be using this plan. That requires more data than I have at my command, and more time than I would want to devote to the analysis if I had it. It wouldn’t matter anyway.

This different way of ranking players would have immediate validity because it would be understood by the layman, and it is aligned with how he or she is rated. While there are many ways to rank things, the method that has the greatest acceptance among the consumers of the rankings is always preferred.

You might point to the major flaw in the USGA handicapping system, which is that their formula rewards a hot-and-cold player more than it does a consistent player. This would not be a flaw for the pros, though. Who do you think should be ranked higher — a guy who gets a lot of top tens, or the player who might not be as steady, but who wins a few tournaments every year? The winner, of course. That’s the point of competition anyway, isn’t it?

We’re going through a period right now where there is no dominant golfer, and the Rankings rely too much on ancient history. We can’t scratch the first itch, but we can the second. The powers that be read this blog religiously, and I know they will see the sense of what I suggest. Until they do,

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

equipment

Wedges vs. Long Irons

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The composition of your bag plays a heavy role in the score you shoot. You know your game and the shots you hit to get the ball around the course. The clubs you put in your bag are the ones you hit those shots with. Clubs that are meant for shots you don’t hit, get left out.

When I started playing (c. 1960), this was the standard set:

Woods: 1,3,4
Irons: 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Wedges: P, S
Putter

Look in anyone’s bag and that’s what you’d find. Woods were sold as a set, and the set was 1,2,3,4. Smart players would swap out their 2-wood for a sand wedge. That was about the only decision you had to make.

Times have changed. Higher-numbered fairway woods are no longer just for the ladies. Raymond Floyd won the Masters in 1976 by trading his 2-iron for a 5-wood so he could float the ball onto the green on the par 5s. Everybody noticed. Tom Kite started playing with three wedges instead of two and became the tour’s leading money winner. Everybody noticed that, too. And then came hybrid irons.

So let’s refine the club selection rule. To score, you have to get the ball up to the green as quickly as you can. From there you have to get the ball into the hole as quickly as you can. The clubs you put in your bag are the ones that let you perform both tasks the best and the easiest.

From the tees I play (6,400 yards or less) I can reach all the par 4s in two, but none of the par 5s. There’s no need for me to load up on the long end. Once I get up to the green, I want to get down in two strokes more often than not. That might just mean two putts, but more often it means a chip and a putt. I want to find a way to make those chips and putts as easy to get as I can, because I set up more pars from greenside than from 160 yards.

So, I apply the Iron Rule to the short game: vary your distances by using one swing and differently-lofted clubs. This is how we play from the fairway. Around the green we can use one swing and differently-lofted wedges to get the ball close from varying distances. You get more predictable results from one swing with different clubs than from different swings with one club.

This, now, is my playing set:

Woods: Driver
Hybrids: 2,3,4,5
Irons: 6,7,8,9
Wedges: P,G,S,L (4-degree gaps)
Putter

Now I can still hit a 5-iron, but it’s an effort, and the 4-iron, too, but it’s a real effort. So out they went and in came the hybrids. No fairway wood. Haven’t missed it in three years.

Yes, there is a sense of loss when you know you’ll never see that solidly hit 5-iron arcing through the sky toward the flag again. But when you hit the same shot more easily and more often with a hybrid iron, you get over it in a hurry.

Four wedges? You would not believe how close I can get the ball to the hole by having the right club in my hand, and I don’t spend days at the range practicing.

I’m not finished, though. I’m looking at a 64-degree wedge, because sometimes I have to ease up with my lob wedge. That would mean taking out a hybrid. All I would do is look at the length of the longest par-3 holes on the course I would be playing that day and leave out the 2 or 3 that I wouldn’t need.

Never forget that golf is about getting the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. There’s nothing in the rules that says you can’t make that as easy as possible, too.

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