Harvey Penick has a short bit in his Little Red Book titled “Long and Short.” The point he makes is that you should spend most of your practice time on your 150-yard shot, using whatever club that is.
This is best advice I have ever seen for the strength of your overall game.
Why?
Penick said, “There’s no reason why the average golfer should take more than three to get down from 150 yards.”
If you make your goal to get down in three once you have arrived at or beyond the 150-yard marker that most courses have, the 70s are within reach.
If you are money with an iron from 150 yards and in, that same swing will put your tee ball in the fairway reliably, too.
From there, use that swing to hit the ball on the green, then get your approach putt close – or – hit the ball next to the green and get your chip close.
That’s three skills to get really good at:
– hitting the ball reasonably straight,
– approach putting, and
– chipping.
That’s how I got into single digits, and that’s what you can do if you dedicate yourself to the task.
Sometimes you read there are angles in the golf swing, and that the key to a good swing is to maintain those angles. I agree whole-heartedly.
What those angles are is the important point. There is one I have been working on for a while that is paying big dividends. It is the angle shown in the picture below, made by the clubshaft and arms as seen from a down-the-line point of view.
I became aware of this angle in Terry Kohler’s article that appeared in GolfWRX recently.
That angle need to be preserved throughout the swing. You will get a swing that returns the clubhead as square the target and as centered to the ball as it was at address.
How hard is this technique to learn? You can figure out in minutes.
When you stand at address with your arms hanging straight down and the club angled away from you, you will have a certain feeling in your forearms and your hands.
MAINTAIN THE FEELING THROUGHOUT THE SWING. That’s all there is to it.
I would recommend learning the feeling by making half swings with a 9-iron at a slower tempo than usual. When you start getting it, work into longer clubs and longer swings, concentrating at all times on the feeling of maintaining the angle as described.
When the feeling is good and uniform throughout the bag, then start hitting balls.
For the longest time I would shank pitch shots. Not constantly, but occasionally, and I never knew when one would pop out.
I tried everything I could think of to fix it. Nothing worked. So I gave up and signed up for a lesson.
The pro said, “Let me see you hit a couple.” So I hit four or five 65-yard pitches as pretty as you please.
Then he said, “Hit them half that distance.”
I did, and sure enough, on the third try, the ball went shooting off low and to the right.
I turned to him said, “There it is!”
He said, “That wasn’t a shank.”
I said, “Then what was it?”
He said, “Your clubface was wide open.”
“You’re opening the clubface when you take the club back, and sometimes you don’t get it closed, so the clubface is still wide open when you make contact. The ball goes where the clubface points.”
So he taught me a radically a different pitching stroke that I’m not going to try to describe to you because this YouTube video with Lee Trevino shows you exactly the stroke the pro taught me.
If you shank pitches there’s a chance you are really doing the same thing I was doing and this is the cure.
Watch how Trevino doesn’t break his wrists when he takes the club back at 0:38. There is NO WRIST SET. The shaft and the left arm are in a straight line (3:27). That is the key.
This is a Steve Stricker video. Watch the whole video, it’s short, but pay attention at 1:10. No wrist set, as he says.
It is said that the long pitching stroke is a miniature swing. Not true. Not true at all. They are entirely different strokes and need to learned separately.
These are the key feelings I have identified after working on this shot for several months. The left arm (right arm, for you lefties) stays straight when you take it back. That arm feels like it is reaching out to the side, not swinging up in a circle.
The club feels like the shaft is sticking straight out to the side and the wrists have not broken at all. If you look, you will find neither of those things are true, but it will feel like they are.
Then you turn and swing the arms/hands/club assembly through the ball without changing any of these feelings I have described. Without changing the feelings. But do not force them.
Not only do I not hit those shooters anymore, but I am deadly accurate. If I get lined up at the pin that’s exactly where the ball goes.
You can do that to.
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Note: Some of you are having trouble seeing the videos. They show up just fine on my iMac. Here are the links to the videos. If you can’t see them in the blog, let me know, tell me how you are viewing the blog, and I will try to fix it. Thank you very much.
Most of the things I discover about putting come from hours spent on the practice green. Every so often something goes click. This one, however, comes from my back room, where I knock the ball around for a few minutes every night.
It’s about sinking the putts that you just have to sink–short, no break. Just straight in the hole. Yet, those can be the hardest ones, for some reason.
This is what I noticed. I had been imagining a tiny line between the ball and the hole, and hitting the putt so the ball rolls along that line. That’s a lot of pressure
But what popped into my head that night was a band, as wide as the putter, going to the hole.
Not only that, but I saw that if you line up the toe of the putter with the corresponding edge of the hole, so that if the putter could magically slide across the green to the hole, the absolute toe would graze that edge of the hole, which would square up the putterface to roll ball into my rubber “hole” dead center.
In the photo, the thin red line lines up of the toe of the putter with the outside edge of the hole, and the transparent red band is what the putterface stays square to–a much easier image to believe in that a tiny line going from the ball to the hole.
So forget about the hole, forget about the ball, just make your stroke to have the putter face stay square to the band and the ball goes in. Easy!
As for lining up the toe of the putter with the outside edge of the hole, it might seem like this would not be exact. But if you try this out, and the putterface is not square to the hole, you will see clearly that the toe is not “pointing” to the edge.
I think this works because you are squaring up the entire surface of the putterface rather than a small point on the surface. And to tell the truth, I’m not even sure you can square up a point to something.
I tried out this method on a putting green and found it to be reliable up to about 15 feet.
[Update: With practice, you can use this technique on breaking putts, too, by learning how much to line up the tip of the putterface outside (R to L) or inside (L to R) the hole.]
NOTE: A Basic Golf Swing is now available that develops the comments below in full, and more, in both words and video.
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Golf instruction books speak of three orientations of the hands when taking a grip: strong (the Vs between your thumbs and forefingers point outside your trailing shoulder), neutral (the Vs point at your trailing shoulder), and weak (the Vs point at your chin).
These are grip categories, however. They should not be taken as actual ways to set your hands on the club. How you do that is an individual matter that should reflect the natural orientation of your forearms. *
Instructors often talk about the clubface getting out of alignment because the hands turned the clubhead, but they do no such thing because they can’t turn. It is the forearms that turn, carrying the hands with them. This is not a trivial distinction.
When the forearms start out in their natural position, they will stay there (unless you disturb them) and return the clubface to the ball square. If you address the ball with them out of position, they will return to their natural position during the first few feet of takeaway, very likely without your being aware of it. There goes your shot when it has just barely started.
Stand with your arms hanging naturally by your sides. Notice where the backs of your hands are facing. They must face the same way when you put your hands on the club, which in turn puts your forearms in their natural position.
If you have trouble with the clubface being either open all the time at impact, or closed, and have tried everything to fix it without success, consider that the only problem is with your grip. It’s not your grip, but someone else’s.
You might find as well that the swing feels kind of effortless because you are not forcing your arms to move in a way they don’t like. That’s not a bad thing!
* The only instruction books I have found that mention this point is the chapter on the grip in Al Geiberger’s book, appropriately titled, Tempo, and Phil Galvano’s Secrets of the Perfect Golf Swing.
You need to practice to get good at golf, but it must be the right kind of practice. Hitting lots of golf balls is the wrong kind. Practicing movements is the right kind. This video shows you one way to accomplish that.
This is what I call The Number One Approach Putting Drill. Spend fifteen minutes with this drill a couple of times a week and you will become a deadly approach putter.
In the summer of 2012, following two back surgeries earlier that year, all I could do was chip and putt. So I decided to start over with that and learn how to do them both the right way, not the way I had fallen into on my own.
I had a chipping lesson that June. I said to the pro, “Pretend I’ve never hit a chip shot before and tell me how to do it from the ground up.” That’s exactly what he did.
Whenever I have a golf lesson, I take notes afterward. I wrote down the points he made on chipping, practiced them a lot, because, remember that’s all I could do at the time, and I became a very good chipper.
I looked through the blog and found out that I had never posted the points he taught me. They don’t really substitute for a lesson, but here they are anyway. I hope you can make something of them. There are six.
1. Setup: The ball is in the center of your stance, weight is slightly left, the clubshaft leans slightly left. Light grip pressure, grip down to the metal for control.
2. The wrists break back slightly when the club goes back. Do not overdo this.
3. Swinging forward, the shaft and the outside of the right thigh feel like they are moving forward together.
4. The right knee continues breaking through the shot. The right heel comes off the ground little bit.
5. The hips turn. There is no slide. The left hip moves straight back, not around.
6. The wrists are straight again at impact and do not break further (the right hand does not pass the left). The clubface ends up facing the sky.
As I have said earlier, think of sliding the sole of the club underneath the ball, not so much on hitting down on the ball. There is a bit of that, but do not emphasize it.
One of the best comments I ever read on a golf forum was to “slow down your swing and learn to live with the extra distance you get.” The reason eluded me until recently.
I got the November 2018 copy of Golf Digest magazine. You know, the magazine that has playing tips every month that work for world-class professionals, but not for you?
Here’s one that did work, and it was from Daniel Berger. He said you’re never going to get the distance you’re due until you learn to hit the ball off the center of the clubface, and he gave us a drill to work on that.
He said to hit balls with your 7-iron (everybody’s favorite club) at 30 percent of your normal swing speed until you start connecting with the center of the clubface consistently. Then move up to 50 percent, then 70 percent.
Thirty percent is pretty slow. If it takes you one second to go from takeaway to impact, that’s now three seconds from takeaway to impact. Pretty slow.
He also mentioned you would be surprised at how far the ball goes even with those slow swings if you hit the ball on the center of the clubface.
That rang true to me, so I went to the driving range I live next door to. Actually it’s not driving range, but the Oregon State Fairgrounds. It has a big field that is used for a parking lot that is 560 yards long and 235 yards wide. I go there every day and hit a few balls.
So I went out there with a 7-iron and a few golf balls to try this tip, swinging at what I felt to be 30 percent. Slowing down that much is harder than it sounds, but I think I got it.
Wow. Triple wow.
Berger is exactly right. Slowing down the swing makes it easy to get centered contact and when you do, the ball flies off the center of the clubface, and goes farther than you could imagine it would.
I’m working up slowly to a faster speed, but only so fast that I can still make contact on the center of the clubface.
In my Living Golf Book, I define tempo as “the fastest you can swing through impact and consistently hit solid shots off the center of the clubface.” Berger’s drill is a fantastic way to find that tempo.
Try it. You’ll find that tempo doesn’t have to be very fast to hit shots that go straight (slowing down your swing takes the tension out of it, which is what introduces many of your swing errors) and to a distance I know you can live with.
Little Differences That Make a Big Difference in How Well You Play
