It has been quite lately on the blog. I haven’t been playing because it is so wet out here, but I have been practicing in my back yard between showers.
My practice is solely hitting wedges. Chips, half wedges, and occasionally a full wedge. What I am aiming for is perfect contact and hitting the straight at my target.
I’ve been hitting over 100 balls a day, those little golf-ball sized plastic balls that we called holey balls because they have holes in them.
This is what I have learned so far.
Consistent contact comes from controlling the swing with the hip turn. An arm swing is a crap shoot, and focusing on your hands is even worse.
Now the way I’m turning my hips and when, and what it feels like, is something I cannot describe it at all. It just came out of hitting more than 1,000 golf balls, and it’s easy for me to do the same way time after time.
A second thing is that you can only make that perfect contact when your grip is relaxed. I don’t want to say light, as in pressure. Relaxed is better because to relax your grip, everything else has to be relaxed, too, which is all to the good.
As for direction, aim is important, but not the whole story. You must have a idea of what path you want the clubhead to be following after the ball has been struck, and that path is straight at the target.
I find a spot on the ground about three inches in front of the ball along the target line, and telling myself to swing the club squarely along that line and over that spot. From there, it’s a subconscious mind thing.
I think I have a workable solution to those two problems. Now all I have to do is hit a few thousand more balls to make it automatic.
Then there’s distance. I’m saving that for last because there is no point is calibrating distances before the stroke is good enough.
Every now and then I swing a 6-iron, once, using the full wedge swing to see what happens. The same thing happens: perfect contact, ball goes toward the target.
As for all this practice, see this post, probably the most valuable on in the entire blog, and this one, quoting Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim.