Once your golfing skills get under control, that is, you have a reasonable expectation that the shot will come off like you wanted it to, what keeps your score higher than it should be is poor decision-making.

Yesterday I played nine holes and lost five strokes that I shouldn’t have. Two were from shots I absolutely skanked, which happens. But three were from not thinking things through.

Par 4, 413 yards, right-angled dogleg right. My tee shot ended up in the corner with no real shot toward the green. So I took out my 6-iron and set up to hit a fade around the corner at least get me back in the fairway and somewhat closer to the green. Except the fade didn’t come off. The ball went dead straight and sailed out of bounds.

I dropped a ball at the same spot, hit a 8-iron, and from there a 6-iron got the ball on the green for two putts and a 7 that would have been a 5 if I had used my head.

Here’s the rule, then. If, from the fairway, it will take more than one stroke to get the ball on the green, what is the easiest combination of shots that will do the job?

Two holes later, my tee shot on a par 3 ended up about two feet short of the green, on a very tight lie. The pin was about 40 feet away.

I like to chip from off the green. I hardly ever use my putter. So instead of using my putter, I went to my habit and tried to chip with a sand wedge. As I was standing over the ball, I couldn’t quite feel good about what I was about to do. Sure enough, I didn’t get the contact to spin the ball enough, and it rolled about twelve feet past the hole.

Two putts later I had a 4 when an easy 3 had almost been handed to me.

Here’s the rule. If you don’t feel confident about the shot you’re about to hit, stop and try one you feel good about.

So there you have it. Golf is a game you play. Shot-making skills are tools you develop at the range. The course is where you learn which ones to use to shoot low scores.

I played nine holes yesterday, solo. This is what I learned, or reminded myself of.

My chipping clubs go from a 60* wedge to a 7-iron. On the fourth hole I was just off the front of a deep green with the pin in the back. That invites a pitch. But it was also perfect for a chip with an 8-iron. When you set up your chipping clubs, trust them.

On a par 5, I was about 240 yards from the hole after my drive. I pulled out a fairway wood, but reconsidered. It would take two shots, regardless, to get the ball on the green, so why not make it two easy shots? The FW went back into the bag and out came a 24* hybrid. That club, and an easy pitch got me on the green for two putts and an easy par, not a hard one.

Short putt, about eight feet, downhill. I am not a die-at-the-hole putter normally. But for putts like these, I am. I gave the ball a little tap, sending it slowly to the hole and catching the right lip on the last roll to fall in. Any more pace and the ball would have stayed out.

Ball in the rough off the tee, enough that I would have to go down and get it at impact. If you play the ball in the center of your stance, the grass will grab the clubhead and the ball won’t go very far, and you’ll never get the clubhead down to the bottom of the ball. Instead, play the ball back in your stance and employ a more vertical forward swing. Since the ball is back, the clubpath will still be a bit rightward at impact, so aim left of your target.

Forty feet from the flag, about five feet off the green on very short grass. With a long putt like this over grass at the start, the ball will be in its bouncing phase when crosses the grass, so there is no need to hit the ball harder to get it through the grass. Hit it like you would if the ball was on the green.

Read your chips as if they were approach putts. If you ignore slope, chips that go the right distance can get carried away from the hole by contours you didn’t take into consideration.

Reading the green: I read every putt over two feet putt at 30 feet from the hole. You can see slopes in the green that are not apparent when you read from right behind the ball. Also, do not overread short putts. The large majority of putts from about three feet in do not have to be played outside the hole.

Terry Kohler, who writes for GolfWRX, wrote recently about how good touring pros are, or rather are not, when they have to play their tee ball out of the rough.

It seems, when we watch them play on television, that it doesn’t matter where the ball ends up. They still get on the green and make their par and even some birdies.

One thing you always want to remember is that the players we see on TV are the ones who are playing really well that week. So of course they will tend to play well out of the rough.

But they aren’t as good from the rough as you think they are. The fairway matters.

This chart, suggested by Kohler’s column shows how far the ball is left from the pin, on average, from the fairway, and from the rough, for a given distance.

Notice, as Kohler points out in his article, that guys get it closer from 150-175 yards from the fairway than they do from 75-100 yards from the rough.

What does that tell you about your game, when you are not as strong as they are, not as athletic as they are, and not as talented as they are? Hmmm?

If you said the recreational game depends on getting your tee ball in the fairway, you win the prize.

Now I don’t mean to pull back so much that you handicap yourself, but that on some holes you can let it out with your driver and on other holes you need to leave it in the bag.

Or, if you can drive 260 and miss a few fairways that is much better than hitting 230 and not missing any. But then…

Colin Montgomery said on a Playing Lessons With the Pros show (when he was standing in the fairway), “People say I was a good iron player. … The only reason I was a good iron player was because I’m hitting them from this, and not from that. No one’s a good iron player from there. Nobody. The only good iron players are the ones who hit it from here.”

If hitting the fairway off the tee is not your honest expectation, it’s time to re-think your tee game.

Hitting straight in your approach game is even more important, but that’s another post.

Eleven years ago I shot my personal best round of 75. These are the notes I made when I got home, which were no doubt relevant to having shot that score.

1. Don’t hit a shot until you’re ready. That means you are at ease with what you are about to do. If you have any misgivings, or doubt, or something just doesn’t feel right, step away. Clear your head, and step up to the ball again.

2. Play within yourself, especially off the tee. Play easy and believe in what you’re about to do.

3. Read putts by looking uphill. If you’re putting uphill, read the green from behind the ball. If you’re putting downhill, read from behind the hole. The slope of the hill and the break are always seen more clearly when you look uphill.

4. Find the shots that are working and use them to death. Let the shots that aren’t working take the day off.

5. When in doubt about which iron to choose, take the longer one, grip down a half inch, and fire away.

1. There is a chapter in the book, The Search For the Perfect Golf Swing, titled, “Long Approach Shots — Where Tournaments are Won”.

By “long approach shots”, they meant shots between 130-220 yards. The indicator is proximity to the hole. The closer, the better, obviously.

There is another chapter on driving which concluded that length counts most, but I won’t go into that here.

2. My favorite Tiger Woods quote was when he said his irons were his offensive weapons. Yes, he made some putts, but they were putts his irons gave him the opportunity to make.

3. My favorite golf quote of all time comes from Percy Boomer’s book, On Learning Golf: “It is true that if you cannot putt, you cannot win, for no hole is won until the ball is down—but good scores are only made possible by good play up to the green.”

4. This article, which came out in Golf Digest today, explains why Collin Morikawa is so good. Big hint: it’s his iron play.

You’ve no doubt read the comment that his dispersion with a 6-iron is the same as the average Tour pro with a pitching wedge.

5. I was a decent iron player even at the time when I wasn’t all that good at anything else, and one thing that got me into single digits was becoming a very good iron player.

So when you go to the range, spend a lot more time with your irons than you do with your driver.

Although he had to find fairways, Johnny Miller didn’t shoot a 63 at Oakmont because of his driving.

To hit a good opening tee shot, look at your grip to be sure you have placed your hands on the club correctly. When you swing, make sure you apply good rhythm and tempo. Do just those two things and you should be O.K. Actually, do this before every swing for the first two holes while you’re getting settled in. Actually, do this all day.

Two hundred and sixty yards from the green? Put away the fairway wood. You’re going to take two shots to get there no matter what, so make them easy shots: two 8-irons, a 7 and a 9, etc. Unless you are really good with them, I don’t know why you would hit a fairway wood from the fairway anyway.

Do you have a five-foot putt that looks like it will run straight into the hole? Walk to about thirty feet away and look again. Now you can see that the green is a little higher on the right than it is on the left, and only from back there can you see it. A putt that looked straight really breaks left, and now you know.

You know how some of the pros take the club part way back and look at the clubface? They’re looking to see if the face turned out of square in their takeaway, which is easy to do. Checking yourself this way might be a good habit for you to adopt.

I made toy a few years ago to show myself how easy it really is to shoot a low score in golf.

It’s an Excel spreadsheet called The Longest Shot Score [course name] on my hard drive, but I abbreviated it for this post as longestshot.xls. so you can download it.

Enter the yardages of each hole on your course, then enter the longest shot you can hit off the tee, and the longest shot you can hit off the fairway.

The spreadsheet tells what score you could shoot.

My real intent when I wrote this was to see how short you can hit and still score.

Let’s use this screenshot of one of the courses in play, in Dallas, Oregon (several miles east of Salem).

If you never hit over 200 yards off the tee, and 175 yards off the fairway, you are set up to score a 75.

Trying to break 90? You can do that if you never hit over 150 yards off the tee and 125 yards from the fairway.

There’s a given, which is that you always get down in two whenever the ball is up to the green, and that’s a really big given.

But still. I’m trying to tell you that length is good, but straight is better, even if it isn’t very long, and there’s more than one plan for getting around the course than to hit driver all the time.

Play within yourself, keep the ball in play, and shoot scores you would be proud of.