There is no reason to play a golf course that is too long for you. Just move up a set of tees. If you are ever in a situation where you have to play from tees that are too long, here is how to do it.

First, realize that you will shoot a score that is higher than you usually do. Accept it and do not concern yourself with your score as you play. Just play golf. Add it up when the round is over.

Second, control the ball. You must get the ball in the fairway off the tee, and keep it there. If a long par four will be a three-shotter for you anyway, make them three easy shots. Let’s say that you don’t want to, or can’t, hit a 437-yard par 4 in two. Back way off and make them three easy shots. You can get there with two 5-irons and a pitching wedge. Leaving your driver home might not be a bad idea.

Third, avoid trouble around the green. Know which is the longest club you feel sure that you can hit the green with. Now add three clubs. If you have to hit that club or more to get the ball on the green, lay up if there is lots of trouble around the green you could hit into.

Fourth, if you know you’re going to use up an extra stroke to get to the green, hit that third stroke from a distance you’re very good at. Let’s say you own the 75-yard pitch. Plan your attack so your second shot ends up 75 yards from the pin.

Fifth, your short game goal is to get the ball on the green. From inside 100 yards, you dare not take two shots to get the ball on the green. Forget the pin; aim for the center of the green. The longest approach putt you might have is 40 feet, and they will likely be much shorter than that.

Finally, since you’re using up extra shots to get the ball on the green, you just have to get down in two putts once you’re there. There are no shortcuts here. You’re giving away strokes in the fairway, you can’t give up any more on the green.

Uppermost, never let the added length lure you into trying to hit the ball farther than you can. Stick to playing your game and be happy with the result.

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There are times when you have to take on a hole, and times when you need to ease off. Knowing which holes are which will save you strokes.

1. Example 1 is a 359-yard par 4 that goes downhill off the tee to the halfway point, then uphill after a right turn to a shallow green. This green is thus meant to be approached with a short iron, but the tee shot is intimidating and makes a driver look like a risky choice, because: a fairway bunker will trap a ball that goes off the tee too far and straight. The proper tee shot is a fade, but if the ball bends too much, trees in the corner of the dogleg will surround the ball leaving no shot but a chip back out to the fairway. And, the gap between the bunker and the trees is none to wide.

I had always laid up off the tee to be safe, but had a mid-iron into the green not designed to hold one. I seldom got a par. Two days ago, I hit my driver anyway just to see what would happen. The ball went into the trees, I chipped out sideways, but the tee shot with my driver had gone far enough that I had an 8-iron to the green. I hit on, and two putts later had an easy bogey.

So I learned that on this hole, a bad tee shot would cost me one stroke, and a good one meant an easy par, whereas hitting short meant bogey, and a double if something went wrong.

2. Four holes later we’re on the tee of a 427-yard par 4, with water on the right, a slight dogleg right, with water in front of the green to its left, beside a generous lay-up area. Unless your drive is pretty long, you will have to hit off a rolling fairway (an uneven lie is a certainty) and over the water to get to the green.

I hit my drive straight, but not as long as it could have been, and I was faced with a shot of about 175 yards over the water on the right, off a downhill lie, to get safely to the bail-out area. The green was out of the question. One of my primary playing rules is: never hit over water if you don’t have to. Since it was going to take two shots to get on the green anyway, I chipped 50 yards down the fairway so I could have a short iron over dry land into the green.

I got on, took two putts for a bogey, and avoided a double or even a triple had I tried to cross the water with my second. Had my drive gone about twenty yards farther, I could have safely taken on the green. But sometimes, you have to do that discretion and valor thing.

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1. I really like 2s. When you put a 2 on your scorecard, everyone knows exactly what happened. A 3 could be anything; 4s and 5s look all right, but a 5 could be a double bogey. A 2 means only one thing. I like 2s a whole bunch.

2. When you’re learning a new shot, it takes a good while practicing it at the range to be able to hit it on command. Only when you get that good at it would you want to use it when you play. The next thing you have to learn is when to use it when you play.

You can easily make the mistake of using it when you shouldn’t, or not using it when you should. I have a great new short shot about which I made each mistake the first few rounds I played after I had it down. But that’s how you learn.

3. Play the shots you believe in regardless of what conventional wisdom says to do. Jack Nicklaus said that Arnold Palmer once told him to putt from the greenside fringe (I was going to say “frog hair,” but I’m not sure everyone would know what that word means), since your worst putt is always better than your best chip.

Not if you know how to chip.

4. Yesterday I skanked my tee shot way to the left, just a few feet still in bounds, skanked my shot back to the fairway, hit a 75-yard pitch to four feet, and sank the putt. Walter Hagen once said, “Three of those and one of these still make par.”

Never give up. One good shot can make up for a lot of bad that has happened before.

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Recreational golfers will shoot lower scores by not taking extra strokes, more than by hitting better shots. There is a big difference.

Extra strokes are one ones you take because you didn’t think things through clearly, and as a result, play a shot that doesn’t get you anywhere. You’re no better off than before, but you’ve rung up one more stroke on your score.

Play shots you know you can hit. You might have seen something on TV that you would like to try, and here is a great place to do it. Or you have tried this shot once or twice in practice so you think, “I’ll try it here.” Then you hit it, and it doesn’t work, and now you get to try something else.

Hit a shot you know you can hit, even if it’s not the ideal shot. That way you’ll get something out of it, instead of nothing. Remember what that set-up was, so you can practice after the round to learn what you should have done, preparing yourself for the next time.

But don’t hit shots that are complete strangers.

Respect your lie. Which brings up this point. A subtle difference in your lie can mean you have to hit a different shot. Maybe around the green you have a chip shot that is pure gold, but if the lie isn’t conducive, don’t hit it. The result could be worse than a compromise shot.

I have this chip that sends the ball right at the pin, bounces twice, and stops. But I have to take the club back very low and keep it low coming into the ball. If the lie is any bit cuppy, so the ball is sitting down, this shot will blade the ball over the green.

So I have to pick another shot, as you should if you don’t think you can get the club on the ball the way you would like to.

Uneven lies crop up all the time, but they’re easy to master.

Don’t get greedy. Take what the course gives you and no more. Say the tees are up one day, and you can bend your drive around the dogleg for once. But there’s a wind in your face which will cancel out the distance advantage. If you try anyway, your ball will likely go into whatever is in the corner and you’ll have to spend a stroke getting out to the spot you would have driven to if you hadn’t been greedy.

What course designers want us to do is get greedy and not do the next item on the list.

Respect trouble. Play away from trouble. Play around trouble. Don’t play over it or nearby it. The course designer will give you an out. You just have to find it.

With water, especially, be careful. Never play over water unless you have to. If you have to, set up your shot so you have a wide berth if you miss. You can lay up so you don’t hit in, and still have plenty of room to clear the hazard with your next shot.

Forced carry off the tee that you can’t quite cover? Use your tee shot to chip down the tee box to a spot from where you can get over. Use up one stroke to save two. (And maybe consider you’re playing from the wrong set of tees.)

Much of the fun of golf is that it is a thinking man’s game. A thinking woman’s game, too. When you play it like that, you shoot lower scores without being one whit better at hitting the ball. Now how good is that?

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See this post updated at Arrive

There is an ongoing series of posts titled, What I learned at the range. This post begins a series titled, What I learned at the course. It will be a number of playing tips that I’m bringing home that helped me play better, and might help you, too.

Remember, you can’t read about at tip to make it work. You have to try it and see for yourself.

1. An epiphany: It is not me hitting the ball. I am not involved in any way. The club swings; the ball goes. My ego, my self-involvement, does not play any part in the shot. For two seconds, stop being my everyday self and become an embodiment of a golf swing. See where I’m going with this?

2. Take more club. The pros say amateurs underclub themselves from the fairway all the time. The pros are right. Second hole, 115 yards from the pin. Pitching wedge, right? But that’s at the end of the line for my pitching wedge, and the green is a bit up the hill from where the ball is. I took out a 9-iron, made an easy swing, and got hole-high.

3. On the putting green, the more you think about easing the ball up to the hole, instead of hitting it up there, the closer you will get your approach putts.

4. Relax. You don’t have to play perfect golf to score. Two so-so shots and two good shots are enough to make a par.

5. Laser rangefinders rule. Mobile phone apps suck. Last week my drive and the drive of another guy in my group ended up about three feet from each other. We were hitting into a deep green with the pin in the back. I shot the pin at 159 and got there. His app said 134 to the center, plus or minis five yards, and he was short of the green, and he’s a good player who hit a good shot.

Moral: dump your app and get a rangefinder. I use a Leupold GX-1.

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

I don’t doubt you have a favorite course and play the bulk of your rounds there. Whatever it is that you like about it, that course is your golfing home. It’s the place where you can relax and have the fun that you seek from golf.

Yet, if that’s the only course you play, you are doing yourself a disservice if you want to become a better golfer.

Playing only one course requires only a limited a variety of shots, the ones that get you around this particular design. You also learn to think strategically only in ways that are very familiar to you. Your growth as a player stagnates.

Also, when you play only one course, you get quite familiar with it and start to shoot low scores. Though there’s nothing wrong with that, you might become under-handicapped.

There was a local golfer who shot a 62 on his home course several years ago. I looked up his record on the GHIN locator and found that all of his latest 20 scores came on that same course.

Now you can’t argue with a 62, but I wonder how good he would be if he played on some of the more challenging courses in his area.

When you go to a brand new course, do you shoot about 5-10 strokes over your usual score? There might be a few surprises, but if you have a well-rounded arsenal of shots and know how to analyze a course on the fly, you shouldn’t be more than a few strokes over your usual.

I play a variety of courses. One course I play requires more accurate tee shots than usual. Another course features unforgiving greenside rough.

A third is carved out of the Pacific Northwest mountain forest. Miss the fairway and don’t even bother looking for your ball.

On a fourth course all the greens sit about two or three feet above the fairway, so the chipping game is much different.

Now it is a fact that all these things are characteristic of the course I normally play, just not on every hole, and not to such a degree.

Playing a healthy rotation of course makes me a better player on each one.

Take it as a matter of pride that the ten best rounds that determine your handicap were played on three, and even four different courses.

When your handicap travels like this, you become a more educated golfer, and more capable golfer, and you have more fun.

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

A good way to reduce self-induced pressure is to accept that you’re a handicap golfer. You don’t make a par on every hole.

When you try to get a low score on holes that are too difficult for you, you force your game to produce more than it can deliver. You risk taking a high score by pressuring yourself to play better than you know you can.

Professional golfers know on which holes they can attack and on which holes they need to ease off. Recreational golfers need to play golf the same way.

Your handicap gives you an allowance for holes where playing for par, or even for bogey, depending on your handicap, is asking too much.

Take advantage of that. Play to take an extra stroke on the difficult holes. Take what is yours and let the golf course have the rest.

As you improve, you can start challenging the holes that used to challenge you.

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Either you’re lurking or you haven’t been checking my Facebook page every day. Here’s a bit of what you have missed if you’re in the second group:

Find the club you hit 175 yards and get real good with it. If you look at the scorecards of the courses you play, you’ll find that if you can nail that shot, par 4s are yours for the taking and par 5s become birdie holes.

There’s a neighbor cat who hangs out in my backyard when I hit plastic golf balls every morning. It thinks every one has to be pounced on. So I’ll hit one to this side of the yard then that side, to give it something to chase. I’ll also get out a wedge and see how close to the cat I can drop one. Great practice.

Winter is the best time of year to get a lesson. You know what needs patching up, so you can get corrected and have the time to practice it until you’ve got it. Also, NO ONE is taking lessons now, so the pro’s dance card is empty. You can sign up any time you want to. Go ahead, do it!

I’ve found that when I go to the range, if I know what I’m doing, about a dozen golf balls will do. If I don’t know what I’m doing, the whole bucket won’t help.

My teaching pro told me a story from his college days about a teammate who spent lots of time hitting one-foot putts. So the question finally got asked: “What are you doing over here?”
“I’m practicing making putts.”
“But they’re only this long!”
“Yes, but the putter doesn’t know that.”

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