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.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

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.”

Visit me @TheRecreationalGolfer

Last week I wrote about the joys of autumn golf in the warm late afternoon sun. Autumn golf also features the cold afternoon rain.

Now if it’s raining and cold, I don’t go out. Someone once said to me that because I don’t like to play when I’m cold or wet that I’m not a True Golfer . . . whatever that means.

But sometimes you just have to go out and it isn’t raining, but it might rain. So here’s what we do in the Pacific Northwest, the rain capital of the western world.

Bring along your rain jacket and rain pants. If you use a golf glove, bring extras. They get soaked quickly and won’t dry out.

Bring four towels. One is to clean your clubs with. The other three are to dry your hands before you take your grip. Bring three because one will be wet before you make the turn. The second one will be wet halfway through the back nine.

Make sure you have the club cover that came with your bag. When it starts raining, we cover our clubs first and put on our rain suit second.

Did you pack an umbrella, by the way?

Bring along an extra pair of socks and shoes to change into when the round is over. There’s nothing like having dry feet on the way home.

Now for playing in the rain.

The ball will sit quickly when it hits the green, so you can be more aggressive that usual. Your approach might plug or make a deep mark when it lands. Please repair!

Be sure swing easily from the fairway and hit the ball easily. You might need to take one more club accordingly.

Concentrate on hitting the ball first. A strike that is the least bit fat will throw up mud and the ball will go only a very short distance. If your habit is to take a divot, try to play for picking the ball off the ground.

Near the green, put away the bump and run because the wet ground can grab the ball before it has a chance to run. When chipping from greenside, try to minimize spin, which can again stop the ball before it starts to run.

A wet green will be a slower green, so you can hits putts more boldly. Play less break because of the added speed.

Read Rule 25-1, which tells you what to do if there is a build-up of casual water.

Do all this, and by golly, maybe you can become a True Golfer.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

Bobby Jones’s most famous book is titled, Bobby Jones on Golf, and has a deservedly sterling reputation. It is a compilation of selected columns that he wrote for syndication to daily newspapers from 1927 to 1935.

A book he wrote later, as a book, titled, Golf Is My Game, is equally rewarding. The instruction portion is more to the point in many places, and reads as a unified piece of instruction rather than a collection of thoughts on various subjects.

Chapter 8 is titled “Management.” He means both management of the course and management of your temperament. He has a bit about expectations that, if absorbed by any golfer, will make every outing much more enjoyable. I quote:

1. I must be prepared for the making of mistakes.
2. I must try always to select the shot to be played and the manner of playing it so as to provide the widest possible margin for error.
3. I must expect to have to so some scrambling and not be discouraged if the amount of it happens to be more than normal.

End of quote.

These admonitions come at the end of an extended section where Jones explains that in an average round (for him) of four to six under par, there would be only one or two shots “that had not been mishit to some degree,” and in his best rounds, only five or six.

By keeping expectations reasonable and accepting the course and the playing skills you bring with you that day, it is entirely possible to become someone who always gets more out of his or her skills than would seem possible.

What more can any golfer do than that?

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

I suspect that most recreational golfers feel comfortable playing into a green from under 160 yards, maybe as far away as 170. I also suspect they feel all right playing shots of about 200 yards or longer into fairways. That 30-yard gap in the middle, however, is the problem that many of us have yet to solve.

If we face a shot from within that gap, we’re trying to hit a green. Not many of us can hit a green reliably from that distance. It’s not just us, either. Touring professionals have a gap as well. It’s just that their numbers are different than ours.

There’s a chart in the book, The Search For the Perfect Swing that shows the percentage of greens hit, from which distances, in a professional tournament in England in 1964. The data show that the percentage of greens hit from 150 to 180 yards was fairly consistent at 75-80 percent. At the 190-yard mark, the percentage of greens hit dropped to below 50 percent. Remember that in those those days that they hit to 180 yards with a 4-iron.

So at some distance, there’s a sharp drop-off for everyone, and it’s sharp. What do you do about it?

1. Learn to hit the long clubs straighter. Obvious on paper, but pretty difficult to do in real life. If the pros can’t do it, we can’t either. Let’s try something else.

2. Sharpen your short game. This is better. You’re probably going to miss the green from such a distance, but if you can get up and down you’ll be O.K.

3. Lay up. If there is real trouble around the green, bad trouble, it’s a losing bet to think you can avoid it from a long distance. Play short of it and trust your greens game (chipping and putting). By real trouble, I mean water, and bunkers, especially if you’re not a good bunker player or they’re deep and plentiful. You might take four shots to get down from the fairway following this strategy, but if you can guarantee that, it’s better in the long run than trying for three and most of the time taking five or six.

Recreational golfers should emphasize 2 and 3. These are two ways to play within the capabilities you now have and that you can likely attain to. I don’t mean for you to play timid golf, and this isn’t doing that. It’s getting the most out of the game you have and not asking more from it that it can deliver.

What do you do when you have a shot that falls inside your distance gap? Post your solution in a comment below.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

Slow play is everyone’s bugbear. Well, maybe not for the slow players.

But to get around the course in less time, you don’t have to play faster. You only need to play more efficiently.

This is what I mean. Say your group is at the tee. One member is on the tee box, teeing off. The other three members are standing way over there by their carts.

The one guy tees off, and the next one up walks up to the tee box, goes through a routine and hits. Then the third member walks over to the tee box and so forth, and finally the fourth member walks over and hits.

Or this.

The first member is on the tee box and the second member is standing beside it. The first member hits, and right away the second member steps onto the tee box and the third member walks up to it.

The second member hits, the third member walks on the tee box, and the fourth member walks up to it. The third member hits, and the fourth member steps on the tee box. And hits.

Can you see that the second version could easily save almost a minute in getting the foursome off the tee? Multiply that by 18 and you get a significant saving in time over the course of the round by doing just that.

No one had to hurry. No one had to rush. It’s just that the entire group played more efficiently. That’s all.

Everyone doing a little thing added up to a lot of time saved. That is the faster play strategy.

Here are a few more examples.

From the fairway, when someone is hitting and you’re next, you can begin surveying your shot at the same time the other player does. (Out of courtesy, don’t pull your club until the other ball is in the air.) In other words, be ready.

On the green, read your opening putt as soon as you get there instead of waiting until it is your turn. Mark your ball, clean it, and put it back down unless it’s in the way of someone else’s putt. That way there’s no waiting when it’s your turn. I watch the four old guys ahead of me get on and off the green in a hurry, and this is how they do it.

Just doing those three things could save close to an hour over eighteen holes. That is, if you can convince your buddies to give them a try.

It all comes down to this. Paying your green fees does not give you the privilege of holding up your group and the the groups behind you by playing at any pace you choose. By giving back a bit of what we think we might be entitled to, everyone benefits from the overall goodwill that’s created.

Playing efficiently is a painless way to do it.

Can you think of some others? Post them in a Comment below.