There is one thing you can do in your short game that will make every shot easier and better. That thing is to hold the club lightly. Maybe hold it softly.

What do I mean by “softly?” Hold the club so the handle barely compresses the soft pads of your palm and fingers, but not so softly that the club flops around when you swing it.

Stop reading, get a club and try that before you go on.

In addition, relax your arms and shoulders completely.

If you get all this right, I promise you will make good contact with the ball much more often than you do. You will be in a position where you can learn to control your short shots to an amazing degree.

You can get away with less-than-perfect contact from the tee and the fairway. But the short game requires, (demands?), precision when the club meets the ball.

When you set up for a short shot, the perfect address position of the clubhead is also its perfect impact position. The problem to be solved is how to return the clubhead to that exact spot.

If you grip the club tightly, the tension in your hands puts tension in your arms and shoulders, which shortens your arms. When you swing back, you subconsciously know something is wrong and the forward stroke is a desperate attempt to get the clubhead back where it belongs. Every so often, you get it right.

But if your hands, arms, and shoulders are completely relaxed, the length of the arm-club lever does not change.

All you need to do from there is swing back and through gracefully with an unhurried rhythm and tempo, and ideal contact is yours. It’s that simple.

We had freezing rain yesterday, for 10 hours, non-stop. The ground today is covered with an two-inch layer of what looks like snow but is solid ice. It’s as hard as a rock, and so slippery. Going outside is not a smart thing to do.

Not to mention, it’s 23 degrees.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t practice my golf.

My back room has a big rug over wall-to-wall carpet. I swing my wedge, maybe a 40-yard swing, and try, so every time when the sole of the club brushes the rug going through “impact”, to make the same sound.

About a dozen years ago I had a playing lesson and set up with a ball about 75 yards from the green.

I took three practice swings, the same length of swing each time, but with one hitting the ground firmly, one brushing the top of the grass, and the third one diggining into the ground a little bit.

The pro said, those were three different swings and they will each hit the ball three different distances. The club needs to hit the ground the same way every time.

So I started practicing the depth of my swing, and have ever since.

It’s one thing to have calibrated your wedges for distance, but you don’t have to wait until it’s 23 degrees and icy to start putting that calibration into practice.

These are the drills I used to get good at chipping and I still use to stay good at chipping.

Practice greens have a number of holes to putt and and chip to.

Drill 1: Drop four balls at one spot and chip each one to a different hole. Then putt them out.

When you get all four up and down, go to Drill 2.

Drill 2: Chip balls, from four widely-spaced locations, to the same hole. Then putt them out.

Select your targets in the first drill and your locations in the second drill to give you the greatest challenge.

You might think these drills would be hard to do because of the amount of room on the practice green that is required for them and what do you do when the green is filled with people practicing their putting?

Not to worry. Practice greens are among the most under-utilized real estate in the world.

I promise you that everybody else is at the range to pound their driver and maybe ten percent of them will come on to the practice green and knock a few balls around and leave after five minutes because that’s enough of that.

You’ll have the green all to yourself.

Chipping from beside the green and pitching from long distances are shots we are all familiar with. They are both easy shots to get good at, too.

Short shots we don’t hit very often, and ones that confuse us, are the ones from close to the green but not that close. Here is some advice from Manuel de la Torre on what to do, from his book, Understanding the Golf Swing.

“If the flagstick is located close to the front edge of the green, the best option is to play a low running shot and use the grass on the fairway to slow the ball down and have it trickle slowly to the hole. Playing a high shot to land on the green would not result in a shot that would be able to stop near the hole—there is too short a distance between the edge of the green and the hole to be able to handle that type of shot.

“If the flagstick is located at the back of the green, you have a great number of options. Almost any iron will produce shots that can end close to the hole. Under these conditions pitch shots or pitch and run shots can be used and be equally successful. In many cases the pitch and run will produce better results than high pitch shots.”

This is good advice in my experience. With the advent of the four-wedge bag, you don’t see golfers hitting pitch and run shots too often even though it is a more effective shot that is hit with a lower-lofted club.

Practice this shot with your 6- to 8-irons to add a potent shot to your short game bag of tricks.

I have a real problem with bunkers. I work hard to make ball-first, ground-second contact from the fairway. But in the bunker, that’s just what you’re not supposed to do. They all tell us to hit one, two inches behind the ball. In other words, hit it fat.

And I just can’t bring myself to do that. Consequently, I’m lousy out of bunkers. Terry Koehler to the rescue.

Terry is a club designer who also writes a periodic column for GolfWRX. In one of his recent posts, he advises us to hit the ball and the sand at the same time.

This is exactly what I do when I hit out of a fairway bunker, a shot I am as good at as I am bad in a greenside bunker. Which in both cases is “really.”

My problem is there isn’t a practice bunker within miles of my house, so I can’t try it out. The only practice I get in a bunker is when my first attempt doesn’t work and the ball is still in it, so I get to try again. But maybe there is one near where you live and you can see if it improves matters.

You know, the touring pros say the bunker shot is the easiest one there is. If that’s so, why do we have so much of a problem with it?

If you’re a hopeless case in a bunker like I am, maybe Terry’s new approach will turn things around for you.

Short game swings are not abbreviated versions of the full swing. The pitching and chipping strokes are each their own animal.

Two things are common to both of them, though.

Light grip pressure. Slower tempo.

These are finesse shots. You are not banging the ball. You are caressing it.

This is where the short game begins:

Light grip pressure. Slower tempo.

Bobby Jones said, “The secret of golf is turning three strokes into two.” That’s the goal.

The fundamental strategy for putting you on the road to achieving that goal is this:

From close in, get the ball on the green with one shot. Getting the ball near to the pin is a secondary goal.

That does not contradict Jones’s dictum. It is the only way it can be achieved.

Every time I go out to play golf I learn something. I hope you do, too. Today I learned some thing about pitching and long chipping.

Yesterday I was at the range with a driver and a 9-iron. I use the 9-iron to help me maintain a controlled swing with the driver. If my driver swing is getting out of hand, a few swings the 9-iron brings it back down to earth.

But I put the 9 to use, too. I hit pitches to distances where I would normally use different wedges. They worked out OK. I used a longer or shorter swing, and it was easy to get the distance right.

Today when I played I thought I would use the 9 to pitch on two shots from 89 yards and 59 yards. They worked out pretty well. I got close enough to the hole where the putt was makeable if I could putt worth a lick and the greens hadn’t been sanded a few days earlier.

Then there are those long chips from 20-30 yards off the green. I had a few of those. I thought, what the heck, let me try the short irons here, too. They worked really well. By short irons, I mean 8, 9, and pitching wedge.

The upshot is that I hit short irons to good effect in situations where I would have normally gone straight to my wedges. In addition, I found the short irons easier to hit than the wedges would have been.

Try it for yourself. See if you like the results. There’s no need to be wedded to wedges (but no need to drop them, either). Give yourself options.

You don’t always get a garden variety chip when you miss the green. Here are three sticky situations and what to do about them. You will probably be using one of them every time you play.

1. Say your ball is on an upslope of some kind. You have to hit over the crest of the slope and have a significant way to the pin. Swinging parallel to the slope will turn your 54-degree wedge into a 64-degree wedge and the ball won’t go anywhere.

Instead, pick the wedge you want to use with to the distance the ball has to travel horizontally to get to the hole. Swing straight into the slope. There will be only a small follow-through. The ball will pop up and forward, and run softly to the hole. This is the shot that Fred Couples hit on the 12th hole on Sunday at Augusta when he won the Masters in 1992.

(Actually, the recovery is not amazing. Any one of us could have hit that shot. What’s amazing is that the ball didn’t roll into the water.)

2. If the ball lies instead on a downslope, the fear is that you won’t get the leading edge of the club underneath the ball, and blade it across the green.

Take a wedge that is more lofted than you would normally use for the distance the ball has to travel. Put the ball back in your stance, so far back that it is well outside your trailing foot. You’ll have to reach back to get the club to the ball. Raise the clubhead up and chop gently down on the back of the ball, driving the wedge into the ground. The ball will pop forward with lots of spin. 

3. When you’re seriously short-sided and you can’t run the ball along the ground for any reason, hit a mini-flop.

Take a sand wedge and set up with the ball in the center of your stance and the club shaft straight up and down, that is, not leaning toward the hole. Take the club back low and bring it through the ball low and slow with no wrist action. Try to slide the club underneath the ball without disturbing it. You can’t do that, of course, but you will get a gentle hit that eases the ball forward with little spin. It will land and go nowhere. A cushion of grass underneath the ball is desirable.