In response to Facebook’s cavalier disregard for customer privacy and the Cambridge Analytica affair, I deleted my Facebook account in March 2018. All my writings are now contained on this blog.
Category Archives: supporting your golf
How Solid is Your Handicap?
[September 2018: My advice in the second half of this post about playing a variety of courses stands. The first part, about getting a USGA handicap, does not. To heck with a handicap. Just go play and have fun. Your golf belongs to you, not the USGA.]
I hope you have a handicap, an official USGA handicap. If golf for you is just knocking the ball around every so often, then, maybe it isn’t that important. But if you are a steady player, you should have one. It brings you into the company of golfers by allowing you to enter competitions. It will show you how much you are improving, you can tell how well you play on courses of varying difficulty, and if you travel abroad, many courses won’t let you on unless you can show them a USGA handicap card.
To have an accurate handicap, you should turn in every score, the good ones, and the bad ones. And you keep an honest score, counting the penalty strokes and playing by the rules. If you do, you can say your handicap truly reflects the condition of your game. But does it?
There is one other consideration — does your handicap travel? This is the important part. It’s one thing to be a 12 at your home course, which you have learned inside and out. It’s another to be a 12 no matter where you play.
A few years ago, a golfer shot a 62 at one of our local courses. He had a 2 handicap and had a day where everything went right. I looked him up on the GHIN Handicap Lookup page, which you can do if you have a name and a state, and found that all of his rounds were played on the same course.
Now you can’t argue with a 2. That’s pretty good golf no matter where you earn it. But I wonder how that 2 would stand up if he took his game to some of the other courses in the area that are, quite frankly, harder than the one he’s playing on? I wondered if he shot higher rounds on some of those courses and just didn’t turn them in. Who knows?
How well your handicap travels is the factor that makes your handicap legitimate. This isn’t about honesty. It’s about how good are you, really?
If you play a rotation of courses, you now that certain courses demand shots that are different from other courses. One course I play is a first-shot course. Get your ball in the fairway, and you’re home free. Of course, that isn’t easy to do, and a price for missing is paid. Another course has high rough around the greens that demands chips I never hit anywhere else, and so on.
I would suggest, as a general rule, that you the twenty scores in your handicap mix should at any time be made on at least four different courses, and the ten scores that determine your handicap should come from at least three.
That would give you the assurance that when you go to a new course, you won’t get a big surprise by finding out there are big holes in your game. This will also give you the joy of rounding out your game, and knowing that wherever you go, there isn’t a challenge you can’t handle.
If you don’t have a handicap, join a club to get one. The USGA’s definition of a club is quite permissive. It doesn’t necessarily mean an expensive membership in a private or semiprivate club. Your local muni should have a mens’ club or women’s club you can join for maybe $40 per year, and you’re all set.
My new book, The Golfing Self, is now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It will change everything about the way you play.
The Recreational Golfer’s Video Tips
If you’ve been to my web site, www.therecreationalgolfer.com, you might have browsed the Tips Index page and noticed the video tips I have posted. These videos explain in pictures what would be difficult to make clear in words.
You may receive notice of new video tips when it is posted by registering. It’s just a matter so sending me e-mail and you’ll be in the list.
My book, Better Recreational Golf, explained things in pictures where possible, but having a moving picture makes it even easier to see what to do and learn how to do it.
Please join the growing group of recreational golfers who are learning how to play the game better and have more fun.
Play With Better Players
This is a message for everyone who wants to get become a better golfer: play with golfers who are better than you are. Much better. You will not improve if you don’t, no matter how many lessons you take, no matter how much you practice.
Percy Boomer, in his book, On Learning Golf, gets right to this point:
“The trouble with many 5 and 6 handicap men is that they have become as good as their conception of the swing enables them to be. Because their swing has not been developed about the correct centrifugal principle, it is unreliable, and they have to depend upon a tip being given or an idea coming to them just when they need it. This is a dangerous state of affairs, and the natural result of trying to learn golf by trial and error–that is by trying one thing one day and another the next–with no basic principle to back it up. It is true that this is the way most of us Pros learned, but it takes immense perseverance and a long time!” (pp. 208-09)
Now it sounds like I am about to urge you to take lessons to acquire the solid foundation Boomer is talking about. I would never advise against that. But I am concentrating on something he mentions in the first sentence of this extract. That is the conception of golf.
What is your conception? If you are teaching yourself, your notion of what can be done on a golf course is limited by what you can imagine. You will eventually rise to meet that notion, but that is all the farther you will progress. Because you cannot imagine what it means to play better, you will be stuck where you are, trying to perfect your limited idea of golf.
The only way to break out of your own mold, in my view, is to play with players who are much better than you. More than in terms of score, I mean in terms of skill.
Take the best shot you can hit, that you hit several times per round. Play with players who hit better shots than that, and hit them time after time–as the typical way they play. They not only hit better shots, they hit different shots that never occurred to you as possibilities. They’re playing a different game than you are.
It takes that to open your eyes and give you a new direction to take your learning and your practice. Then you can go get those lessons and put in the practice time because you have a goal in mind. You’re working toward something that has real meaning and will make you a different golfer, rather than being better at the some old things.
New web site
I launched my new web site today, www.therecreationalgolfer.com. It’s a collection of my best tips that show you the little things that make a big difference in how you play. All the tips are in text right now, but video tips will be posted starting next month.
You can register in order to get notice of new tips as they are posted, which will be once a week or so.
I’m not going to go deep into golf theory like on some web sites. I’m just going to give you the benefit of how I have learned to play better, insights that will let you play a more enjoyable recreational game.
Spring Tune-up
Now that you’ve played a few rounds to scratch your golfing itch, take a break and get yourself and your equipment ready for the season.
Replace your spikes. The ones on your shoes now are worn down to nubs. Better yet, maybe you need a new pair of golf shoes. Are the the ones you have now really that comfortable anymore?
Get new grips on your clubs. When the grips get smooth, you start holding on tighter, introducing tension and causing all sorts of swing problems.
Get some lessons. That swing that worked so great last fall is a little rusty. Get a putting and chipping lesson, too. You’ll get a few adjustments that will make a world of difference.
Buy a wide-brimmed hat that actually does, instead of pretending to, keep the sun off your face and neck.
Get that new driver. Just kidding. Learn to get the driver you have in the fairway and use the $399 to pay for golf lessons.
Purchase and read Better Recreational Golf, (www.bettergolfbook.com) by yours truly. Applying the information in this book will help you shoot lower scores.
Playing Standards for 2010
Every year I set goals for the coming year, and organize my winter practice based on how much work I need to do to be ready to attain them when the new season starts.
The goals are based on the number of holes green-high in regulation, percentage of par saves from greenside (<5 yards), and percentage of par saves from beyond greenside (5-20 yards). Green-high in regulation is a concession to my recreational golf swing. It’s not good enough to let me hit a lot of greens--the pros can worry about greens in regulation. I measure instead how many times I can at least be chipping for par. My goal for 2010 is 16 or more. There are two par save stats because within these two distances you would be using a different stroke, and you should monitor how well you do with each one. My goals for 2010 are 80% and 50%. Putting index is a thing I came up with. It’s the combined length of all putts divided by the length of all non-first putts. For example, if on three holes you had putts of 23 and 2 feet, 8 feet, and 47, 6, and 1 foot, the total length of all putts would be 87 feet. The total length of non-first putts would be 9 feet (2+6+1). You putting index would be 87 divided by 9, or 9.67. My 2010 goal is to be over 10.0. Mental errors are especially important to keep track of. A mental error is an occasion when your mind was thinking about the result during a shot rather than feeling the process, forgetting a pre-swing fundamental, or two, making bad choices about what shot to hit or what club to hit it with, and so forth. I would bet you could identify at least four strokes you lose every time out because your mind let you down. Mental errors are more difficult to quantify, but if you examine a round objectively, My goal in 2010 is to have none. Leave some comments about what your standards are. We’d all be interested to read them.