As the most popular recreational game in the country, golf is certainly the most difficult to play well. For us to enjoy playing golf, we need to take this complicated game and find a way to simplify it. That is easily done, as this article will show.

There are three basic playing skills in golf: hitting the ball straight, getting close-in shots on the green the first time, and accurate putting. We shouldn’t be too concerned about how pretty we look while doing it (pretty is as pretty does), nor should we be bothered by exactly how we get the job done.

Our only task as golfers is to keep advancing the ball closer to the hole. The quickest way to do that is to hit the ball straight, walk up to it, and hit it straight again, then knock it into the hole. So far, so obvious. But how to do that?

After you have learned a basic golf swing, or chip or putt, here’s what you should do with it: use it to hit the ball. Use your swing to hit the ball. You don’t hit the ball, your swing does. That’s a huge difference in approach.

Golfers who try to hit the ball with a golf club are thinking of the end result. They think hitting the tiny golf ball with a tiny clubhead is a fine motor skill, the golf club being an extension of their hand which can be guided finely into the ball to achieve a pure strike. This leads only to failure.

A golf ball is not something to be hit or hit at. It is an object to be swung through. When thinking changes from “hit the ball” to “swing the club,” the entire game becomes easier and you hit better shots.

One way to look at it is that you should be truly surprised when the club meets the ball. Not that you can’t believe you actually hit it, I don’t mean that. It’s rather than you should be so caught up in your swing that you don’t realize until after you have hit the ball that this was what was intended all along.

How do you do that? It’s obvious you’re standing up the ball to hit it. How do you surprise yourself? Simple. By fooling yourself. By learning to ignore the ball even when it is right there in front of your eyes. By forgetting all about the fact that your goal is to hit the ball, and concentrating on making the best stroke that you have trained yourself to make.

This thinking goes for every shot, from two-foot putt to swinging a driver. What it leads to is minimizing or even eliminating tension in your swing. Tension, caused by trying to hit the ball to get a result, pulls our stroke out of line or off plane, rushes it, just plain gets in the way of us doing what we taught ourselves to do.

You swing, the club hits, and the ball flies. Keep the game that simple in your head, and you will play better.

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

In another post, I talked about which clubs are the most important for you to be able to hit. (See The three most important clubs) Now I want to talk about the most important shots, which is not quite the same thing.

We’ll break this down into two parts: the good shots to hit, and the bad shots to avoid. First, the good shots.

The tee shot. Getting the ball into the fairway off the tee is a critical scoring shot for recreational golfers. My advice is this: do not tee off with a club that has fewer degrees of loft than your average score over par.

If you aren’t breaking 100, the 5-iron (28° of loft) is your big gun. A 6-iron might be a better choice. Break 90 regularly and you can move up to a 19-degree hybrid iron, which should get you 190-200 yards off the tee. Drivers in this scheme are for golfers who break 80.

The 7-iron. Play from tees that let you hit lots of 7-irons (or less) into the green. Then get very good with this club.

The approach putt. Go to the practice green and develop a stroke that hits the ball 30 feet, every time. This shot is two-putt insurance.

Sand. Can you just get the ball out and onto the green? For recreational golfers, sand saves are accidental without volumes of practice, but down in four, you shouldn’t be doing.

Now for the bad shots you want to avoid, which, quite frankly, are not that hard to avoid. I see golfers wasting strokes all the time on these shots.

Hitting your fairway metal when you can’t reach the green with it. 260 yards away in the fairway on a par 5? That’s two 8-irons. (See The mathematics of club selection.)

Hitting your fairway metal out of hairy lies just because you’re a long way from the green. Instead, chip out to the fairway and play on from there.

Hitting over water when you don’t have to. Or if you have to hit over water, using a club that you have to swing just right to get the ball in the air.

Flying the ball to the pin when you could run there. The first shot is much more risky than the second, and seldom more successful even if you pull it off.

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

[Note: This post has been superceded by Do You Play From the Right Set of Tees-Part 4]

Golf is a difficult game. Regardless of the better clubs and balls we get to play with, you still have to hit the ball straight. And then there’s distance. Even though everyone is hitting the ball farther than they did twenty years ago, most golfers play a course that is too long for their ability.

Think back a bit. On your home course, how many greens do you hit short irons into? 7-iron on down. My home course is 6,402 yards from the white tees. I hit a short iron into three greens on average, five on a good day. How about you? Think about it, write it down. If the answer is just a few, you’re playing from tees that are too long. You’re making the game harder for yourself than it should be.

How long should a course be that you play on? Let’s find out by looking at courses the pros play on. On the PGA tour, 7,200 yards is a representative length of a tournament course. PGA pros average 290 yards off the tee. If you divide 7,200 by 290, you get 24.8. We’ll call it 25, to make the math easier.

Now, the LPGA. The average driving distance on that tour is about 260 yards. 260 yards times 25 equals 6,500 yards. Sure enough, the women play on courses measuring from 6,400 to 6,600 yards, which is just where they should be.

How about you? Multiply your average driving distance by 25. Say it’s 235 yards, carry plus roll. 235 yards times 25 is 5,875 yards. If you were to play from the whites on my home course, that’s a course almost 9 percent longer.

Nine percent doesn’t sound like much, does it? Yet it’s equivalent to the men on tour playing courses averaging 7,850 yards. Or the women on tour playing courses measuring 7,100 yards, and that’s the handicap you’re giving yourself right now.

Ladies, what if your average driving distance is 190 yards? Well you’re kind of stuck. The shortest set of tees on any of the golf courses I play regularly is 5,400 yards. Most of them are over 5,600 yards. That’s an 18 percent increase in distance, twice what we calculated above, over the 4,750-yard course that you should get to play on! No wonder so few women play golf. How much harder can it be made for you?

Recreational golfers have two solutions to this problem. One is for every architect to design tees at distances average men and women can reasonably play from. Not sure when that will happen. The other solution is to find courses, and they’re out there, that have tees at the right distance for you, and play those courses from those tees.

One more note. I have broken 80 six times in my life. Four of those times came one course which measures 5,917 yards from the white tees. I’ve broken 80 on my 6,402-yard home course, which I play much more often, once. See a pattern here? I do.

See Do You Play From the Right Set of Tees, Part 2

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

This winter I learned how to hit the ball in both directions — curve it left, curve it right — on command. Those are good skills to have , in that learning them makes you really think about what you’re doing when you hit the ball. It’s not just rear back and fire. There has to be a purpose to the shot, and playing with direction focuses your mind in that regard.

Even though that sounds like it might make the game harder, knowing how to work the ball actually makes the game easier.

I’ve been playing lots of practice rounds since the new year began, and when I first went out I was hitting the ball straight, as usual, or at least trying to. Lately though, I have been noticing that it is easier to curve the ball on command than it is to hit the ball straight on command. A lot easier.

For instance, the 18th hole on my home course present you with the Scary Tee Shot. Water on the right, trees and a creek on the left. There’s no room to be anything but straight. Normally I play left to avoid the water. That puts bogey in play to avoid the double.

For some reason, today it just made sense to start the ball out to the left and swing it back into the fairway. So I did that. Worked like a charm, and it was stress-free!

I knew at worst that the ball couldn’t swing left, it would just stay left and end up in the fairway on that side. I also knew the ball couldn’t go in the water, because the could not swing that far to the right.

So the shot comes off just as planned and I’m in the fairway, dead center. It was easy.

Back up to the 12th hole, and I’m in the fairway, right side, of a right-angle dogleg hole with a tree between me and the green. So I just took out my 2h, drew the ball around the tree, and got a room-service birdie putt. Without knowing how to curve the ball, I would have had no option but to punch up the fairway.

I do not believe that learning to work the ball is an advanced skill. It is an intermediate skill that will help to turn you into an advanced player. Get lessons, work on it, learn to apply it on the course. You will be amazed at how easy golf can be.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

The key to scoring in golf is hitting the green with your iron from the fairway. To get on the green, though, the ball has to get to the green. Too many golfers overestimate the distance they hit their irons, leaving their approaches short. To get the ball pin-high you have to know how far you hit each club. Here’s how to find out.

Go out to the course early, before there’s much traffic on the fairways. On a hole that has a level fairway, find the 200-yard marker. On most golf courses that’s a blue cement circle laid into the ground. Walk from it to the 150-yard marker, counting your steps. Now turn around and take half that number of steps back toward the 200-yard marker. You’re exactly 175 yards from the green.

Drop a few balls and hit them with what you think is your 175-yard club. They need to hit the center of the green. Front portion doesn’t count. You want the center. If they land short of that, try one more club. When you hit the center of the green on the fly, or maybe a little beyond, that is your 175-yard club.

Do the same thing on another hole from the 150-yard marker, and again on a third hole from 125 yards. You’ll end up with three distances from which you know which club to use. The important thing is to do this experiment on the course, under playing conditions and with the ball you play with. You can’t figure this out at the range with perfect lies, do-overs, and range balls.

You have eight irons (3-PW), though, so why am I recommending you hit from only three distances? First of all, you found each distance in a precise way, so you know they’re right. Second, these three distances give you all the information you need.

When I tried this, the irons I came up with were 4, 6, and 9. The 4 and 6 were about five yards long, but the 9 was just right. So I determined these three iron/distance combinations by experiment: 4/180, 6/155, 9/125. The remaining clubs can be easily interpolated into that sequence.

Note: If you have hybrid irons in your bag, check them out individually. The intervals between them could be larger than between your traditional irons.

Once you really know how far you hit your irons under playing conditions, you can account for in-between yardages, wind, the lie, elevation changes, and other factors that affect playing distance so that you can start hitting pin-high irons. It will change the way you play the game.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com