playing the game

Breaking X0

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There’s a class of golfers who are on the cusp of breaking what I call a milestone score—100, 90, or 80. (If you’re trying to break 70, you don’t need my help.)

I’ll tell you right now, that if you’re flirting with that 99, 89, or 79, you’re already good enough to get there. What’s keeping you back is not be coming a better shotmaker, but a better player.

Golf is a game you play. Good shots get you in the ball park you want to be in. The right shots bring you home.

Example. I was playing a few days ago and my second shot on a par 4 ended up on a mound about five feet above the level of the green, maybe 30 feet from the hole. I took out my sand wedge and pitched on. The ball landed about three feet from the hole, but rolled about ten feet past.

That sounds all right, maybe, but it was the wrong shot. I had released to clubhead, that is, let my hands turn over. That puts a moderate amount of spin on the ball, which is why it ran so far past.

I was playing solo, so I dropped another ball and this time held off the release so at the finish, the clubface was still facing to the sky. That puts a lot of spin on the ball. The ball flew the same, landed close to the same spot as before, but rolled out less than one foot. Tap-in par.

The first shot was a good shot. It was just the wrong shot, which added a stroke to my score, whereas hitting the right shot would have kept my score down.

Now there’s a difference between the wrong shot and a bad shot. We all miss shots, make bad ones, even if they were the right shot. That’s why we’re handicap golfers.

But the more you know about how to play the game, the lower your score will be with the same skills.

Raymond Floyd wrote this in his book, The Elements of Scoring, which I highly recommend: “If somehow I was given your physical (golf) game and we had a match I would beat you 99 times out of 100, because I know how to play the game better than you do”

Got that?

Here’s another example. Earlier in that round, I was on a sharp upslope in front of the green about 40 feet from the pin. Since an upslope adds loft to the club, I chose a 52-degree wedge to chip on with. I hit a good shot that finished about 15 feet past the hole. So I tried another shot, with a 56-degree wedge. Same stroke, different club. The ball finished about four feet past the hole.

In the first example, it was the right cub, but the wrong stroke. In the second example, it was the right stroke, but the wrong club.

Do you see what is going on here? These little things are what can add strokes to your score that you don’t reflect your skill level. Your score doesn’t reflect how well you hit the ball so much as how well you play.

In that nine holes, there were four occasions where I hit a wrong-shot do-over that saved a stroke. The bad shots I let lie. All that turned a 42 into a potential 38.

Four shots in eighteen holes is a lot, but four shots in nine holes is enormous.

I strongly recommend that you find time, on occasion to play a solo round when the course isn’t busy and do what I did. You will learn a ton about being a better player, which is all you need to be to break that milestone score.

golf swing

How to Hit Your Irons

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With an easy hit. That’s how to hit your irons. Hit ‘em easy. The ball will go straight and land on the spot you were intending. Can you ask any more than that?

Yes, we all want to hit the ball long way. Distance is good. The longer you can hit the ball, the more options you have. The more you get out of the same effort.

But if you’re in the fairway 154 yards from the pin, instead of trying to force the ball up to the green, take out a club that will send the ball that far with an easy swing.

That’s why you have so many irons in the first place. Just pick the one that will carry the ball the distance you need with an easy swing. If you think you have to hit your best shot to get the ball there, you have the wrong club in your hand.

This is all predicated on knowing how far each iron carries the ball. However you determine your iron distances, determine them with an easy swing. If you accidentally (and it will be an accident) nuke one, treat it like the one you chunked 20 yards short. Leave them both out of the calculation.

At the range, use your bucket to find the joy in making one well-struck shot after another. Hang how far they go (in an absolute sense). If they’re well-struck, they’ll go far enough.

While you’re there, make sure you don’t pick up bad habits. If there’s a flag at 150 yards, don’t take out your 145 club to see if you can get that much more out of it. Take one more club and fly the ball 150 yards with a easy swing.

Now what is an easy swing? It is the swing made (a) at the tempo that lets you strike the ball on the center of the clubface consistently, and (b) begins going forward at the same speed that it went back—none of this easy back, then WHAM!

Swing the ball, not whack the ball. Swing easily. The only person who cares what clubs you use is you.

tournaments

A Day With the LPGA

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Yesterday I went to the Cambia Classic in Portland, a new sponsor for the longest-running non-major tournament in LPGA golf. Here are a few of my observations.

– It had been about a dozen years since I saw the women play. It is very different now. They hit the ball hard. 250 off the tee isn’t long. It’s not even the middle of the pack. It’s not your mother’s LPGA any more.

– Brooke Henderson is not very big. She takes the club back slowly, then WHAM going down. She’s the 9th longest driver on the Tour.

– I saw both Anne Van Dam and Angel Yin, the two longest hitters on the Tour, who both average over 280 yards off the tee. Ouch. Poor golf ball.

– Even Morgan Pressel, who topped out at 235 in her early days, now averages almost 260.

– They all pay very careful attention to their setup. They set up deliberately, precisely, and each follows her setup procedure the same way every time.

– Remember the suspension point? With the exception of a very few golfers who launch their lower body into the forward swing, EVERY player kept her suspension point still. EVERY player.

– Most of the players pick the ball cleanly off the ground. The sound is a gentle crack. Lexi Thompson, however, hit the ball hard and the ground hard. It was loud, and after a day of relatively quiet strikes, startling.

– Most, but not all, of the players started getting ready for a shot from the fairway while someone else was hitting so when it was their turn, they were ready. Only one player, Suzann Pettersen, did this on the putting green as well.

– They hold the club firmly, but gently. No choking the handle. Their hands look like they were made to hold a golf club.

– They have the pin positions scoped out, and they put the ball on the green on the spot where they want it. Would that we were that good, too.

– All that said, man, were they slow on the putting green. Real slow. I wasn’t impressed by their greenside chipping, either. I hate to be negative, but those things were true, too.

– You know what I liked most? It was quiet. I go to baseball games and football games. Lots of noise. The only sounds we heard all day were golf balls being hit and putts dropping. Otherwise, quiet. I like that.

It was a good day. It’s enjoyable to watch people play golf who are that good, shot after shot.

commentary

Fixing the FedEx Cup – III

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About ten years ago, I wrote a piece on how to make the FedEx Cup more interesting and more fan friendly. That is, get rid of the point system and re-adjusting of the points that no one understood at that time or since.

No one listened.

Two years ago I had another go at it, with a more complicated but more fun way of paring down the list to the final 30-man tournament.

Again, no one listened.

So, here I go again, a voice of reason proposing a system that is so obvious and so simple that again, it is unlikely that anyone will listen.

Except you, my loyal readers.

Take the top 30 players on the year’s money list and there’s your field for the Tour Championship and the $15M prize. Best players for the year, one tournament, done.

The current points are handed out based on the order of finish in a tournament, which is the same way money is handed out. Points and money track each other closely, so why not take the obvious step and go with money, which everyone understands?

Since the FedEx Cup is a Tour championship, I would make two exceptions. Do not to include money won in major championships and WGC tournaments in the FedEx money rankings because those fields are not open to everyone with a Tour card. The major champions would get in, though.

Last week’s field was pretty much the top 30 money winners. There were only four exceptions (with money list rank on parentheses):

In – Abraham Ancer (32), Lucas Glover (36), Louis Oosthuizen (37), Jason Kokrak (44).
Out – Shane Lowry (20), Francesco Molinari (22), Tiger Woods, (24), Ryan Palmer (29).

The point system that we still don’t understand, and the two extra tournaments to get to the final 30 at a time of year when the guys are kind of tired of playing, served only to put four players into the Tour Championship in place of four others who had a better season.

And on top of that, two of the year’s major winners, Woods and Lowry, were excluded.

If the FedEx Cup is a season championship event, the participants should be selected purely on their season performance. They should not have to re-qualify. They already qualified.

Will the powers that be listen? I have the nagging suspicion that The Recreational Golfer flies unnoticed in the golfing skies.*

So next year they will tweak some more, get it wrong again, and say, “We are studying it and hope to do it better next year.”

But what the heck. This blog is about recreational golf. Every now and then, though, I have to rant when I see something so SIMPLE made so complicated.


*Where on earth did that metaphor come from?

slow play

Don’t Play Faster, Play More Efficiently

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Slow play on the PGA Tour has blown up in the past few weeks. Brooks Koepka (rightly) called out Bryson DeChambeau for taking two minutes to line up and hit an eight-foot putt, which he missed.

(No one seems to have commented on the irony that both B.J Holmes (who plays like he owns the course) in the British Open, and DeChambeau, in the Northern Trust, were paired with Koepka, who would be Death To Slow Play if he could.)

I don’t care a flying fig if Tour players are slow, but I do care about moving it along when I play my recreational game.

What it comes down to, to me, is playing more efficiently. Everyone saving a few seconds every time they do a particularly thing adds up to a significant time saving over eighteen holes. Or even nine.

Here are my suggestions, taken from Bob’s Living Golf Book.

– Take clubhead covers off and leave them off. Fiddling with them takes time, and they get in the way of finding the iron you want. The clubheads won’t get damaged if they’re left bare.

– Know where everything in your bag is so you can get what you need without delay.

– Play from the right set of tees.

– When someone is teeing off and it’s your turn next, stand beside the tee box, ball, tee, and club in hand, ready to go, rather than way over there by your cart, empty-handed.

– Don’t wait for the group ahead of you to clear if you really can’t hit into them. On the tee, consider letting shorter hitters tee off first (if they can leave their egos at home).

– When someone is hitting from the fairway and you’re next, start preparing so you can hit when it’s your turn. Don’t wait until the other player hits before you even start to get ready (J.B. Holmes). This is probably the best way to save time in recreational golf.

– You get one, and only one, practice swing.

– Step up to the ball and hit it. Standing frozen over the ball for the longest time or taking endless waggles or looks at the target does not help you in any way.

– Recreational golf is a social game, but chat when you are walking, and not when you should be getting ready for your shot.

– Always check the ball you’re about to hit to be sure it’s yours.

– After you play your shot, clean your club and put it back in the bag only if you are waiting for someone else to hit. Otherwise, start walking right away. Carry your club, and put it away when you get to your ball. If you’re riding in a cart, get in the cart with your club and go.

– If you have hit the ball five times and it’s not on the green, pick up your ball and drop it on the green when you get there. If you have hit the ball eight times and it is still not in the hole, pick it up and cease play on that hole.

– When looking for a ball that might have gone into high grass, remember that the ball is always 20 yards farther back from where you think it is. (I’m not joking about this, either. You know it’s true.)

– If someone else’s ball might be lost, play your ball first, then go help them look.

– When you get to the green, put your bag or cart on the side of the green nearest to the next tee.

– Read your opening putt as soon as you get on the green instead of waiting until it is your turn to putt. Don’t spend too much time reading the green. Your first impression is most likely correct.

– If you use an alignment mark, don’t spend too much time tweaking the mark, especially if the putt is a long one for which distance is much more important than line.

– Leave the pin in the hole.

– After your approach putt, putt out if it’s a tap-in.

– Falling behind the group ahead of you? To catch up, the first two players to hole out should go to the next tee and tee off, leaving the other two to putt out and handle the pin for each other (if necessary).

short game

A Valuable Wedge Shot

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This might happen to you once a round: you’re about five to ten yards off the green, the hole is near the edge (not much green to work with), and you have to get the ball over something (a bunker, a mound, heavy grass or weeds, etc.). In other words, you can’t run the ball onto the green. You have to fly it on and make it stop right now.

Without a solution, all you can do is hit on and watch the ball run way past the hole and face the Mother of Two-Putts coming back.

Well, here’s the solution. You have to have this shot in your bag, and not many people do.

1. Take out a wedge with at least 56 degrees of loft. Open the face (by twirling the handle in your hands, not by rotating your hands). The less distance over ground you have to cover, the more you open the face. You’ll have to practice to find out just how much.

2. Open your stance until the clubface is square to your target again. Put the ball in the center of your stance. No shaft lean—keep it vertical.

3. Swing along your stance line, brushing the sole of the club along the ground as you hit the ball. Do not try to hit down on the ball. Do not try to lift the ball in the air by hitting up with your right hand. The open clubface will get the ball in the air for you very nicely. Keep the clubface facing the sky on the follow-through.

In the first photo, I’m set up for a standard, straight-ahead pitch. The ball is in the center of my stance, and the clubface is square to the target line (yellow stake). Notice the piece of straw just above my left toe.

In the second photo, I have opened the clubface and rotated my stance (see the straw) so (a) the ball is still in the center of my stance and (b) the clubface is still square to the target line. I will swing along my stance line (orange stake).

(Click photos to enlarge)

Since the clubface is open, you’ll have to hit the ball harder than you think you should to get the ball to go the distance you want it to. Practice will get you used to how hard that is.

The ball will get in the air with lots of spin, land, and roll out only a very little distance. Depending on the circumstances, the ball might run past the hole, but you should have a makeable putt coming back.

This shot requires practice. Lots of it. Once you have learned it, though, you have a major and common problem around the green solved.

Then when you use this shot to get up and down on the course and one of the other members of your foursome asks, “How did you do that,” you say, “Oh, it’s just something I picked up.”

hands lead the clubhead

Your Hands Lead the Clubhead – IV

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[February 2022: Sections A6 and H28 in the Living Golf Book no longer exist. Please see The Handle Moves In Harmony With the Clubhead (Video tip)

I’ve written often about the hands passing the ball before the clubhead at impact. I feel this is the most important technical matter of the golf swing, and have suggested several ways you can make it happen.

I constantly look for ways to make it easier to do, and more certain. Here is my next iteration. It involves the movement of the end of the handle, that and nothing more.

This new concept takes the onus off the hands to make sure of the leading, and assigns the responsibility to the club itself. The difference in effect is like night and day.

This was going to be a longer post, but everything I wanted to say is now in Bob’s Living Golf Book, sections A6 and H28.

Download the book and read those sections. Please.

Then team it up with a stationary suspension point, make sure your tempo is not too fast for you, and you will have a golf swing that performs beyond your wildest dreams.

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Your Personal Swing Flaw

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I won’t say this for sure, but I’m willing to bet you have a personal swing flaw—one thing that you do wrong, not because you don’t know better, but because it makes sense, or it feels right, or feels good, whatever. It’s wrong but you do it anyway.

You get it fixed, start playing better, and then your swing goes south again, and guess why? You’re doing that thing again.

That personal flaw will haunt you for your entire golfing career. Even touring professionals have one, and they spend time on the range combatting it.

If you have one, and you know what it is (if you don’t know, start looking, because it’s there), what to do?

There are two ways to deal with it. If the flaw is a matter of poor technique, you can create a new technique. If the flaw is the result of a personal tendency, it is easier to build in a compensation than to correct something that would be difficult to change.

I’ll use myself as an example of each kind.

My pet swing flaw is to take the club back too far inside. This results in swinging the club into the ball from too far inside, which leads too often to a duck hook or a weak push.

By taking the club back slower (new technique), I remind myself to take it back straighter and this flaw goes away.

My other flaw is that I do something that makes my hands turn over through impact, leading, again, to right-to-left ball flight that I don’t want. The number of corrections I have tried felt artificial or forced.

I finally solved the problem by agreeing to let myself keep doing whatever that is I’m doing because that’s just what I do, and trying to change it gets me nowhere.

A compensation is in order, then, and the simple compensation I came up with is to open the clubface about two degrees at address.

What I get out of that is a straight shot or a baby draw. The ball doesn’t go way left unless I just lose my head, which happens, but seldom enough that I can live with it.

So there you have it. Two ways to fix a persistent problem and become a better golfer in spite of yourself.

tournaments

2019 Open Championship Preview

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Winner: Shane Lowry by six strokes over Tommy Fleetwood.

The 148th Open Championship will be played this weekend at the Royal Portrush Golf Club in Northern Ireland. The tournament was last played there once before, in 1951, when England’s Max Faulkner won by two strokes over Argentina’s Antonio Cerdá.

This year the course will play at 7,344 yards to par 71. Graeme McDowell grew up in Portrush and played there hundreds of times. Rory McIlroy, at age 16, set the course record of 61, which has still not been equalled.

The photo shows the course, looking westward with the town behind it, and the sea behind that.

This Golf Digest article shows stills of all the holes. This course is different, believe me.

Hole-by-hole flyover videos are available at the official website.

It’s hard to pick out one hole over another for mention because they are all so good, and each one presents a unique challenge.

But we must mention the 16th hole, a par 3 playing at 236 yards into the prevailing wind, with the appropriate name of Calamity Corner. The green sits on a perch that slopes severely away on the right. The merest slice will be disastrous (photo). It’s no fun if you’re short and right, either.

Two new holes, which will play as the 7th and 8th, were created just for this championship to replace the traditional 17 and 18. They were considered somewhat lackluster, and are in a spot on the grounds better suited for the tent village that is a fixture at major championships anymore, so for that purpose will they be used.

Through a re-routing of the holes from the 7th onward, which I won’t go into, the round will finish with the traditional 15 and 16 serving as 17 and 18 for the Championship.

The course is by the sea, but only the 5th green and 6th tee come near it. The new 7th and 8th are out there, too, but not as near to the beach.

One thing that all holes save the 1st share: they curve. Only the 1st plays straightaway. In addition, if the rough is allowed to grow inward, the fairways will be very narrow.

Those two factors might convince golfers who have a hard time hitting their driver straight to retire it for the week. How about the bombers, though? Will they find a way?

There are few bunkers on the course, especially around the greens. They are guarded by hills, mounds, and hollows. Greens can be difficult to hold if approached from the wrong spot of the fairway.

It should be noted that during the Championship in 1951, only two golfers, not including Faulkner, broke 70.

What would a major championship be without controversy? This year it involves John Daly. Daly, because of osteoarthritis in his right knee, was allowed to use a cart at Bethpage Black for the PGA Championship, but the R&A has offered only their sympathy.

Daly’s request to use a cart at Royal Portrush was turned down, because the R&A felt that golf is a walking game, and besides, the course is not set up for, and does not have places for carts to be driven.

Who will win? I know who wants to win, and that is Rory McIlroy. His A game beats everybody else’s A game. Let’s see if winning the return of the OC to Ireland is sufficient motivation to bring it with him this week.

So get up early and watch golf played the way it should be played. Whatever you think of the other major championships, this one is the most fun to watch.

Little Differences That Make a Big Difference in How Well You Play