Here’s a rule of thumb for recreational golfers regarding iron play.
Take the number of the club and add a zero to it. That’s the percentage of the time you should hit the green with that club.
With a seven-iron, you should hit the green seventy percent of the time. Five-iron, fifty percent. And so on.
If you can achieve this, and you play from the right set of tees, you should score pretty well.
This is a factoid (does anybody use that word anymore?) I have mentioned before, but I want to develop the point today. There is a break-even distance in putting. That is the distance from which a golfer averages 2.0 putts.
From farther away, the player would average more than two putts (three-putt more often that one-putt). From closer in, the average would be less than two putts.
The break-even distance for the average recreational golfer is 15 feet. For touring professionals, the distance is just over twice that, about 32 feet.
What I get from this comparison is to try to push that break-even distance out as far as I can. I will never have a professional golf swing, but there’s no reason I can’t be nearly as good with a putter.
One of the putting drills I do occasionally is to hit ten fifteen-foot putts, without three-putting. Then I do the same from twenty feet, twenty-five feet, and thirty feet. Sometimes I do take three putts, but sometimes, one goes in!
If you try this drill, don’t putt from the same spot over and over. You can’t groove your stroke when you play, so you shouldn’t do it when you practice, at least not in this drill.
Oh, yes. You have to putt out. No fair giving yourself the leave. Sometimes you really blow it and leave your first putt four feet short. If you do it here, you’ll do it on the course, too, so you might as well get comfortable cleaning up your messes.
When you’re finished and have hit your forty putts, test yourself. Put one ball on the green at each distance and putt them out in this order:
Twenty feet,
Thirty-five feet,
Fifteen feet,
Twenty-five feet.
As you do this drill, and start to get good at it, you’ll find yourself thinking deeply about how you putt from distance, looking for how to make long putts accurate and repeatable. That will only make you a better putter.
What I get out of this drill is when I have a long putt, I feel confident I can leave it close to the hole, and sometimes luck will take over.
That takes a lot of stress out of being on the green. Not to mention, it lowers your score.
If I were to give recreational golfers advice on what would do the most good to get them hit the ball better, I would say these things:
Golf Swing
Get a grip that fits your body. This is two things. A good grip is one that has a chance of success. Many rec golfers I see play with a grip that is too strong or doesn’t leave the hands working together. See a pro, get a lesson, to be sure about yours. Also, you might have a fine grip, but it doesn’t go with your swing. If you have a neutral grip and a slice swing, that’s trouble.
Learn the correct rhythm, and the tempo that is right for you. Rhythm is the same for everyone. This blog post shows you what rhythm is and how to get it. Tempo is different for everyone. Yours is probably too fast. Try this post to find your best tempo.
Your hands must lead the clubhead coming into the ball. Most of you do the opposite, because you’re trying to hit the ball with your right hand. This is an easy idea to understand, but difficult to execute because our “hit” instinct is so strong. See this video.
Pitching and Chipping
This one is really simple. First, get lessons on how to hit these shots. One lesson for each shot. They are their own kind of shot and need to be learned that way.
Then, hit them using the iron method — one swing, different clubs. For pitching, you really need two swings, of different length, but for chipping, only one. Calibrate each swing and you can’t miss.
Practice your standard strokes A LOT so they don’t slowly drift on you and make you wonder why you aren’t getting the ball close anymore.
Putting
I commonly spend an hour on the practice green chipping and putting, mostly putting. I see other rec golfers come on, putt for about ten minutes, and leave. Who is going to become the better putter?
Use a pendulum stroke that moves in one unit from your shoulders to the clubhead. Do not let your wrists get involved.
Find an alignment spot on the green in front of your ball and hit the ball right across it.
Practice short putts, from two and three feet, A LOT. Hit these putts with authority. Do not finesse them into the hole.
Calibrate your stroke so you can hit to fifteen feet, twenty-five feet, thirty-five feet, and forty-five feet at will. Practice these stokes at a hole to maintain them, and to learn how to add or take off a few feet because of differing green speeds.
That takes care of ninety-five percent of golf. Learn the other things, bunkers, uneven lies, wind, a multitude of short game shots, after you have mastered the material above.
Unless you are a very good player, there is a gap in your golf game that you likely cannot close. That gap is between your 4-iron/24° hybrid/7-wood and your driver. Within that space, recreational golfers generally do not have a good chance to hit greens and make pars.
The solution is to judge the conditions carefully if you have a long shot into the green. When there’s no real trouble around it, then go for it if you can get there with a club you get into the air easily.
(Having said that, if it’s a club you don’t get into the air easily, maybe it shouldn’t be in your bag at all.)
If you miss the green, you’ll at least be hole high with a chip onto the green for a par putt and a sure bogey. Nothing wrong with that.
What if there’s trouble in the form of bunkers, water, tall grass? Now it might make sense to play short to a long chipping position. In that case, hit the shot with the longest club you have confidence in.
That way, you’ll eat up a lot of yards, be in front of the green with a good lie and a chance, again, to chip on for a par or a sure bogey.
If you have a gap like the one I’m talking about, and I do, it’s best to think of the longer clubs as advancement clubs — clubs that get your ball down the fairway without the risk of losing strokes.
Or, you can go one step farther and not even put them in your bag. That way, they will never get you in trouble.
I like a light bag, so I carry only 10 clubs. The set starts off with driver, 24° hybrid, 6-iron and on down stepwise to a 56° wedge and my putter. No 5-iron? I hit it well, but not often enough to carry it.
I hit my driver 220 yards. With a 175-yard second, I can reach the green on all but the longest par 4s. Long par 3s are hard to hit anyway, so playing short and safe works out better than playing long and into trouble. Par 5s are three-shotters, and 395 after two shots leaves a short iron into the green.
I’m not asking you to play wimpy golf. Not at all. I‘m suggesting that you be realistic about how to play from long distances so you don’t lose strokes needlessly.
The pros play golf one way. We play it another. When you’re ready to hit into the green from 200 yards without courting disaster, you’ll know.
Between clubs?
Rule: When between clubs, take the longer club and grip down. Then make your normal swing.
Don’t try to hit the ball harder, because you don’t have to, and for sure don’t ease up, because that’s like hitting the shorter club.
——
One of the things that made me be a better golfer is that I don’t care where the ball goes after I hit it. If it goes here, or goes there, I just get to my ball and play the next shot, whatever it is. If you want to put your best swing on the ball, let a graceful swing flow through the ball, and leave it at that.
Consider this point well.
Very few of us are good enough to worry about whether, from the fairway, the pin is 160 yard away or 158. I’m not, but around the green, two yards makes a world of difference to me.
I didn’t want to assume my pace is one yard long when I step off a shot. I wanted to know exactly how long it is.
I went to a baseball diamond and walked around the bases, counting my steps. At 90 feet per base, or 30 yards, that’s a 120-yard walk in total.
It took me 140 steps. Divide 120 yards by 140 steps and I got 6/7 of a yard per step.
I made up a card that I keep in my bag showing how far I walk with any number of steps from 1 to 20. For example, if I take 11 steps, that’s 9.4 yards.
When I walk off short pitches, chips, and approach putts, I know exactly how far it is. That’s one step closer to hitting the ball stone dead.
I was at the range a while ago fooling around on the putting green. I like to try different things out there to see what happens.
In the 2015 British Open, Irish amateur Paul Dunne*, co-leader after three rounds, had this putting grip where both hands were side-by-side.
I thought I’d try that, but I couldn’t make it work. Dunne’s putter had a thick grip, and mine didn’t. There wasn‘t enough of the putter grip in my fingers to hold the club the way he did. But I didn’t want to give up, so I tried an interlocking grip with my left forefinger between my right middle and ring fingers.
That didn’t work. I still didn’t have control of the grip. There’s one more finger to go, I thought, so I put my left index finger between my right index and middle fingers. Bingo.
That brought my hands neatly together and put the grip in my fingers the way I was looking for. I call it the Forefinger Interlock grip. (You heard it here first.)
Notice in the second photo how close together my thumbs are. The left thumb nestles into the pocket of my right palm, and the pad under my right thumb fits right on top of my left thumb. The effect is that you hold the putter entirely in your left hand. The right hand provides stability.
Both thumbs point directly down the shaft.
Notice also how square my hands are. I don’t try to do this, it’s just what happens when I take this grip. That’s where my hands end up.
One of the problems with a standard putting grip, where one hand is lower on the shaft than the other, is that you have two hands that you have to keep working together so one hand, usually the right, doesn’t run off and do its own thing.
That problem disappears with the Forefinger Interlock, because all you have down there is one clump of hands — one thing moving the club, not two. In this way the putter face does not twist out of square. You get a swinging stroke, not a hitting stroke. Your hands are taken out of the stroke entirely.
Results? I’m putting just as well on average days as I did on good days. Because my hands are not involved in the stroke, I’m more relaxed mentally. That gives me more confidence, which leads to better putting.
So. Is the Forefinger Interlock the grip of the future? The grip that will take five strokes off your score? The grip that will take the Tour by storm? Maybe.
But it is definitely something for you to try. Can’t hurt, and it might help. A lot.
* Dunne collapsed in the fourth round, shooting a 78 and finishing in a tie for 30th place. He turned pro later that year, and in 2017 won the British Masters by three strokes over Rory McIlroy.
If you use a laser rangefinder on the golf course, you get an accurate distance to the pin. It would be nice to know where the pin is in relation to the center of the green, though. A location indicator attached to the pin, or on the 150-yard marker, if they’re used, is only an approximation.
As you’re approaching your ball, and before it’s your turn to hit, find a sprinkler head with a yardage affixed and stand right above it. Shoot the pin and compare the difference between the yardage to the pin and the yardage shown on the sprinkler head.
If the sprinkler head yardage is higher, the pin is nearer to the front of the green. If the sprinkler head yardage is less, the pin is nearer to the back of the green.
Most of the time we are short with our approaches (but that’s another post). If you know because of what you just found out that the pin is toward the front of the green, you might what to take a longer club to make sure your ball gets to the green.
If the pin is behind the center of the green, you can take less club and hit an easier shot, knowing that you still have enough club to get the ball onto the green. Remember, most greens are at leasts 30 yards deep, which gives you plenty of room for error.
The advice you read these days is that your driver should be arcing upward when it makes contact with the ball. True enough for recreational golfers. There are some instructors, though, who would have you learn a swing separately for your driver so that could happen.
I won’t argue with them, because they might well be right in that that would be ideal way to play golf. But recreational golfers who have time to make one trip to the range per week, and play one round of golf per week, don’t have the time to develop two swings. Getting good at just one is hard enough.
So here’s what you don’t have to do to be swinging upward with your driver.
– You don’t have to deliberately swing up at the ball.
– You don’t have to tilt your stance away from the target when you set up to the ball.
– You don’t have to tee the ball higher or tee it up way forward in your stance.
None of those things. All you have to do is use your normal stance and your normal golf swing.
I figured this out when I was working on my swing with a 6-iron and no ball. I found that the club kept hitting the ground about thee inches in front of the ball.
This means I would have hit a golf ball lying on the ground while the club was still going slightly down, like we’re supposed to. But three inches isn’t that far in front of the ball. After that, the club would have to start arcing upward.
I laid out a few alignment rods as shown in the picture. The orange rod points to the center of my stance, where I would place the ball for an iron shot. The tee peg points to a spot three inches in front of that, marking the bottom of my swing. The yellow rod points to the ball on a tee, even with the inside of my left heel.
As you can see, the yellow rod lies well in front of the bottom of my swing (tee peg). That means when the driver bottoms out three inches in front of the orange rod, it has plenty of time to be arcing upward when it contacts the ball.
When I started swinging normally at a teed-up ball, using the same swing feelings that I do when I swing an iron, the ball just took off.
Remember, all the clubhead has to be doing is moving a few degrees upward. By using your normal swing, that will happen.
One swing is hard enough to learn. Fortunately, that one swing is good enough for everything.
Winner: Zach Johnson in a playoff over Marc Leishman and Louis Oosthuizen
The oldest championship in golf begins this Thursday on the Old Course St. Andrews (“Sinandrews”, to the locals).
The first Open Championship played here was in 1873, and won by Tom Kidd, who shot 91-88 to win by one. Twenty-six competitors teed up for the tournament that was done in one day.
The last time the OC was played here, Louis Oosthuizen won in a walk over Paul Casey.
This aerial photograph of the course shows the first green just beyond Swilcan Burn (lower right), with the 17th green just to to the left. The course runs between the white boundary lines that head toward the upper left of the photo.
Golfing fans have seen this course so many times, it is about as familiar as Augusta National. There are a few things you might not know about it, however.
There are seven double greens, 2/16 through 8/10. They are so large that it takes a truly awful shot to encroach the oncoming group. They can also present a golfer with the longest approach putts he will ever face.
Pay special attention to the 7/11 green, fronted by the Strath bunker, which is in play on the tee shot from #11 (below). It is easy to get into and hard to get out of.
The primary defenses of the course are its bunkers and the wind. Many of the bunkers cannot be seen until you find your ball in them.
The wind can change direction at any time. A wind in your face on the outgoing nine can easily turn around and be in your face coming home. The wind can also carry your ball onto the green, or lead it to one of the infuriating bunkers.
The place to make a score is the Loop, where the course hooks and turns back around, the 8th through the 11th holes. 8 and 11 are little par 3s, and the 9th and 10th are drivable par 4s. The short par-4 12th can be had, too.
Odd note: The course was designed to play in the reverse order from how it‘s played now, viz., 1st tee to 17th green, 18th tee to 16th green, etc. Someone said, the placement of the bunkers seems odd, but when you play the course “backward”, they all make perfect sense. Every year on the first Wednesday in September, the original routing is followed. See here for a fascinating analysis of the reverse course.
Personal note: I played this course in 1968, when you could walk right up to the starter’s shack, pay your fees, and wait for the group on the first to tee to go off and then it was your turn.
How did I do? I kind of got eaten alive, but had loads of fun.
On the first hole, I played a run-up into the green, an obvious shot just by looking at it. As I walked up the fairway, I saw this crack in the ground that gradually got wider. That didn’t give me a good feeling. Sure enough, my ball was in the Burn. “Now I know,” was small consolation.
I did, however, birdie the 17th, the Road Hole — 3-wood over the hotel, 3-iron onto the green, 20-footer. I thought at the time the hard shot was the tee shot. I didn’t know anything about the Road Hole bunker (and look how close it was to the pin that day!). I guess the Golf Gods didn’t want my ignorance to hurt me twice.
I’ve given up predicting winners or even taking about who the front-runners are. Just enjoy the broadcast and be sure to set your clocks to wake up early on Sunday.
Oh, yes. Word is in the air that this could be the final OC for legendary starter Ivor Robson.