slow play

Slow play on the Tour

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I don’t normally devote a column to professional golf, but I thought I would talk about an article by Jaime Diaz in the May 13, 2013 GolfWorld that many of you might not have access to.

It explains why the pace of play on the PGA Tour is so slow and what can be done about it. It’s not as simple a problem as you might think.

I don’t need to go into too much detail about how slow the Tour is. Five-hour rounds are common, and despite the slow play penalty given to young Tianlang Guan at the Masters earlier this year, Friday afternoon threesomes took 5 hours and 40 minutes for complete their round.

It should be noted, regarding the penalty given to young Guan, that he was asked four times to speed up, but playing slowly is a habit he could not break.

Chinese journalists were asked if they thought he had been singled out, and they said, “Oh, no, He’s really slow. He needs to speed up.”

Diaz lists seven reasons why play is so slow, not making excuses for any of them.

1. Firmer and faster greens require more careful study.

2. Courses are longer and more difficult.

3. Players who hit the ball longer are waiting for the green to clear on par 5s instead of hitting a second shot short and moving on.

4. Sports psychologists encourage longer pre-shot routines.

5. Yardage books and green charts are more involved.

6. Players precisely align their ball when they putt, often even for the shortest ones.

7. There are longer and more frequent discussions with their caddies.

Each of these little things adds up.

The current slow play policy is to give players in a group that is out of position, more than one hole behind, 40 seconds to hit their shot. A player going over this limit is warned, and if it happens a second time while the group is out of position, the player is given a one-stroke penalty.

The last time this policy was enforced was in 1995, when Glen (“All”) Day was nicked.

But if the group is not out of position, a player may take as much time as he wants to.

What to do?

A lot of it has to to with peer pressure and awareness. Many slow players don’t think they’re slow, and get upset when you tell them they are. I’ve talked about that before. Slow is many people’s normal speed.

The policy could be changed to eliminate the warning and go directly to the penalty.

Another would be to speed up play in developmental competition. The AJGA has time stations at several places around the course, and the average time is 4:19.

Things slow way down in college golf, though, where most of the new Tour players learn to play at high levels. They come to the Tour having learned to take lots of time.

Change is possible, though.

A notoriously slow player named Richard Johnson was in the first twosome of the final round of a tournament, which had tournament officials quite worried. He could set back the entire field.

Johnson assured them he would not dawdle because he had an airplane to catch. He finished the round in under four hours, shot a 64, and vowed never to play slowly again.

Most people, and even touring professionals are people, find that when they play faster, they play better, and golf is much more enjoyable.

As for the Tour aggressively speeding things up, that won’t happen until there’s enough motivation to build a consensus among the players. That might take a while.

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

setup

Don’t ground the clubhead

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When you’re ready to hit the ball, it’s natural to rest the clubhead on the ground just behind the ball. Let me suggest that you not do this. Instead, hover the clubhead just above the ground so it’s touching the grass, but not resting on the ground. Why? How about six reasons?

1. Hovering the club makes it harder to squeeze the club with your hands. Light grip pressure is one of the keys to better ball-striking. This method makes you more sensitive to how firmly you are holding the club.

2. Your posture will be better. That is, you will stand up straighter, not getting yourself hunched over. When you bend over to rest the clubhead on the ground, there is a tendency to settle a bit more after the clubhead gets there. Hovering the clubhead prevents that tendency.

3. Your takeaway is smoother. It’s hard to snatch the clubhead away from the ball when it is already in the air. You have to start off the swing slowly and gently, which leads into a swing controlled by your best tempo and rhythm. It helps maintain your balance throughout the swing, too.

4. Because you’re starting the swing slowly, you’ll turn rather than sway off the ball. The center of your swing stays over the ball instead of shifting to one side, meaning your swing will find the ball again instead of the ground behind it.

5. By hovering the club you have its full weight in your hands. When you take the cub away there is no adjustment to be made and your takeaway will be smoother.

6. You avoid a penalty. When you set the clubhead on the ground behind the ball, you have addressed it, according to the rules. If it moves before you hit it with your stroke, you could be penalized two strokes. By hovering the clubhead, you have never addressed the ball. Now if it moves, there is no penalty.

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

playing the game

What I learned at the course – 1

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There is an ongoing series of posts titled, What I learned at the range. This post begins a series titled, What I learned at the course. It will be a number of playing tips that I’m bringing home that helped me play better, and might help you, too.

Remember, you can’t read about at tip to make it work. You have to try it and see for yourself.

1. An epiphany: It is not me hitting the ball. I am not involved in any way. The club swings; the ball goes. My ego, my self-involvement, does not play any part in the shot. For two seconds, stop being my everyday self and become an embodiment of a golf swing. See where I’m going with this?

2. Take more club. The pros say amateurs underclub themselves from the fairway all the time. The pros are right. Second hole, 115 yards from the pin. Pitching wedge, right? But that’s at the end of the line for my pitching wedge, and the green is a bit up the hill from where the ball is. I took out a 9-iron, made an easy swing, and got hole-high.

3. On the putting green, the more you think about easing the ball up to the hole, instead of hitting it up there, the closer you will get your approach putts.

4. Relax. You don’t have to play perfect golf to score. Two so-so shots and two good shots are enough to make a par.

5. Laser rangefinders rule. Mobile phone apps suck. Last week my drive and the drive of another guy in my group ended up about three feet from each other. We were hitting into a deep green with the pin in the back. I shot the pin at 159 and got there. His app said 134 to the center, plus or minis five yards, and he was short of the green, and he’s a good player who hit a good shot.

Moral: dump your app and get a rangefinder. I use a Leupold GX-1.

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

golf swing

In golf, it’s a swing, not a hit

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The French have a saying that goes, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, or, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The French also have a saying that goes, Vive la différence, to which many web sites are devoted, but not this one.

I would like to introduce to you Mr. Jim Barnes, who is writing today’s guest post. He speaks to the important point that you have to swing the golf club, not clobber the ball.

Mr. Barnes:

“I would describe the swing as an effort in which a steadily increasing movement is achieved in response to the co-ordination of several sets of muscles working to produce the movement. The hit I conceive as a quick movement resulting from the sudden application of a single set of muscles. The one is a slow steady pull; the other is a sharp jerk.

“The beginner or unskilled player, on watching the experts, either amateur or professional, will usually be struck by the fact that they appear to hit and hit hard, and they do. But the point to be remembered is that they have first come to acquire the knack of timing the stroke properly. In other words, they can afford to apply plenty of force since they apply it correctly.

“The disposition to want to hit the ball as hard and as far as possible is entirely natural. For this reason, the effort is being made here to get it firmly impressed on the player, that while there is a good deal of “hitting” in the golf stroke, even for a full swing, it is of great importance to guard against overdoing it.

“Then there is another very important objection to making the stroke too much of a hitting effort. When this is done, there is an unconscious effort, more often than not, to stop the forward sweep of the hands as the ball is hit, if indeed not a fraction of a second before the hitting takes place.

“Long experience has proven that if the effort to drive the ball is allowed to stop immediately on contact between the clubhead and the ball, the result, generally speaking, will be poor. Instead of getting a picture of the stroke as a movement where the hands are practically stopped as the ball is hit, try to visualize them as sweeping right on through and out in front of you as far as the arms will permit them to go.

“In a short swing, the hands, wrists, and forearms supply nearly all the needed power, so that the stroke is distinctly a hit. The more full the swing the smaller the proportion contributed by them. For that reason, it is important to keep in mind that the chief consideration is the general sweeping or swinging movement with the hands and clubhead.”

Some of you might have heard of Jim Barnes. He golfed professionally in the early 20th century, winning the PGA Championship in 1916 and 1919, the U.S. Open in 1921, and the Open Championship in 1925.

These excerpts are from his book, A Guide to Good Golf, published in 1927. Plus ça change, . . .

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

mental game

Concentration on the golf course

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Joyce Wethered, an English golfer whose heyday was in the 1920s, and is regarded as one of the best female golfers of all time, was on the green and putting in the 1920 English Open when a train came roaring by. (Golf courses in those days were built next to rail lines to make it easy to get to the course, since few people had cars.) The story goes, as an example of her superior power of concentration, that she was so wrapped up in her putt that she never noticed the train.

But let’s think about this for a moment. Trains make lots of noise. When one goes by and it’s less than 100 feet away, it’s loud, and you hear it. If, however, you’re truly concentrating with a moving mind, the noise won’t bother you. You won’t pay attention to it because it’s irrelevant to what you’re trying to accomplish. That’s what happened to her.

When you are truly concentrating, your power of perception increases. You notice more things. Along with that, though, comes filtering out information that is not relevant to your task at hand. Your moving mind attends to whatever is important and the rest gets discarded.

We all think we know what it means to concentrate. We “bear down,” “zero in.” We force our mind to pay attention to one thing and fight to exclude distractions. We are taught from an early age that trying hard and concentrating are the same thing. We continue to concentrate in this way not because it works, but because it is what we were taught.

We have learned that since the body must do hard work to achieve results, so must the mind. We are also aware that we seldom concentrate in this way, because, quite frankly, most of us avoid hard work if we can.

This is all a misunderstanding of what it means to concentrate. There are many other misunderstandings. Concentration is the easiest thing in the world to do. It’s nothing more than being able to maintain your mental focus without pause.

— from The Golfing Self

Find out more about what concentration means, and to learn how to concentrate correctly, in this revolutionary golf instruction book, now available at www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

It will change everything about the way you play.

playing the game

Play different golf courses

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I don’t doubt you have a favorite course and play the bulk of your rounds there. Whatever it is that you like about it, that course is your golfing home. It’s the place where you can relax and have the fun that you seek from golf.

Yet, if that’s the only course you play, you are doing yourself a disservice if you want to become a better golfer.

Playing only one course requires only a limited a variety of shots, the ones that get you around this particular design. You also learn to think strategically only in ways that are very familiar to you. Your growth as a player stagnates.

Also, when you play only one course, you get quite familiar with it and start to shoot low scores. Though there’s nothing wrong with that, you might become under-handicapped.

There was a local golfer who shot a 62 on his home course several years ago. I looked up his record on the GHIN locator and found that all of his latest 20 scores came on that same course.

Now you can’t argue with a 62, but I wonder how good he would be if he played on some of the more challenging courses in his area.

When you go to a brand new course, do you shoot about 5-10 strokes over your usual score? There might be a few surprises, but if you have a well-rounded arsenal of shots and know how to analyze a course on the fly, you shouldn’t be more than a few strokes over your usual.

I play a variety of courses. One course I play requires more accurate tee shots than usual. Another course features unforgiving greenside rough.

A third is carved out of the Pacific Northwest mountain forest. Miss the fairway and don’t even bother looking for your ball.

On a fourth course all the greens sit about two or three feet above the fairway, so the chipping game is much different.

Now it is a fact that all these things are characteristic of the course I normally play, just not on every hole, and not to such a degree.

Playing a healthy rotation of course makes me a better player on each one.

Take it as a matter of pride that the ten best rounds that determine your handicap were played on three, and even four different courses.

When your handicap travels like this, you become a more educated golfer, and more capable golfer, and you have more fun.

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

practice

What I learned at the range – 5

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1. Chipping

I don’t hit a lot of greens. Nine would be a good day for me. That means I have to chip and putt in order to keep my score down.

The short game, BTW, doesn’t lower your score. It keeps it from going up. But that’s a different post.

So when I go to the range I always practice chipping and putting. I’ll take one chip, hit it about six times, then putt out each ball. Par is 14.

What I learned a few days ago, or rather finally realized for good, is that when you chip you should pick a landing spot and try to hit that, letting the ball run out as it will.

That style will give you much more control of where the ball goes.

Now the run-out is important. You can’t just let it happen.

For example, you have to know how much each of your chipping clubs will release. You also have to hit the stroke consistently to get the release you intend.

But the important point is where the ball lands. That is what governs all your other choices.

Thinking in that way will give your chipping a tremendous boost.

2. The Evil Seducer

If you follow this blog, you know that is what I call my driver. Because we want to hit the ball a long way, we alter our swing and end up hitting it shorter and in who knows which direction.

The driver is built to hit the ball a great distance. Stay out of its way and it will!

Here’s a great drill to convince you of that.

Take out your sand wedge and hit a 70-yard, or so, pitch. That should be an effortless shot with this club.

Now take out your driver and put the same swing on the ball. That you’re standing up a little straighter should be the only difference.

Different club, same swing.

Hit one drive and go back to the wedge. Keep alternating, one ball with each club.

After about three or four times through the cycle, I will bet (hope) that the wedge has rubbed off on you, and you are making an easy pass at the ball with your driver and the ball is going straight and long.

Well! Who knew?

If you can learn to swing your driver like this, you might not hit that once-a-month bomber, but you will be putting the ball in the fairway much more often, and with more than enough distance.

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

slow play

A cure for slow play

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I would guess the biggest day-to-day problem in golf is not anchored putting, or the juiced-up ball, or LPGA players who need their caddy to help them line up their shot. It’s slow play.

Slow play is terrible on the PGA tour, rampant on the LPGA Tour, and a disease in college golf. All of that trickles down to recreational play and it drives most of us nuts.

There are all sorts of suggestions about how to play faster. Ready Golf was a valiant attempt to get things moving along, but it turned out that people played Ready Golf slowly and we’re right back where we started.

Slow play is caused by slow people. They don’t just play golf slowly. They do everything slowly. They have slow lives. That’s their pace. No amount of faster play tips is going to speed them up.

I think, though, that the problem is not slow play, it’s inefficient play. Three golfers wait for the fourth to get everything done before the next one starts, instead of overlapping their activity.

Example 1: One player tees off, picks up the tee, and walks back to the group standing well off to the side. Then the next golfer walks on to the tee box, etc., in sequence. Instead, the next golfer to play should already be standing beside the tee box when the golfer on it is hitting, and stepping on as soon as the ball is struck.

Example 2: One player in the fairway looks over the shot, takes out a club, does whatever, hits the ball, and puts the club back in the bag. Then the next player starts up. Instead, Player B should have a club out of the bag, ready to hit, by the time Player A is addressing the ball.

Example 3: One player marks his ball, cleans it, puts it down again, reads the green, putts, goes up to this ball and marks it, then the next player starts up. Instead, every player in the foursome can read their putt as soon as they get on the green, so everyone is reading the green at the same time.

Overlapping play, which is efficient, is an easy solution to the slow play problem. You read it here first.

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

practice, putting

What I learned at the range – 4

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Here’s a way I found to get consistent distance control on the green.

Set down five golf balls about six inches apart from each other in a line running away from you. Putt each ball, using a smallish stroke that has a “feel” to it such that you can make that same sized stroke every time.

The important thing is to not put any “hit” in the stroke with your hands. Let the weight of the putter do all the work.

Do not look at the ball after you have putted it. Keep your eyes on the ground in front of you.

After you have putted all five balls, take a look. There should be a tight cluster. Step off the distance to that cluster. That’s how far the ball goes when you putt it with that length stroke.

Find several other “feel right” lengths and find out how far the ball goes with them.

I have a small stroke that goes 15 feet, and medium stroke that goes 24 feet, and a long stroke that goes 35 feet.

These distances, and the ones you get, can be adjusted on the course before the round with a few experimental putts on the practice green.

This method takes most of the guess-work out of approach putting.

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

brilliant ideas

How to make a golf instructional video

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If you go to YouTube and search the golf videos, you find more people than you can shake a stick at have put one up. Why not you? Go ahead, but just make sure it’s worth your name. The actual content, that’s up to you. It is a piece of film-making, though, so follow these tips to upload something that is watchable.

As for your filming equipment, there are too many hardware options for me to discuss, so let me just say this one thing. Mount your camera/iPhone/whatever so the image stays still. You don’t want people getting seasick when they watch your video. Sound must be spot on. The microphone built into your camera is not good enough. A remote mike is critical. An Audio-Technica Pro 88W/R is inexpensive and works great.

You also need film editing software. Mac users have iMovie built in. Windows users can use Movie Maker.

Now to the video.

One video, one subject. If you have two ideas, make two videos.

Write a shooting script. Define each (camera) shot and write down what you’re going to say. Get the dialog tight and don’t repeat yourself. Less talk, more action. Then rehearse.

Get to the point right away; that is, start by showing the viewer, within the opening 15 seconds, what they are there to learn. If a minute has gone by and you still haven’t gotten to the good stuff, odds are the viewer will click off and try someone else’s video.

Say you’re teaching a greenside chip. If you follow this outline, you can’t go wrong:
1. Title (5 seconds)
2. Greet the viewer and introduce yourself. (5 seconds)
3. Say what shot you’re going to teach and demonstrate it. (10 seconds)
4. Now talk about how to hit the shot. (40 seconds)
5. Hit the shot. (5 seconds)
6. Hit the shot again. (5 seconds)
7. Summarize the key points. (15 seconds)
8. Sign off. (5 seconds)

This all adds up to about a minute and a half, and that is all the time you need to make your point. If the viewers didn’t get it the first time, they will watch again because it’s short. Do not build that repetition into your video!

When you film, set yourself up in front of a neutral background that will not compete with you for your viewer’s attention. Get the camera close enough so necessary detail can be seen. For example, if you’re discussing the grip, get a shot from waist to head so you can see the hands clearly.

Vary the point of view. Try to take a few shots from the golfer’s point of view if necessary. Say you’re taking about a shot that has a setup with an open clubface. Get a shot looking down as the golfer would see it of what an open face looks like, and how much you’re saying to open it.

Remember, keep it short and to the point, and your videos will be quite popular.

Here’s one of my early videos that nonetheless gets going right from the start, varies the point of view, and has solid content through to the finish.

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

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