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.
Jim Flick (1930-2012)
Jim Flick, one of golf’s most respected, loved, and influential instructors, died on November 5th of pancreatic cancer. He was 82 years old.
Flick was a competitive golfer in his youth, and was Arnold Palmer’s roommate at Wake Forest in the early 1950s. After a brief try on the professional tour, Flick turned to teaching.
In his career he taught at the Golf Digest Schools, teaming with Bob Toski and co-authoring two books with Toski, How to Become a Complete Golfer, and How to Feel a Real Golf Swing. Flick’s book On Golf is a best-seller.
Later, Flick teamed with Jack Nicklaus to run the Nicklaus-Flick golf schools.
In addition to teaching amateur golfers, Flick was instrumental in turning Tom Lehman from a journeyman on the mini-tours to a major champion.
Flick’s conception of golf was to put away science and play more by feel. This video shows that teaching in action.
Fick was honored by Golf World magazine as one of the top ten golf teachers of the 20th century.
USGA LIkely to Ban the Anchored Putting Stroke
Earlier this year I mentioned that the USGA and the R&A would be ruling in December on anchored putting. Rumor has the decision now being announced in March, and the ruling could already be in the bag pending its announcement.
Even though anchored putting has been around for decades, the controversy did not arise until last year when Keegan Bradley won the PGA, and again this year when Webb Simpson and Ernie Els both won a major championship, all three using an anchored putting stroke.
Golf’s two governing bodies make the rules for tens of millions of golfers all over the world. But, because of the success of three (count’em, three) of those golfers, the rules for everyone could be changed.
Let us remind ourselves that golf belongs to the millions who play it for recreation. That several thousand play golf professionally does not give them ownership of the sport, and should not even be the driving factor in rules changes. Grooves notwithstanding.
Because three golfers had success at the right time with an anchored putting stroke, there is a very real chance that stroke will be taken away from many thousands of recreational players who need it to continue playing the game they love.
I’m talking about golfers who have the yips. Senior golfers who can’t bend over for the time it takes to hit a putt. Golfers of any age with back conditions which give them the same problem. The long putter with an anchored stroke lets them keep playing and keep having fun.
I’m a purist. I think you should dress well when you go out and play. You should follow all the rules even if it’s a recreational round. I believe in sinking every putt. I replace my divots and fix ball marks on greens. And so forth.
But you can be a purist to a fault. Saying that this is a “nontraditional” stroke might be true, but so what? It helps people keep playing their game. It helps keep them getting outdoors in beautiful surroundings, having fun with friends, doing something athletic, getting exercise.
I doubt that an organizing committee sat down in 1840-something and said that golf is intended to be played by swinging a club that is not anchored to your body. No. That’s just how it worked out.
The tradition of golf is that it is a sport which can be played as long as you can stay upright, which might be well into your 90s. Long after you had to give up tackle football, full court basketball, and so forth, you can play golf. Or if you were never good enough to play those sports or because of gender bias you were never able to, you can still play golf.
That is a tradition we want to foster and maintain, and if it takes anchoring your putter to make golf playable and fun (that is, not taking three strokes to the green followed by four putts, or after the first few holes putting makes your back hurt), then go ahead and anchor. I want you to play golf with me.
This week’s Golfweek magazine suggests that the professional tours might not go along with the ban if one is imposed. Wouldn’t that be something? The consequence would be that golfers the rule was intended to affect would be untouched, and golfers who really need an anchored stroke to keep playing would be out in the cold.
There are a lot of arguments for and against anchoring that I don’t have the space to go into. All I’m saying here, is that the hoo-hah seems be over the affect of anchored putting on professional competition. If that’s so, the professional tours can address it on their own. There is no need for me and my millions of peers to be affected as well.
Quite frankly, if you want to anchor and want to keep anchoring even after a ban goes into effect (the earliest would be the year 2016), go ahead. You wouldn’t get a handicap, and couldn’t play in tournaments, but if you don’t do that anyway, you won’t be losing a thing. The USGA advises us through the rules on how to play golf, but it does not command us.
Just in: GolfWorld magazine reports that Keegan Bradley will fight a ban in court and Tim Clark is making noise about the same thing. Should be interesting.
A Winter Improvement Program – Takeaway
The moment you take the club away from the ball defines the probable success or failure of your shot. By this I do not mean how your body moves: whether you have a one-piece takeaway or something else. What I am about to say concerns the condition of your mind.
What all of us want to hit the ball in the way that we imagined as we made our preparations for the shot. There are two things we must do for that to happen. We must have the technical skill to hit the shot as planned, and we be able to stay out of our own way, mentally, so the technique we have trained ourselves to perform can be expressed.
What we know we can do is too often interfered with by what thoughts that are entirely unrelated, be they doubts or worries, or unnecessary monitoring. The moment we take the club away from the ball is where that interference begins, and that is the moment were we must stop it.
But how? The solution lies in being able to have your mind on what you are doing at the moment, and not getting ahead of yourself or staying stuck on what has happened. Here’s what I mean.
When you look over your shot, find the place where you can hit the ball successfully. You know what you can do, there’s no secret. If you find yourself unsure of what you have in mind, find somewhere else to hit the ball.
Focusing on what you can do keeps your mind in the present. The mental projection of an undesirable outcome concerns your mind with an uncertain future, taking you out of the present.
We’re going to get small now, but it’s all important. When you take your club out of the bag, have our mind on that. Don’t be thinking of the shot. When you take yours stance and line up the shot, think of that, not about the shot to come.
If you get the habit of doing one thing at a time, you never give your mind a chance to get ahead of itself. It stays engaged on doing the best you can at what you’re doing right now. By sticking to that, the future, which is nothing more than a collection of present moments yet to come, and which themselves will be passed over, loses its inflated importance.
What could happen is not more important than what is happening. Only by attending fully to what is happening now can the future reflect what we are able to do.
So when you take away, the club, your mind cannot be racing ahead to the downswing, or impact, or the ball flying away. It stays on the takeaway, and then moves to the other parts of the swing as they arise.
When you have trained your mind to feel the flow of present moments in golf instead of trying to lock down events, good golf gets a lot easier. Arnold Palmer said the first 12 inches away from the ball is the most important part of the golf swing. I agree, but it’s about what happens in your mind, not with your club.
My Chipping Formula
I have tried every formulaic chipping system you can think of, all the ones in the books and YouTube videos, and none of them worked. Chipping by feel didn’t work so hot, either.
But this year, I finally figured it out. It is incredibly easy, and I’m going to tell you how to do it.
First get a lesson on how to chip. You might think you know how to hit this stroke, but you really don’t. You’re doing something you made up and that’s not good enough. Learn from a pro how to do it the right way.
I had a lesson, and at the start, I told the pro that I wanted to run the ball to the hole instead of fly it, and he said that’s the best way to chip. Then I told him I wanted to learn the shot from scratch — not refining what I know, but learning it from the start.
He didn’t quite get it at first, because when I dropped a ball and picked a target, he said, “OK, what club would you use?” I said, “I don’t know. Put one in my hand.” Now he understood and I had a tremendous half-hour lesson, with six parts of a sure-fire chipping stroke to work on.
I went home and practiced in my back yard, hitting that shot every day until those six parts had fused into one movement that I could repeat like it was second nature. That took about two months.
Then I went to the practice green with my 8-iron through lob wedge (six clubs total) and hit chips with each club using an identical stroke. That’s the key — the stroke is identical with each club.
I hit ten chips with each club and walked off the distance that the good hits centered around. What I came up with is a list of six distances that I can chip to using the same stroke. I wrote those distances on a 4×6 card and put it in my golf bag.
Now, when I have a greenside chip, I walk it off and pick the club according to the chart. I just have to do one thing the same way every time and the club does the rest.
These are my distances:
8-iron 36 yards
9-iron 32 yards
PW 26 yards
GW 22 yards
SW 17 yards
LW 13 yards
If the distance is in between two clubs, I pick the shorter club and hit the ball a bit harder. For example, I would hit a 20-yard chip with my sand wedge.
This system works like a charm. The only thing you have to do is practice your chipping stroke at least three times a week to make sure you maintain it at a particular standard. You can do that in your house off the carpet. Once a year you should go through the calibration procedure to make sure you haven’t made a subtle change in what you’re doing.
Believe me this works. It takes all the guesswork out of chipping. The key is being able to reproduce the same stroke every time. It took me several months of constant practice to get that down. That’s a lot of effort, but good things don’t come easily.
See also: My Chipping Stroke
A Winter Improvement Program – Setup
The rain has come and it won’t let up until March, if that. Time for the Winter Tune-up.
What I want to do in the next few weeks is go over a things you could do to improve your golf for the 2013 season. We all say we want to do that. We play around with a few things we read in the golf magazines, and before we know it, it’s time for the new season and we haven’t made the progress we intended.
So, I’m going to lay it all out for you. What to do, and in this order. Every Thursday, you’ll get something new to do and a week to practice it. Hopefully, by the time the series ends, you have built a number of improvements into your game. Let’s get started with the setup.
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If you were going to hang a door, you would ensure that the frame is square, the door is the right size, the hinges are on straight, and that the latch lines up with the strike plate. Any one thing that isn’t quite right and you’ll have a door you have to wrestle with every time you open or close it.
Your golf swing is the same way. When your setup is right, your swing naturally falls out of it. When something is wrong, your body gets carried off in directions that make hitting the ball harder to do well or in the same way consistently.
One of the things I will be doing from time to time in this series is suggesting you get a lesson. There are times you can’t learn from reading what it is you’re supposed to do, and get it right. Now is one of those times.
Sign up for a lesson in the setup: grip, stance, posture, aim. I’m not kidding. Get a lesson for just this. It can take a full half hour, and it is a lot of stuff. You might want to bring a notebook to write down the important points.
When you get home, practice your grip, stance, and posture in a full-length mirror, looking at yourself face-on and down the line. You can buy a mirror on a stand for less than a round of golf.
Take your grip and set up to a ball, step by step, 30 times a day, starting over completely every time — let go of the club, walk away from the ball and start over. If you’re learning new habits, you have to repeat them. Knowing what to do isn’t enough.
Practice your aim on the practice tee, since you really need to have a distant target to aim at. This bit is more important than you know. Any pro will tell you the number one cause of bad shots is poor aim.
None of this is very sexy, and practicing it can get kind of boring. There are, however, so many ways you can ruin a shot before you’ve even moved the club. Eliminate those ways and then you can worry about your swing. Accomplished musicians practice their scales. Golfers practice their setup. Enough said.
When Do You Need a Golf Lesson?
Long-time readers of this column know that I am not shy about taking golf lessons or about suggesting that you get them, too. You can learn things in a half hour that would take months to learn on your own, and find out things you never dreamed of.
What you shouldn’t do is take a lesson just to have one. There needs to be a purpose, a well-defined problem that needs solving. Here are a few good reasons for taking a lesson.
1. You’re just taking up the game. After you’ve played a few rounds and decided that golf is something you want to pursue, get lessons to learn how to play it the right way. Learn the right way from the beginning. The habits you acquire at the start will follow you through your golfing career. Make sure they’re the right ones.
2. Three bad rounds in a row. Harvey Penick said to forget about one bad round, go practice if you follow it with another one, and see a pro if you follow those two with a third. It’s likely you’ve fallen into a bad habit that will be simple to correct, but it’s likely, too, that you’ll never find it without help.
3. To learn a new shot. Odds are that once a round, at least, you will be in a situation that calls for a shot you don’t know how to hit. So, do the best you can and remember what that situation was. When you get a collection of three or four of those, go to a pro and find out how to hit them.
4. To learn an old shot the right way. You can probably hit the ball onto the green from 75 yards, for example, just fine. Get a lesson on this shot like you’ve never hit it before. Learn it from scratch. You’ll be amazed at how much better you hit it. Really.
5. Periodic maintenance. You take your car in for periodic maintenance every so often, you have a dental check-up twice a year. Why not do the same for your golf swing? Once your pro learns your golf swing, he can spot little things that show you’re drifting away from what works and correct them before you start leaking oil (or getting cavities). Don’t neglect your putting, either.
6. To get to the next level. In a recent post, I mentioned that the first step to playing better is not to improve your swing, but to use your best swing more often. That swing, however, will take you only so far. To improve beyond that point, the second step is to get a new conception of the golf swing. The pro will show you. Plan on doing a year of hard work and putting up with a lot of bad shots until the changes take hold. Then go out and enjoy the brand new game you’re playing.
Golf in the Rain
Last week I wrote about the joys of autumn golf in the warm late afternoon sun. Autumn golf also features the cold afternoon rain.
Now if it’s raining and cold, I don’t go out. Someone once said to me that because I don’t like to play when I’m cold or wet that I’m not a True Golfer . . . whatever that means.
But sometimes you just have to go out and it isn’t raining, but it might rain. So here’s what we do in the Pacific Northwest, the rain capital of the western world.
Bring along your rain jacket and rain pants. If you use a golf glove, bring extras. They get soaked quickly and won’t dry out.
Bring four towels. One is to clean your clubs with. The other three are to dry your hands before you take your grip. Bring three because one will be wet before you make the turn. The second one will be wet halfway through the back nine.
Make sure you have the club cover that came with your bag. When it starts raining, we cover our clubs first and put on our rain suit second.
Did you pack an umbrella, by the way?
Bring along an extra pair of socks and shoes to change into when the round is over. There’s nothing like having dry feet on the way home.
Now for playing in the rain.
The ball will sit quickly when it hits the green, so you can be more aggressive that usual. Your approach might plug or make a deep mark when it lands. Please repair!
Be sure swing easily from the fairway and hit the ball easily. You might need to take one more club accordingly.
Concentrate on hitting the ball first. A strike that is the least bit fat will throw up mud and the ball will go only a very short distance. If your habit is to take a divot, try to play for picking the ball off the ground.
Near the green, put away the bump and run because the wet ground can grab the ball before it has a chance to run. When chipping from greenside, try to minimize spin, which can again stop the ball before it starts to run.
A wet green will be a slower green, so you can hits putts more boldly. Play less break because of the added speed.
Read Rule 25-1, which tells you what to do if there is a build-up of casual water.
Do all this, and by golly, maybe you can become a True Golfer.
Autumn Golf
The weather has changed. We’re winding down the golf season, at least in the temperate Pacific Northwest. The greens have recovered from their fall sanding, and we can play a few more rounds before the rain settles in for the duration.
Summer is about scoring — taking advantage of the gains we made over the winter. But that comes with its own pressure and we can get so caught up in what we’re doing that we forget why we’re doing it.
We play golf for our athletic recreation, to have fun with friends, maybe to have a bit of friendly competition from time to time.
We also seek golf’s beautiful, manicured surroundings. The plainest golf course is a finer place to be than the most beautiful bowling alley, and autumn is the time when any golf course is at its best.
If you play a parkland course, the trees are turning color and it’s worth the green fees just to the stroll around the grounds. The soft autumn light makes the colors of the summer course more intense as well. It’s a thrill just to be out here.
The cooler temperatures are a plus, too, at least for me. Golf in 70° weather is ideal.
The easy autumn atmosphere puts my mind at ease. Out for a stroll, hit the ball occasionally, that’s about it. With my mind more on the enjoyment of my surroundings than on playing the game, all the good things seem easier to do.
I play most at this time of year when I pick up my grandson after school. We tee off at about 3:30 and finish a few hours later when the sun is low and the day is winding down. There aren’t many people on the course so we get lots of do-overs. Between shots we just have fun talking about whatever comes up.
So here’s to Autumn Golf. We say goodbye to a lovely summer, and get in touch again with why we love this game so much.
The Driver and Parallax
I have a new golf tip idea, but since I’m not swinging a golf club these days, I need your help in seeing if it works. It concerns addressing the ball with a driver. Here is what I would like you to try.
1. Tee up the ball like you normally do for a drive.
2. Hover the clubhead directly behind the ball so the ball appears centered on the clubface.
3. Drop the club to the ground using your shoulders as the hinge. Do not make any changes to your posture, or the length of your arms, or adjust the position of the clubface on the ground. Just lower the club. It should look like you’re addressing the ball off the toe.
4. Swing away. If this works, you should hit the ball on the center of the clubface.
The reason I came up with this is that there is a parallax effect when you address a teed ball. If you address the ball in a centered way with the club on the ground, the clubface will actually be aligned in the air to hit the ball on the heel.
Because the ball is raised, you must add a second dimension to the address. Addressing the teed ball in this new way should correct for that. At least that’s my thinking.
It’s important when you try this not to make a compensation because it looks like you’re now addressing the ball off the toe of the club. Just swing, see what happens, and let me know. Ten shots should make a good trial.
Also, Make sure you just make a golf swing. Don’t try to bash the ball or steer the clubhead. Just swing.
Thank you for your help. Let me know how/if it works.