ball position

Why Ball Position is Important in Golf

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Last week my son had a golf lesson in which the instructor corrected his ball position, which Son never paid any attention to, despite my harping on this detail almost every time we go to the range together.

So maybe I need to explain why it’s so important, and why, after you are set up to the ball, I could move it a half inch and ruin your shot just by doing that much

Your swing is an arc. The bottom of the arc needs to hit the ground at a certain point. Where that point is, is the subject of another post. Let’s just say that it would be very helpful if you could hit that spot on the ground every time. Then, if you put the ball in the right spot relative to the ground-hitting spot every time, you would get good contact every time (all other things being equal).

That is the reason why ball position is so important. When your ball is in a different place every time, you have to disrupt the swing you want to make in order find the ball. This is why I could move the ball a half inch and ruin your shot, because the ball position no longer matches the arc your swing mechanics create.

Most golfers play the ball too far forward, which means they have to reach out for the ball instead of swinging through it. Remember that golf is not a hit-the-ball game. It’s a swing-the-club game, with the ball getting in the way.

The next time you go to the range, take your alignment sticks and set up as shown in the photo. The stick between your feet always points to the ball. Your heels always go in the same place relative to the sticks. Learn (a) what the right position for your feet relative to the ball is, and (b) how to set up with the ball in that position every time.

It is true that specialty shots will find you placing the ball differently. They are all variations of the basic position, though. You need to know what your basic position is before you can vary it successfully.

For example, if I asked you to play the ball one ball back for some reason, I would mean from your standard ball position. You would need to know what that standard position is before you could make sense of my request.

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brilliant ideas

Bonus Post: TRG’s Facebook Page

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Now that summer is over and the golf season is winding down, I have gone to posting twice a week instead of three times. You can, however, get a daily dose of The Recreational Golfer at my new Facebook page.

Every day, at Facebook’s The Recreational Golfer page, you’ll get a tip, or a comment on the current golfing scene, in 50 words or less.

I know you wait on pins and needles for my posts in this space, but now you can start off every day with a visit to the TRG world.

So pay a visit and let’s start building a recreational golf community on Facebook. While you’re there, do me a big favor and click the Like button.

statistics

Practical Note-Taking For Golfers

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I encourage you to make notes when you get home after a round of what shots worked and which didn’t, along with a suggested fix. This is how you learn to play the game, and get a book on your course.

I played nine holes two days ago on Tuesday, just chipping and putting, since it’s still far to soon for me to be swinging a club. I dropped a ball beside the green and played away. This is what I wrote down:

1. 56 from front center to pin in front middle. OK
2. Flop from left side to a tight pin too short. Work on this shot.
3. PW from the fringe beside the right side bunker to a back pin. OK
4. Bump off a left side bank with one more club than the distance would indicate.
5. 60 from the right side to a pin at bottom of slope. OK
6. 56 from left side to back pin. OK
7. Another flop too short from left side to front pin.
8. 8 from 6 yds in front to back pin OK
9. 52 from front hillside. OK

Now this might not mean much to you, and but that’s all right. They’re notes to myself which I can use next time, because I made diagram of each green in a flip notebook. All this information is now marked down on the digram of each green, along with notations made from previous rounds. When I play this course, I just have to consult my notebook and find out what to do. No guessing. Simple.

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health

Fred’s Back, Tiger’s Back, Your Back

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Several weekends ago, two prominent golfers succumbed to back pain. Fred Couples withdrew from a Senior Tour event after hitting one shot. He described the pain as nothing he had felt before. Tiger Woods minced around the course in obvious pain, finding it it hard to walk at times, and difficult to bend over so he could tee up the ball and get it out of the cup, most of the time.

With Fred, this could be the last straw. His hyper-flexible swing caught up with him years ago. The back treatments he gets in Europe aren’t working any more. The last one he had was in July before the Senior British Open when he won. The treatment carried him through about four weeks.

If he continues to play he could be setting himself up for a serious disability in his advanced years. I hope he thinks hard about his next steps. He has achieved great things in competitive golf so far. If he continues playing, he might likely pay a high price for more success that, in the end, would add little to his list of achievements.


Tiger said his back pain was due to sleeping on a bed that was too soft. That may well be the case, though with Tiger’s history of hiding his ailments, there might be more to the matter than the wrong mattress.

Even if it is only a matress, Tiger is at the age where his body is susceptible to daily life giving his back fits. He’s also at the age where the wear and tear of hitting so many golf balls can begin to have an adverse affect on his back’s health. We’ll see.

Then there’s you. Professional golfers put little strain on their back because their swing is so efficient. Their back problems come from overuse (see Tiger, above). Recreational golfers, on the other hand, injure their back because of faulty technique. The wrong muscles are put into play, which puts a strain on the spine that it cannot tolerate for long.

I would suggest these things concerning your back’s health:

1. It’s O.K. for your left heel to come off the ground. In fact, it’s a good thing, because is reduces the strain that the twisting motion of the backswing places on your lower spine.

2. Having a large X factor is a bad idea. That’s the size of the angle between your hips and your shoulders at the top of the backswing. Too great an angle sets up your spine for serious strain when you swing through the hitting area. You don’t have to swing to parallel to be effective or to hit a long ball.

3. Just like Julius Boros said, you can swing easy and hit hard. The women on the LPGA Tour, these little slips of a thing, hit the ball a lot farther than you do because of their mechanics. Their swing is efficient. If you build an efficient swing, you don’t have to swing so hard to get the distance you need. The main thing I can learn from Rory McIlroy’s swing is how to hurt myself. I’ll copy Suzann Pettersen’s swing and be just fine.

Take care of your back. Warm up well before you hit balls, either at the range or the course. Swing within yourself. Have a lesson on swinging with back safety–the pro should be able to help you. You want golf to enhance your life, not make it more difficult.

Update: Oh, my, Department: Couples described this latest incident “as a bomb going off in my back.” His business manager said it was just another flareup and “He’s got a lot more tournaments left. He’s not done for the year, not even close.” – Golfworld, September 10, 2010

Retief Goosen had back surgery recently to treat pain and will be out indefinitely. – Golfweek, September 7, 2012.

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chipping

Practice Chipping and Putting Together

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I’ve been doing a lot of chipping and putting this year. Considering my recent history (two spine surgeries earlier this year), that’s about all I’ve been able to do. I have learned a good bit about each stroke, and have gotten much better at each than I ever have been. What’s important, I’ve found, is how you practice.

Of course, you have to learn the shots. That takes hitting lots of putts and lots of chips. Lessons help, too. Yes, a chipping lesson to find out how to do it right. Putting lessons, too.

When you practice, remember that applied chipping and putting are a package deal. The chip and the putt work together in a partnership. When you play, you hit the chip, then you go putt it out. That part needs to be practiced, too.

After you’ve practiced putting for about fifteen minutes, and after you’ve practiced chipping for fifteen minutes, practice them together. Get four balls and chip them to the same hole, but from different locations around the practice green. Then go putt out the four balls.

When you get up and down on all four, reverse the drill. Chip to four different holes from the same location.

Finally, narrow down the drill. With one ball, chip it and putt out. Pick a different location and a different hole. Chip and putt out. Keep doing this for dozen times or so, giving yourself a different shot every time.

Never hit a do-over chip. Learn to deal with the putts you leave yourself.

It’s one thing to have good technique. It’s another to know how to get the ball in the hole. These drills are how you learn.

shot-making

A Golf Shot’s Four Parameters

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Note: The September Recreational Golfer Newsletter will be published this Saturday, September 1. To have it sent to you, please sign up at my home page.

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When you have a shot from the tee or from the fairway, there are four things you can do with the ball. A shot-maker will consider all of them. They are the parameters of shot-making which, when mastered, turn golf into a whole new game. They are direction, distance, trajectory, and curvature.

Direction seems obvious. There’s the fairway, or the green, so hit the ball in that direction. You know there’s more to it than that. Which side of the fairway do you want to hit? Do you go for the pin or give it room because of disaster lurking nearby?

Distance seems obvious, too, but there’s a great deal of finesse in a shot to a pin 170 yards away. Do you want the ball to land hole-high and stop, or land short and release? Maybe you want the ball to fly beyond the hole. Only one of those shots will go 170 yards.

From the tee, it’s the same story. The driver is not meant for you to hit the ball as far as you can. It’s meant to put the ball in a certain place in the fairway. We start driving the ball consistently well when we pick a distance and try to drive the ball that same distance every time.

Trajectory controls placement of the ball upon landing. Pin in front, hit a high shot to the pin that stops. Pin in back, hit a low shot the center of the green that runs to the back. If there’s wind, you need to keep the ball low to give the wind less control of the ball, and you, more.

Curvature is something most golfers have no problem with other than it’s the wrong curvature at the wrong time. Once you learn to hit the ball straight, then you can play with curvature at will to maneuver the ball around the course when needed.

You don’t have to curve the ball very often, though. Nine times out of ten, a straight shot will do. But if you have to hit the ball around something, or there’s a tucked pin you can get to, give it a go.

Admittedly, some of these parameters involve advanced shot-making skills. The only way to learn those skills, though, is to see the need and start developing them based on real-life situations you face every time you play. When the motivation to learn the shot is a real-life problem, you will learn faster, and better.

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playing the game

Bobby Jones on Game Management

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Bobby Jones’s most famous book is titled, Bobby Jones on Golf, and has a deservedly sterling reputation. It is a compilation of selected columns that he wrote for syndication to daily newspapers from 1927 to 1935.

A book he wrote later, as a book, titled, Golf Is My Game, is equally rewarding. The instruction portion is more to the point in many places, and reads as a unified piece of instruction rather than a collection of thoughts on various subjects.

Chapter 8 is titled “Management.” He means both management of the course and management of your temperament. He has a bit about expectations that, if absorbed by any golfer, will make every outing much more enjoyable. I quote:

1. I must be prepared for the making of mistakes.
2. I must try always to select the shot to be played and the manner of playing it so as to provide the widest possible margin for error.
3. I must expect to have to so some scrambling and not be discouraged if the amount of it happens to be more than normal.

End of quote.

These admonitions come at the end of an extended section where Jones explains that in an average round (for him) of four to six under par, there would be only one or two shots “that had not been mishit to some degree,” and in his best rounds, only five or six.

By keeping expectations reasonable and accepting the course and the playing skills you bring with you that day, it is entirely possible to become someone who always gets more out of his or her skills than would seem possible.

What more can any golfer do than that?

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

Golf’s Distance Gap

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I suspect that most recreational golfers feel comfortable playing into a green from under 160 yards, maybe as far away as 170. I also suspect they feel all right playing shots of about 200 yards or longer into fairways. That 30-yard gap in the middle, however, is the problem that many of us have yet to solve.

If we face a shot from within that gap, we’re trying to hit a green. Not many of us can hit a green reliably from that distance. It’s not just us, either. Touring professionals have a gap as well. It’s just that their numbers are different than ours.

There’s a chart in the book, The Search For the Perfect Swing that shows the percentage of greens hit, from which distances, in a professional tournament in England in 1964. The data show that the percentage of greens hit from 150 to 180 yards was fairly consistent at 75-80 percent. At the 190-yard mark, the percentage of greens hit dropped to below 50 percent. Remember that in those those days that they hit to 180 yards with a 4-iron.

So at some distance, there’s a sharp drop-off for everyone, and it’s sharp. What do you do about it?


1. Learn to hit the long clubs straighter. Obvious on paper, but pretty difficult to do in real life. If the pros can’t do it, we can’t either. Let’s try something else.

2. Sharpen your short game. This is better. You’re probably going to miss the green from such a distance, but if you can get up and down you’ll be O.K.

3. Lay up. If there is real trouble around the green, bad trouble, it’s a losing bet to think you can avoid it from a long distance. Play short of it and trust your greens game (chipping and putting). By real trouble, I mean water, and bunkers, especially if you’re not a good bunker player or they’re deep and plentiful. You might take four shots to get down from the fairway following this strategy, but if you can guarantee that, it’s better in the long run than trying for three and most of the time taking five or six.

Recreational golfers should emphasize 2 and 3. These are two ways to play within the capabilities you now have and that you can likely attain to. I don’t mean for you to play timid golf, and this isn’t doing that. It’s getting the most out of the game you have and not asking more from it that it can deliver.

What do you do when you have a shot that falls inside your distance gap? Post your solution in a comment below.

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driver

When to Leave Your Driver in the Bag

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The Big Dog gets you in trouble sometimes, and you have this nagging feeling every now and then that you shouldn’t be using it. How do you decide which times those are? These four questions can help. First, be honest and decide what score you expect to get on this hole. Then go down the list. At the first No, leave the driver in the bag and hit something else off the tee.

1. Is your expected score on this hole a par?
2. Think of the longest club you feel confident about hitting into a green. Will your average drive get you to at least the distance from which you can hit that club?
3. Do you need to hit a driver to have a short iron or less into the green?
4. Think of the trouble off the tee. If you hit into it with a driver, can you still make one stroke over your expected score with average play?


Here’s how this works out in practice. There is a hole on a course I play several times a year, 386 yards uphill, par 4. In the nearly twenty times I have played this hole, I have parred it twice. It’s an easy bogey for me, but a hard par. A perfect drive (what’s the chance of that?) leaves me with a hybrid club off an uphill lie to hit the ball onto the green (what’s the chance of that?). The answer to question 1 is No. I don’t expect to par this hole.

I play a hybrid club off the tee, advance the ball with a 6-iron, pitch on, and get my bogey. Keeping the driver in the bag lets me hit three easy shots into the green instead of two hard ones. Double bogey never gets put in play, and there’s an outside chance of making par if my chip gets close enough.

The very next hole, on the same course, is a 391-yard par 4. It’s longer, but I always use a driver. Why? Par is a reasonable expectation for me here because the fairway slopes downhill, making the hole play shorter, and angles to the left, favoring my shot shape (question 1 is Yes). Catching the slope will leave me with a short iron into the green. (question 2 is Yes).

Question 3 is Yes; a shorter club off the tee will leave me with a mid-iron to the green. As for question 4, the trouble on the right is easy to play out of. Sometimes I have made par from there, so the answer is Yes. Out comes the driver.

You don’t have to use your driver just because it’s a par 4 or a par 5. Make that club work for you when it’s to your advantage. Otherwise, try a different option off the tee.

See also: Keep the Long Clubs at Home

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playing the game

A Few Ways to Play Golf Faster

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Slow play is everyone’s bugbear. Well, maybe not for the slow players.

But to get around the course in less time, you don’t have to play faster. You only need to play more efficiently.

This is what I mean. Say your group is at the tee. One member is on the tee box, teeing off. The other three members are standing way over there by their carts.

The one guy tees off, and the next one up walks up to the tee box, goes through a routine and hits. Then the third member walks over to the tee box and so forth, and finally the fourth member walks over and hits.

Or this.

The first member is on the tee box and the second member is standing beside it. The first member hits, and right away the second member steps onto the tee box and the third member walks up to it.

The second member hits, the third member walks on the tee box, and the fourth member walks up to it. The third member hits, and the fourth member steps on the tee box. And hits.

Can you see that the second version could easily save almost a minute in getting the foursome off the tee? Multiply that by 18 and you get a significant saving in time over the course of the round by doing just that.

No one had to hurry. No one had to rush. It’s just that the entire group played more efficiently. That’s all.

Everyone doing a little thing added up to a lot of time saved. That is the faster play strategy.

Here are a few more examples.

From the fairway, when someone is hitting and you’re next, you can begin surveying your shot at the same time the other player does. (Out of courtesy, don’t pull your club until the other ball is in the air.) In other words, be ready.

On the green, read your opening putt as soon as you get there instead of waiting until it is your turn. Mark your ball, clean it, and put it back down unless it’s in the way of someone else’s putt. That way there’s no waiting when it’s your turn. I watch the four old guys ahead of me get on and off the green in a hurry, and this is how they do it.

Just doing those three things could save close to an hour over eighteen holes. That is, if you can convince your buddies to give them a try.

It all comes down to this. Paying your green fees does not give you the privilege of holding up your group and the the groups behind you by playing at any pace you choose. By giving back a bit of what we think we might be entitled to, everyone benefits from the overall goodwill that’s created.

Playing efficiently is a painless way to do it.

Can you think of some others? Post them in a Comment below.

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