playing the game

The Social Hazards of Recreational golf

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Recreational golf is primarily a social game. The most important part of the day is having fun with the people you’re playing with and making their day as enjoyable as yours. It is possible, though, that socializing can prevent you from playing your best golf. Here’s how to be a good friend and a good player at the same time.

Between shots your mind will be on the people you’re playing with. When it comes time to hit, all your attention need to be placed on your shot. The danger that the social aspects of golf create is that when that time comes, you won’t switch your focus from your friends to your shot.

We don’t want you to spend the round in a little cocoon, of course. But when it’s your turn to hit, that’s exactly what you have to do so that your best performance can emerge.

The requirements for hitting your best shot are first, to figure out what that shot should be, that is, what shot from here makes the most sense in getting my ball up to the hole the quickest and easiest? Next is getting your mind ready to hit that shot by convincing yourself that you can do it. Finally, you set up to the ball, aim yourself, and swing away.

You can’t do any of this while you’re still having a conversation with a playing partner or thinking about something someone else is doing. You really need to spend about forty seconds being a bit self-centered.

Don’t think that this is being selfish, because it’s not. It’s really a matter of respect. By withdrawing from pleasantries to hit your shot, you’re respecting yourself by giving yourself the best chance to play well. By quieting the conversation with another player who is getting ready to hit, you give that person the same respect.

One of the ways we help our playing partners have a good day on the course is to do whatever we can to help them play their best. Golf has a unique set of etiquette rules designed in part to make sure that players do not disturb each other when a stroke is being made. Good golfers know these rules and follow them.

Beyond that is respecting each other as athletes. Golf is a sport that everyone wants to do well at. When everybody in the group understands that, the athletic and social halves of the game combine perfectly for everyone’s benefit.

What do you do if there’s a talker in your group? One day I was paired with one. I stood on the tee behind my ball looking down the fairway. He kept talking and I kept looking. Talking, looking. More talking, more looking. Finally he realized that I wasn’t going to move until he quieted down. I don’t know about the others in our group, but I didn’t have a problem with him again for the rest of the day.

Enjoy golf, enjoy it with your friends. Just remember that too much of the social whirl isn’t what makes you a better golfer. Don’t be afraid to step out of it when you need to.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

mental game

Avoiding Mental Drift While Playing Golf

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Normally, or at least hopefully, you begin your round fully focused and mentally ready to play your best golf. And, for the first four holes or so, you do. Then the trouble starts. Your focus wanders and you have a few bad holes and wonder what happened. You were playing so well and then it just fell apart.

You failed to maintain your focus. The complete attention you gave to your previous shots got lost. You went through the motions of making a shot, but your mind was not on the task.

The way to avoid this let-down is to make yourself see every shot fresh. Treat every shot as if it were the first shot of the day. Re-engage your concentration every time you step up to the ball. How?

When it’s time to hit the ball, your mind needs to be on figuring out the best shot to hit from where you are. This is no time to congratulate yourself on the great shot that got you there, or kick yourself for the bad shot that put you where you would rather not be. Your attention needs to be on this one thought: from here, what is the best play I can make?

In other words, given my skills, where should I play the ball so I’m in the best position for my next shot? Take some time to figure this out. Set your mind, even, to playing two or three shots in advance.

For example, say my drive ends up on the right side of the fairway on a par-5 hole. Getting to the ball, I can see that the pin is on the right side of the green, tucked behind a bunker. If I play straight for the flag, I’ll have to pitch over the bunker for my third shot.

But I also see that if I play my next shot to the left side of the fairway, the green is fairly open and even if my pitch is short, it will still be on the green. So I hit my ball up the left side of the fairway.

Getting to the ball, I can see that the pin is in the back of the green on ground that is fairly level. The front portion of the green slopes toward me, so I’ll have an uphill putt if my pitch is short. Better to err on the long side with my pitch. And that bunker is now on the right, so best to be a bit left with the pitch. Left and long is the shot.

It’s thinking like this before every shot that will keep your mind actively engaged with the game.

Finally, go through a pre-shot routine before each shot. That routine can take any form. There is no sequence of steps that is more right than another one, nor any required elements except for making sure you’re aimed correctly and that your mind is focused on what you’re doing.

What you’re doing, by the way, is literally that. What you want to have happen, what you don’t want to have happen, whether you might not be able to do it, these thoughts are not included. Put your mind on being confident that the stroke you’re about to make will be the good stroke that you know is in you.

The last step is to accustom yourself to keeping this process going for a four-hour round. It’s not easy, and it will take work. Good luck.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

brilliant ideas

Fixing Golf’s Incorrect Scorecard Rule

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I guess I’m on a rules roll this summer. A few weeks ago I proposed a way to fix the abhorred out of bounds rule. I haven’t heard back from the USGA yet, but they know how to get in touch.

Today I want to inject some sanity into the scoring method the rules call for in tournament play. Too many golfers have been hurt unnecessarily by the rule holding a player responsible for his or her own score.

The earliest notable example I know of was when Jackie Pung shot the winning score in the U.S. Women’s Open at Winged Foot in 1957, but signed for a lower score on the fourth hole than she actually took. DQ.

The linked article recalling this incident repeats a common misunderstanding regarding incorrect scores, by saying that a player who signs for the wrong score is disqualified. A player signing for a score on a hole that is lower than actually taken is disqualified. If a higher score is signed for, the score stands and the player’s standing in the tournament is adjusted accordingly.

Also, players sign for scores on each hole. They do not sign for the total of all the hole scores. Rule 6-6d.

The next case to cause a stir was at the Masters in 1968 when Roberto De Vicenzo signed for 4 on the seventeenth hole instead of a 3, and lost by one stroke the chance to play off with Bob Goalby the next day for the title.

In the past few years, it has become not uncommon for a player in a professional tournament to be DQ’d for signing for a lower score. Sergio Garcia was a victim twice in the same year, and Boo Weekly was the playing partner who wrote down the wrong score each time. Once was in the 2007 PGA Championship, and the other time was three weeks later in the Deutsch Bank Championship. Garcia was DQ’d from the PGA, but the error was caught by tournament officials the second time before Garcia signed.

Here’s the problem. Golf is the only sport that doesn’t have an official scorekeeper. Tennis players don’t keep their scores. Shot-putters don’t have to sign for the distance they toss. Sprinters don’t have to carry their own stopwatch. Yet golfers are expected to be competitors and tournament officials at the same time.

Yes, golfers are expected to enforce rules, because many times the player is the only person who knows that a rule was broken. When the game is played on a 150-acre field instead of in a much smaller arena where an official monitors an area the size of your back yard, this is necessary.

But not for scores. That information is pretty public. When the world knows that DeVicenzo made a 3, nothing should get in the way of that score being posted.

The solution, then, in tournaments where markers accompany each group, is for the score recorded by the marker to be the official score for the players in that group. A player would be allowed to appeal a score if there was a disagreement, but otherwise the marker’s score would stand.

In tournaments where markers do not accompany each group, the players would keep each other’s score. If a player signed for a higher hole score, that score would stand, as it does now. If a player signed for a lower hole score, the correct score would be replaced and a two-stroke penalty added on the infraction.

Earlier this year the USGA and R&A issued a ruling preventing a player for being disqualified for not including penalty strokes when the player was not aware,until after the scorecard had been signed, that a rule had been broken. The basic issue remains unaddressed, though. Let’s get real on wrong scorecards and let’s have the punishment fit the crime.

Does anyone want to lay odds over which of The Recreational Golfers’ brilliant Rules suggestions becomes official first?

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

tournaments

2011 British Open Preview

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Winner: Darren Clarke by three stokes over Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson

The U.S. Open is the most important tournament of the year, but the British Open is the most fun. This is real golf. Hit the ball in the air, run it along the ground, just find a way to get it in the hole. You see more creative shot-making in this tournament that in all the others combined.

It’s also the most cosmopolitan tournament of the year. Entrants come from more countries to play in the Open than in any other tournament. You might say it is the World Open.

This year the championship is being played at Royal St. George’s, on the south England coast. This is where Ben Curtis won in 2003. I remember tuning in early to see the fourth round, and the composed look on his face just gave me the notion that he could win. I called my Dad, who lived in a another city, and who I knew was watching, and said, “Pay attention to this guy. I think he could be our winner.” With a little help from Thomas Bjorn taking three strokes to get out of a bunker, he was.

There are two other Open-quality courses right next door to RSG, Deal and Royal Cinque Ports. It would make a great golfing vacation to pay all three.

In the early days of golf, course designers liked blind shots. There’s the vestige of one at RSG between the 5th and 6th holes. The 5th is a par 4 that doglegs left. the 6th is a par 3 that runs in the opposite direction. Between the 6th green and the spot where the 5th makes its bend, there is a 40-foot hill called The Maiden.

In the original routing, the 6th tee was at the bend, and your shot had to go over The Maiden, carrying a distance of 190 yards. A small post on top of the hill served as a directional marker. Woe betide you if you didn’t make the carry.

If 190 yards doesn’t sound like much, remember this: the hole was built in the 19th century when players used gutta percha ball and wooden clubs. The equivalent with today’s equipment would be a 250-yard carry with the peak of the hill at the 230-yard mark.

“Maiden,” by the way, derived from the original name of the hill, “Jungfrau,” a mountain in the Bernese Alps. Look for this bit of history if the broadcast lets you.

Now for the part you’re all dying to read. Who am I picking to win? Though McIlroy is the easy choice, lightning can strike twice, but not three times. The course isn’t that long at 7,211 yards, so short hitters won’t be left out. This is my birthday month. The day is the 28th. The #28 player in the World Rankings right now is Miguel Angel Jimenez. There’s your Open winner.

I might miss the tournament this year, since I’ll be in Japan during Open Week. Because of the time difference, I’d have to watch at around midnight. Probably won’t happen.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

playing the game

Golf Course Management In a Nutshell

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Good golf is not only a matter of hitting good shots. If it were, we would play it on the driving range instead of the golf course. Golf is about getting the ball into the hole in the fewest number of strokes. That’s such an obvious point, but the way I watch some people play, you would think they didn’t know that. Here’s how not to be one of them.

Let’s expand that statement about golf a little bit. The question is, from here, from where you’re standing now, how are you going to get the ball into the hole in the fewest number of strokes, given your skills? That’s what you have to be thinking, and if you are, you’ve come up with a shot sequence from tee to green that you will attempt to play out. The wrong way is to hit the ball somewhere and then decide what to do next when you get up to it.

To create this plan, work from the hole backwards.  From where on the green do I want to hit my approach putt? From where on the fairway is the best place to hit the ball to that spot on the green? True, you might not be able to see from the tee where the pin is, but most holes have a preferred angle of approach, and you can try for a spot off the tee that gives you that angle. Once you get to the fairway, you can complete your plan.

Few of us, however, are good enough to put the ball exactly where we intend. When you miss the spot you were aiming for, you might have to modify your plan. Here are three scenarios that illustrate the point.

1. On a fairly easy par-4 hole, you planned a drive into the fairway and a short iron onto the green. But you muffed your drive, and now you have 280 yards to the green. You could bang away with a fairway wood and pitch on, or hit two 7-irons and cover the same distance.

2. You wanted to stay left off the tee of a par 5, but you went right and now must hit dangerously close to water to have the pitch onto the green that you planned on. Or, you can advance the ball to the left and away from the water, but you’ll have an 8-iron into the green.

3. You’re about 40 yards off the green and the pin is behind a deep bunker on the left side that you’ll have to pitch over, off a tight lie. Or, you could chip the ball to the center of the green, which is wide open to you, and get down in two putts.

Again, the question you should ask yourself in each case is, which sequence is the most likely to get the ball in the hole in the fewest strokes, given your skills?

When you play like this, golf becomes a game of strategy, rather than a game of this shot followed by that shot. Now you’re thinking all the time, connecting your shots into a single plan so that they work with each other, feed each other. By doing so, you get more out of the skills you have, you become a better player, and the game just gets to be more fun.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

practice

A Recreational Golfer’s Weekly Practice Plan

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There’s no way around it. To get better, or even to maintain skills, a golfer has to practice. What to practice depends on how much time you have available. We’ll start with the essentials, and show you how to find time that you didn’t think you had to get even more practice.

At home:
Putting. This is the easiest stroke to practice. All you need is a putter, a ball, and a smooth carpet. The lid from a 28-oz. can of whole tomatoes makes the perfect target, since it’s just ¼” smaller than the regulation hole.

Practice your setup and your stroke. Put two tees on the ground, cup side down, so they stand up on the carpet. Place them just far enough apart so you can swing your putter through the gap without knocking the down. Now put a ball in the middle of the gap and make your stroke. This drill smooths you out in a hurry.

Chipping. Here again is a stroke you can practice at home in a few spare moments. Hit some balls off the carpet into a backstop like a couch cushion or a pillow. Like putting, the point of your practice is to perfect the stroke. The goal is to hit every ball cleanly, no hitting fat, and keeping your hands relaxed as they bring the club through the ball.

Pitching. You can actually practice this at home, inside. I hook a mattress pad over a window curtain rod and hit plastic balls into the pad. It helps to hit the balls off a carpet remnant so you don’t scuff a hole in your good floor carpet. Like with chipping, you’re practicing the stroke, making clean contact and not concerning yourself with the result of the shot. How could you, anyway? The ball won’t go more than ten feet!

At the range:
If you can get out once a week, here are two practice plans:

One-hour plan

Two-hour plan

If you don’t even have time for that, practice after your round is over. I know that’s socializing time, so pay your respects to your friends at the 19th hole, then buy your bucket and go out to the range. Start by hitting a few of the shots you played well today, so you can solidify that feeling of how to hit them.

Spend most of your time on the shots that gave you problems during the day’s round. Take lots of practice swings before you hit a ball. Hit one only when you feel that your swing for this particular shot is where you want it.

Spend some time hitting pitches. Now you can practice hitting the shot to a target. Go the practice green and chip to a target, and hit some approach putts. All you had a chance to do at home is practice your stroke. Now you can practice the shot.

If you can practice at home daily, just a bit, and get live practice of some kind during the week, that will be all you need to maintain your skills and play golf that you can be proud of.

To step it up a bit, here is a professional practice plan.

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

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Hitting the Ball Off the Ground

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In this world, you have to give a little to get a little. Baseball and tennis are difficult sports because the ball we have to hit is moving so fast. Let’s slow the ball down a little, like to a complete stop, waiting for us to hit it at our leisure. Welcome to the ground, welcome to golf.

What we gave up to get a stationary ball is the freedom to hit a little above or below the ball, and now a second dimension, behind the ball, is added. The spot the clubhead has to hit is about the size of a dime, and the clubhead will be moving at about 80 miles per hour at the time. The margin for error is gone.

Learning how to pick the ball cleanly off the ground is the hardest problem new golfers have to solve. It will haunt them well into advanced golf, and may be an issue for their entire playing career.

There’s an easy way to learn this, and if you’re willing to put in the time, you can move on from wondering if you’ll hit the ball to planning exactly where you’re going to hit it.

Get a 9-iron, drop a ball in front of you, and take a stance with your feet about six inches apart. Now just chip the ball with a backswing that is no more than two feet long. The ball doesn’t have to go anywhere, you just want to focus on clean, ball first-ground second contact.

You’ll soon be able to tell if you hit the ground first, even by just a little, and also if you missed the ground completely, even though you hit the ball reasonably well. You’ll learn, too, what the perfect strike feels like, where the ball, ground, and club all come together at just the right moment. That’s your ball striking goal.

Do this exercise for a few minutes every day. Make short swings, get clean contact. You can’t get too good at it. Once you have mastered the two-foot swing, and I truly mean mastered it, lengthen your swing, maybe by about a foot. If you have problems making clean contact, go back to the two-foot swing and gradually work back to the longer swing. This is the Madsen Rule in practice.

Keep lengthening you swing, but only when you feel you are ready to. There’s no need to rush, and there are no short-cuts. This exercise builds a lifelong habit that will produce effective golf shots to the degree that you develop your skill with it. Six months of dedicated practice will get you to where you want to go.

If you have taken your time with this exercise, working in a controlled way through longer swings, being thoroughly prepared for the the time you move up, by the time you get to your full swing, you will be the ball-striker you had hoped you would be.

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

chipping, ten rules

Ten Rules For Better Chipping

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[Commentary added January 2018.]

No one hits every green. Getting your ball one-putt close from just off the green is not that hard to do if you know how. Here are ten rules that will help you get your ball tight to the hole and prevent a missed green from costing you an extra shot.

1. Read the green. The ball will roll for a considerable ways across the green, and behave just as if you had hit an approach putt. Plan a chip with all the care you give to a putt, because the objectives of each shot are the same–leaving the ball close or even sinking it.

2. Chip with the least-lofted club you can. Your bread-and-butter club would be something like a 6-iron. Use more lofted clubs only under special circumstances. Chipping with a lob wedge is a professional technique.

[I have changed my mind on this. See My Chipping Formula.]

3. Relax your mind. This is a simple shot. You are trying to save yourself a stroke, but don’t get so careful that you get too delicate and muff the shot.

4. Do not break your left wrist as you swing through impact. This leads to consistent contact and predictable distance control. A breaking left wrist is the leading cause of poor chipping by recreational golfers.

5. Hit the ball with a descending strike. The bane of golfers everywhere, from beginner to winner, is hitting the ground behind the ball on one of these simple shots. When the club comes into the ball from above, you ensure that clean, ball first-ground second contact.

[I have changed my mind on this, too. See Stop Chunking Chip Shots.]

6. Keep a light grip pressure. You want no hit in the stroke. It is hard to have a hit when you are holding the club very lightly.

7. Hit the ball off the toe of the club. This deadens the strike, leading to minimum backspin and pure roll. When the ball is hit on the sweet spot of the clubface, it can come off hot and roll too far.

[Please ignore that.]

8. Keep the club low to the ground in the follow-through with the clubface still aligned to the target. There is no forearm rotation.

9. Land the ball on the green. Regardless of how far away from the green the ball is, its first bounce must be on the green so it can start rolling. A ball that lands short can get grabbed by high grass or soft ground and stop dead, or take an odd bounce.

10. Practice from every kind of lie, from and into every kind of slope, and to every combination of ball-to-green-to-pin distances. You will never hit the same chip twice on a golf course. The more scenarios you practice, the more you will be able to handle the real scenarios the course hands you.

If there is one shot to get real good at, this is it. Being able to get up and down from anywhere builds confidence into every other part of your game, because you know you can erase your mistakes. It drives your opponents nuts, too, because a good chipper is never out of the hole.

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

brilliant ideas

Fixing the Out-of-Bounds Rule

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There are few rules golfers hate more than the stroke and distance penalty incurred for hitting a ball out of bounds. For a shot that was perhaps two feet away from leaving you with a playable next shot, golf assigns you its toughest playing penalty.

Harvey Penick says as much in his Little Red Book under the heading, Strange Penalty:

“The most embarrassing thing you can do in golf is swing your driver on the tee and completely miss the ball.
“For this humiliation, the penalty is one stroke.
“However, if you smash a drive a long way but the ball lands an inch out of bounds, the penalty is stroke and distance–in effect, a two-shot punishment for what was nearly a good drive.”

Golf (with a capital “G”) understands this. Few rules have been tweaked as often.

The problem is a neat one, as Tom Watson explains in his book about the rules of golf. He says if the penalty were distance only, as it was for a brief time, the next stroke from the same spot would be essentially a mulligan. Watson supposes hitting the tee shot on a par 3 out of bounds, teeing up the second shot, knocking it stiff, and tapping in for a par. That bothers him. It bothers me, too.

Where his argument breaks down is when he goes on to say, “…common sense demands that the procedures be the same for balls lost or out of bounds.” No, it doesn’t. We make a distinction between a ball found and lying out of bounds, and a ball that could be out of bounds, but is not found.

In the first case, it is a fact that the ball is out of bounds. The ball would be dropped in-bounds, two club-lengths from the nearest in-bounds point, but not nearer to the hole, with a one-stroke penalty. If that were not possible, or would result in an unplayable lie, the player could choose to hit another ball from the spot where this ball was hit, and take a one-stroke penalty. This was the rule from 1964 to 1968.

I know that second option is stroke and distance, but that is an option that exists in the unplayable lie rule and the water hazard rule. No reason why the OB should not have it as an option, either.

In the second case, where it is not an ascertainable fact that the ball lies out of bounds, the ball would be treated like a lost ball, and that current rule would apply.

In short, if you find your ball, a penalty less severe than stroke and distance should apply. Only if you can’t find your ball, should the stroke and distance penalty apply.

Problem solved. Now all I have to do is get rules officials from the USGA and R&A to start reading my blog, and rescue golf from this strange penalty.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

playing the game

Two Clubs and a Putter

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I’ve been going out with my grandson the past month to play golf with him at local nine-holer. I decided these rounds weren’t that big of a deal for me, so I would just take a few clubs to knock the ball around the course, and so I could carry my bag instead of using my pull cart.

I pack a 7-iron, a gap wedge, and a putter. After three rounds of this, let me tell you. You can put up a pretty good score just that set. One of the reasons I’m only taking those clubs is that I’m undergoing a difficult swing change. A 7-iron is the longest club I can reliably hit right now.

We play from the red tees, since he isn’t hitting the ball all that far yet. Still, there’s distance to be covered. The red tees don’t turn it into a pitch-and-putt layout. I tee off with the 7 and hit it from the fairway, of course, hit 7-iron punches into greens, chip with it. It makes me feel like a regular Seve Ballesteros the way I have to create shots with this club.

And you know what? They work! Last time out I started bogey, bogey, bogey, then finished par, par, par, birdie, bogey, par. Not bad.

We have a three clubs and a putter day every year at the men’s club of the course where I normally play. The first time I tried it, I took a 2-hybrid, a 7-iron, a sand wedge, and my putter. Shot a 39 from the white tees measuring 3,150 yards.

There’s something about having a limited set of clubs that frees you up, even relaxes you as you stand over a shot that is clearly not suited for the club you’re holding, about to use it not as it would “normally” be used. Now your creativity has to save the day, and this is where golf starts to get fun. “If I do a little of this and play it like that, it just might work.”

If the shot doesn’t come off, it’s no big deal, since it wasn’t supposed to anyway. But if it does, you have added a great positive experience to your mental skill set that is quite liberating. Instead of playing golf the way everybody else does, the way your pro says to, the way you see on TV, you’re playing it your way. Once you get the hang of having to create, you’ll be in touch with a skill you didn’t know you had.

Try playing a round or two from the red tees with just three clubs and see what I mean. Then move on to playing a course you normally play, from the tees you normally play, with six clubs and a putter. Francis Ouimet won the U.S. Open in 1913 with just seven clubs.

I would pack a driver, a 3-hybrid, a 5- and 7-iron, a pitching wedge, a sand wedge, and a putter. I’ll bet I could shoot a decent score, too. I’ll bet you could, too.

Golf is supposed to be fun. Do fun things with it. This is one of them.

For tips in how to hit the full set of clubs, visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

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