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My So-So Distances

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Ten years ago, when I was playing my best, I had a 9 handicap. Now, I’m 74 years old, with health problems, and the game I played back then is a distant memory. So I have adapted. But that’s another post.

What I want to tell you today that you don’t have to hit the ball out of sight to score well. For recreational golfers, there are other things that are much more important than distance. Let me get right to the point. These are the distances that got me into single-digit golf:

Driver (total) – 235
(remaining distances are carry only)
2-hybrid – 200
3-hybrid – 187
4-hybrid – 174
5-iron – 158
6-iron – 150
7-iron – 142
8-iron – 132
9-iron – 122
PW – 113

What got me into single digits with these rather unimpressive distances was:
hitting the ball very straight,
being a very good chipper,
being a very good aproach putter,
knowing how to hit off any unusual lie you can name,
playing shots I could hit, not ones somebody way better than me would hit,
hitting the ball to high-value targets,
thinking only of the next shot; leaving behind everything else, good or bad.

Distance is nice to have, but each of us can hit the ball only so far. The trick is to develop a game around the distance you have, not the distance you want.

putting

Two Ways to Putt

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There are two ways to putt.

1. Read the green to get the line and the distance, step into a stance you have practiced, and hit the ball with a stroke you have practiced.

2. Get up to the ball and think to yourself, “Hit the ball into the hole.” Then do it.

One or the other.

practice

How Good Is Good?

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All this practicing I’m doing with my wedges has me thinkng about practice itself. It got me to remember something I read about practice a while ago, which I will adapt for this post.

You can practice something until you get it right.

Then you can keep practicing until you cannot get it wrong.

brilliant ideas

Bob the Influencer?

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I’m in the wrong business. It’s because I am so far behind the times.

I just read an article on GolfWRX about Paige Spiranac who is making over $8M a year on her Instagam account. Paige was a decent college golfer, but not good enough to make it on the LPGA Tour. So she turned to leveraging her looks, and why shouldn’t she? (see photo below, and no, I am not trying to turn this blog into something like the fleshy part of Tumblr)

She gets paid (I don’t know how this works) $8-12K PER POST!!! The nearest PGA poster, Scottie Scheffler, gets a bit over $2K per post, Xander Schauffele just peeks over the four-figure barrier, and the rest of them get peanuts.

Now I’ve been an influencer since 2009, and most of the time I influence you in the right direcction. Maybe I need to figure out this Instagram business.

What do you think?

grip

The Soft Golf Grip

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Everybody knows that you should hold a golf club lightly. As Harvey Penick said, Arnold Palmer does not hold the club lightly, but you are not Arnold Palmer.

But still, I don’t think you should of hold the club lightly.

Instead, I think you should hold the club softly. That word describes how the handle should press against the fleshly pads of your palm and your fingers when you enclose them around it. Softly.

I don’t really know what a light grip feels like. But I know when the handle feels soft in my hands, yet secure, and so do you. Use that kind of grip and see what you get.

playing the game

Danielle Kang’s Distances

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I got the recent Golf Digest magazine yesterday, which put the distance or direction debate to bed for good. At least for me.

There is a feature every month called “What’s in My Bag”, where a touring pro talks about the clubs in their bag. There is a sidebar that shows how far they hit each club.

This month the pro was Danielle Kang. I looked at the distance sidebar and almost fell off my chair.

When I was playing my best, my distances were hers, plus or minus a yard. And yet, she is one of the best female golfers in the world, I was a hack trying to get a single-digit handicap.

We can talk about short game and putting, I have no doubt that she is much better than I was in both those parts of the game.

But the real difference is in the long game. She is much straighter every time she hits the ball. I was just trying to get the ball on the green. She is aiming for a quadrant of the green and hitting it.

True, you need to be good around the green, but without a swing that hits the ball straight, you’re playing for bogeys and hard pars.

Birdies? She makes more in one round than I make all year.

golf swing

I’m Hitting Lots of Wedges

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It has been quite lately on the blog. I haven’t been playing because it is so wet out here, but I have been practicing in my back yard between showers.

My practice is solely hitting wedges. Chips, half wedges, and occasionally a full wedge. What I am aiming for is perfect contact and hitting the straight at my target.

I’ve been hitting over 100 balls a day, those little golf-ball sized plastic balls that we called holey balls because they have holes in them.

This is what I have learned so far.

Consistent contact comes from controlling the swing with the hip turn. An arm swing is a crap shoot, and focusing on your hands is even worse.

Now the way I’m turning my hips and when, and what it feels like, is something I cannot describe it at all. It just came out of hitting more than 1,000 golf balls, and it’s easy for me to do the same way time after time.

A second thing is that you can only make that perfect contact when your grip is relaxed. I don’t want to say light, as in pressure. Relaxed is better because to relax your grip, everything else has to be relaxed, too, which is all to the good.

As for direction, aim is important, but not the whole story. You must have a idea of what path you want the clubhead to be following after the ball has been struck, and that path is straight at the target.

I find a spot on the ground about three inches in front of the ball along the target line, and telling myself to swing the club squarely along that line and over that spot. From there, it’s a subconscious mind thing.

I think I have a workable solution to those two problems. Now all I have to do is hit a few thousand more balls to make it automatic.

Then there’s distance. I’m saving that for last because there is no point is calibrating distances before the stroke is good enough.

Every now and then I swing a 6-iron, once, using the full wedge swing to see what happens. The same thing happens: perfect contact, ball goes toward the target.

As for all this practice, see this post, probably the most valuable on in the entire blog, and this one, quoting Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim.

practice

Winter Practice, 2005

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This is a post from my first web site, before WordPress. I had to program it entirely by myself in html. Those were the days.

This advice is still good.
—–
In January and February, shun the regulation course and find an executive layout. Make sure you go out as a single, because you are going to be hitting a lot of mulligans. What you are going to do is par every hole before you move on to the next one.

Here’s why. When you play a game of golf by the rules, if you hit a bad shot, or the wrong shot, you never get a chance to practice it until you get it right, or hit a different shot that might be better. You have to move on to your next shot without getting to correct what you did wrong.

First off, this method is for 100 yards and in. You don’t get do-overs for tee shots and approach shots. Fix those mistakes those on the range.

After you have gotten the ball within 100 yards of the hole, take a mulligan if (a) your pitch doesn’t land on the green and stop, or (b) your chip doesn’t end up within 3 feet of the hole, (c) your bunker shot doesn’t get out, (d) your approach putt doesn’t finish within 3 feet of the hole, or (e) your second putt doesn’t go in. If you make all those corrections, you should end up scoring a par on every hole.

What you accomplished: You will have learned how to make pars and how to save pars, and learned it under playing conditions which I should not have to explain the benefits of.

When you take you game to the big courses starting in March, you will have the skill and confidence it takes to play well around the greens and shoot the scores you deserve.

Note: Sorry I found this old post in mid-February. It’s still not too late to give it a try.

putting

Reading Short Putts

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There’s a common reason why you miss short putts. I mean putts of four feet or less. The reason is that you don’t read them correctly and a putt that should have gone straight in slithers off to the left.

How did that happen?

I think you know that when you read a 20-foot putt you pay attention to what is happening in the last few feet around the hole. That, and you’re reading the putt from about 25 feet away from the hole, make local slope, and the overall tilt of the green, clearly visible.

But with a four-foot putt, you might glance at it from seven or eight feet away, and that’s too close to detect what you can see from far away.

The answer is to back up and read those shorties from at least 15 feet away. Farther back would be even better. From there, you can see where the ball will roll to.

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