For any golfer who wants to play great golf
Course Management
Do you expect things to go as planned?
Aug 18th
I saw this post earlier today and I couldn’t help thinking how much it relates to golf and the way we approach it.
So often, we set high expectations for ourselves, especially when we’ve been working hard on a particular aspect of our game, like chipping, putting, or driving. Then when things don’t go as planned we stop having fun.
Never give up
Dec 6th
Never Give Up
GMac’s victory at the Chevron this weekend over Tiger Woods is a wonderful example of not giving up.
He continued fighting even as things seemed to be breaking down around him. His miraculous bogey on 17 kept him in it. Tiger then hit it tight on 18 giving McDowell a must make putt with a lot of pressure. He made a gritty 15 footer for birdie putting the pressure on Tiger’s short putt.
On the first playoff hole, as they played 18 again, Tiger left himself with an almost identical distance for his approach shot. Graham had a shot from about 175 over the trees. He hit a good shot and left himself a nearly identical putt to the one he made to force the playoff.
Lessons from the WGC Bridgestone Invitational at Firestone
Aug 9th
This week’s WGC Bridgestone Invitational provided a unique learning experience.
Did their expectations do them in?
We saw the world’s number one player, struggle to his worst finish as a professional, while the number two player in the world was coping with a new kind of pressure, the chance to take the number spot away from Tiger Woods.
So why weren’t Tiger and Phil able to muster anything better than +7 and +8 respectively? Was the course unfair? Hunter Mahan shot a 64 on Sunday to win by two shots. Goosen, Furyk, Harrington and Oosthuizen had good rounds in the mid 60s. So I would say that the course was not unfairly setup.
Today’s Round – swing changes and surprising strategy pay off
May 14th
Today I headed up to play Richter Park Golf Course, one of the public course gems in Danbury, Connecticut. I was unsure of what results I was going to get as this morning I decided to implement some swing changes. I also upon arrival at the course, took my 4 wood out of the bag. This club has been giving me trouble recently as the shaft has a completely different flex than what I am now used to in my irons. I decided that I did not even want to be tempted by it.
After hitting a few wayward drives (two that went OB on me) I decided to also leave the driver in the bag the rest of the round. I just wasn’t feeling comfortable with it and it just wasn’t working well with the swing changes. Besides Richter Park is not so long that I would miss the driver. So I spent most of the round teeing off my 18 degree Cobra Baffler pro hybrid and decided that I would play the par 5s as 3 shot holes.
I was hitting the hybrid probably 20 yards behind where I would normally hit my driver and so much straighter. On one hole I went hybrid – lob wedge and ended up about 8 feet from the pin slightly above the hole. The only hole where driver would really have made a difference for me was 18. I thinned the hybrid and ended up with 205 to the back of the green, to a green perched roughly 15 yards above me. I would have proffered a shorter second shot but that’s golf.
I was pretty amazed at how well the swing changes worked. My irons were crisp and very straight. I ended up with an 81 that could have been even better had I left the driver in the car from the beginning. I had 2 drives that went OB on me, and without those penalties the score could have been much lower. However, my irons were crisp, as were my wedges. I had really solid distance control all day and I’m excited for what these swing changes will bring.
Be your own caddy
Apr 26th
As I kid I learned how to play golf on a golf course with caddies. We never took the golf cart, but we usually had a couple of caddies.
The caddies were great. Not only were they super nice and friendly, they knew the course so well that you couldn’t help but play better. They kept you in the game, recommended the right strategies and clubs.
I don’t get to play with a caddy anymore. So I’ve had to learn to become my own caddy. I’ve had to learn the right strategies. I’ve had to learn to deal with the disappointment of making a bad swing. The caddies were great with that. They could always make you laugh.
I think that if everybody could play with a good caddy, that the scores of the average golfer would really drop. Playing with a caddy really takes pressure off. Your mind can be much more quiet, thinking about the shot, rather than trying to calculate everything. But since most people don’t get to play with caddies then they need some help.
Golf perfection is impossible and not needed to play good golf
Apr 26th
You ever get mad when you don’t pull off a shot, that realistically you had no business trying? Happens to me too. Just because we hit that shot once in our life we think we should be able to do it on command.
Of course, that’s not even close to reality. Perfect golf is impossible even for the players at the very top of their game who are the best in the world.
But you don’t need to play perfect to score well. When I look back on my best scoring rounds, I wasn’t playing perfectly. I was leaving myself with good opportunities to score and was able to cash in on enough of them to end up with a good score.
Aside from perfection in golf being unattainable, the main problem with trying to get it is that it puts pressure on every part of your game. That is the quickest way to score badly.
Getting the most out of your golf GPS rangefinder
Apr 17th
GPS rangefinders are wonderful things. They give you the distances you need to make smart decisions. They give you the distances to hazards, to carry over the hazards. They give you distances to fairway targets, and of course the front, center and back of the green.
This information is vital if you want to make good decisions on the course. What they don’t give you is the strategy based on the conditions of the day, how you’re striking the ball, and the pin placements. They also don’t take any pressure into account if you’re playing a Nassau, a match against a buddy, or a tournament.
Some of you are lucky enough to play with caddies and if you to have a good caddy, he or she, can save you many strokes. But for those who don’t have our own caddies or get to play routinely with caddies we need some help making those decisions. If I’m playing a par 5, and I have 245 yards to the pin, 230 to the front, and 260 to the back I will know the distances I need to reach the green, but the rangefinder can’t tell me if it’s a smart decision.
Mickelson setting course management back for the average golfer
Apr 16th
Phil Mickelson’s miracle shot on 13 on Sunday will go down as one of the great shots of Masters history. It will also be a big setback for the average golfer.
There is no doubt that Phil Mickelson has an overload of talent. He has shown that over years pulling off incredible shots. But he has taken risks that have cost him tournaments, most notably the US Open at Winged Foot.
The problem isn’t that Phil tries those shots and sometimes pulls them off. The problem is that he influences golfers and they begin to think they can do the same. We’d all love to be able to strike the ball like Phil but even most golfers in the field at Augusta on Sunday would have laid up. With Phil’s talent he would have scored a birdie 80% of the time laying up, and he in fact scored a birdie.
Was it a heroic shot? Absolutely. Was it smart? Probably not. The par 5 13th had been giving up lots of birdies. Phil’s mistake is that he brought bogey into play. Luckily for him it didn’t turn out that way, but pine straw is not easy to hit out off. He could easily have ended up in the creek, pitching onto the green for an un-guaranteed par. The conservative route wouldn’t have brought bogey into play unless something disastrous had happened.
Have you ever had a stress free round of golf?
Apr 15th
Do you rush to the first tee?
What are your rounds of golf like? Do you rush to the tee without much of warmup, maybe passing by the practice putting green to take a couple of putts?
Do you then wonder if the number of balls you have in your golf bag are going to last the whole round or whether you’ll need to reload at the turn?
Bobby Jones had to let go of his anger in order to play his best golf
Apr 13th
While watching the Masters this weekend there was a really interesting segment about Bobby Jones. Although he had a 14 year career as an amateur, it was only in the last seven years that he won his majors.
It turns out that he had a bit of an anger issue. And when he lost his temper, his game went right out the door with it. It took him years to get over that and to decide that all he needed to do was beat “Old Man Par’, instead of everyone else and that’s when he started to win majors.
I think we’ve all felt something similar. When a bad hole gets to us and rather than staying calm and just playing the round, we get off any plan that we had, and we start to take big risks and end up in worse trouble. I wrote about John Daily doing this a while back.
