For any golfer who wants to play great golf
Course Management
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.
Game Sense: Tee to Green
Apr 12th
If you want to be a better golfer, then you need to learn more than the average golfer. It’s amazing to me, how few people ever take a short game or putting lesson. It seems like all any golfer wants to do is hit it farther.
I’ve been putting into practice the things I’ve learned from Eben, during the development of “Game Sense: Tee to Green“, and it is really helping me.
When I interviewed Eben about course management, he ended up sharing so much information. He really has a wealth of knowledge. He helped Nick Faldo, after Faldo had lost the feel on his putting. He’s helped other tour players and even long drive champions Sean “the beast” Fister and Art Sellinger.
The things he shared with me during the recording of the “Game Sense” program, have had a major impact on my game. Here’s what’s happened with me: Read the rest of this entry »
The risks of forcing shots
Mar 30th
What can we learn from the professional golfers we love to watch? We can learn a lot.
On this weeks episode of “Being John Daly” we saw Daly’s meltdown in the last round of the tournament in Mayakoba, Mexico. By his own admission, he was going for too much. He made some bad decisions and he compounded the errors by trying to hit it farther, or draw it more, or going after too many pins. He was forcing it and he paid the price.
He knew that he didn’t need to hit driver, that it was a perfect 3 wood golf course for him. But when things started to go south, the driver came out to play.
Instead of taking his medicine and getting back to the strategies that got him there, he took unnecessary risks, and he felt he had to do that because the tournament was getting away from him. But that is precisely the time that he needed to play within himself.
Bad decisions are worse than bad swings
Mar 29th
According to the National Golf Foundation more than half of all golfers shoot 100 or more, and only 1 in 4 can break 90 consistently.
Only 5% of golfers can shoot lower than 80.
With all of the advances in technology and the the improvements in the quality of the golf courses as well as the availability of access to golf professional and teachers you would expect this number to have improved over the last 20 years but it really has not. So what is going on? Why are golfers not getting better? And how can you use this information to become a golfer who does improve?
I think the number one reason golfers don’t score is they make bad decisions that costs them more shots than they should take.
