That’s right. I said it. You want to play better golf? Positive attitude is a great way to do it.

I’ve never read a book that covers the mental game that advocates anything but a positive attitude on the golf course. I’ve never heard otherwise in a lesson or from a pro or from watching an instructional program on television.

So why is it that so many players have such a poor attitude on the course? I’ll tell you why - they don’t realize the importance of the mental game and they let their emotions get the best of them.

Golf is an expensive game. It takes a lot of time to play, and a LOT more time to play well, in the form of practice and exercise and lessons. Why would anyone want to get anything less than the maximum out of a round?

I’m sad to say that I succumbed to negative attitude on the course a week or so ago.

I was struggling with my finesse wedges. I had just duffed about a 100 yard wedge up to about 60 yards. I tried to regain my composure as I approached my ball. I rehearsed my next swing several times and felt like I had it. I stepped up to the ball and did the same thing again. Fat city.

Add together a few bad shots a stressful couple of weeks at work and I was drowning in negativity. I slammed my club down, clenched my teeth, and grunted. It was not a pretty picture and somewhat out of character for me.

Eventually, I pulled myself together and recovered. I regained a good attitude after a few holes, but the damage was done.

Emotions are a very powerful thing, both positive and negative. Drawing upon positive emotions can give a boost when things are looking grim.

Let me ask you a question - what’s the worst shot you ever hit? Most of us can’t even easily come up with a list of candidates, except maybe from the last several rounds. See? You’ve already learned to get rid of those negative thoughts. It just took longer than it should have. Now, what was the best shot you ever hit? I bet you already have a few possibilities in mind. How does it feel thinking about it? Good, I bet.

If you can find a way to harness that kind of positive energy, it feeds back into itself. It shouldn’t just be the product of good shots - it can also be part of the cause.

We can’t control all the adversities we face on the golf course. We’re going to hit bad shots. We’re going to get bad lies. We’re going to get bad breaks.

What we can control is how we deal with those things.

Let the negativity creep in and you’re going to drown. Find a way to stay positive, and you’ll suddenly find the game a whole lot easier. You’ll feed off that energy and find that these bouts of adversity are just tiny bumps in the road to success.

Most conventional teaching has a player keeping the hands ahead of the ball at address to promote a crisp, descending blow. Unfortunately, many players try to do too much of a good thing and take that bit of advice way too far. I’ve even caught myself doing it.

It’s true - when addressing a chip shot, the hands should be ahead of the ball (closer to the target). But how much? I personally use the technique that Dave Pelz describes in his Short Game Bible. He recommends that the hands be aligned with the inside of the left thigh.

To recap his chipping address technique: stand with the feet very close together and the ball opposite your right ankle (for right-handers) and your weight slightly more on the left side (about 65%). The feet should be flared about 20 degrees toward the target. It’s helpful to align the ball to your right ankle before turning your feet toward the target, because the change of perspective makes it hard to tell where the ball is really aligned, at least until you’ve had time to practice. You should be standing close to the ball, enough to get the heel of the club slightly off the turf and you should be aligned parallel left of the target.

When considering how far ahead the hands should be, the key thing to consider is that the feet should be very close together. This means that even with the ball aligned with your back ankle, the hands aren’t all that far ahead of the ball.

Try an experiment: address a chip shot as I described above, and set your hands so that they’re aligned with the inside of your left thigh. They’re not all that far ahead, are they? Now, move your front foot toward the target maybe a foot or so so your stance is about as wide as you’d use for a finesse wedge shot. Make sure your hands are still aligned with the inside of your left thigh and your weight is still favoring your left side (about 65%).

See how much different that is? Your hands are waaaaaaay ahead of the ball now. I see players fairly regularly chipping like that. They take a much wider stance than necessary and set their hands too far ahead. Or, some will take a narrow stance but still set their hands much further forward, toward the middle or even the outside of the left thigh.

So what happens when you do that?

That will cause a much steeper angle of attack and you run the risk of bringing the club right down on top of the ball. Or, even worse, you may start to incorporate some body sway when you make a chipping stroke because your subconscious is astute enough to realize that you’re going to bring your wedge down on top of the ball and it doesn’t want that to happen, so you end up stubbing it into the turf. Either way, you’ll probably experience some inconsistency.

Remember that the club should hit the ball with a slightly descending blow. Address the ball as I described above and don’t let those hands get too far ahead and you’ll be on your way to making a much more consistent chipping stroke.

It always seems to get worse before it gets better. I already knew that, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

After last week’s video analysis, I started to work on improving my hip action. I have a tendency to slide laterally toward the target on the down swing, causing several problems. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be one of those quick fixes that just clicks into place suddenly. It’s a long-standing problem of mine.

At the driving range yesterday I tried to key on really rotating my hips instead of laterally sliding. My swing thought was a common one for this type of situation: pull my left pocket behind me.

Of course, such a drastic change threw me all out of sync and I was hitting the ball pretty poorly. Every so often, I started to catch on and would hit one that felt great, but I wasn’t able to make it repetitive. On the course later on, it was more of the same. More often than not, I found myself reverting to the old hip slide.

That’s natural because I just started to work on the new move, so it’s a long way from becoming muscle memory. On the course, you have to trust your swing and let it become automatic. That’s one positive thing I had going for me. I wasn’t getting too mechanical in my swing thoughts, so my body just reverted to what it knows well. It’s nice to know that my mental game is improving that way.

I’m interested to see how this will progress my overall move toward the one-plane swing. Right now, I’m keying on my hip turn, but Jim Hardy’s one-plane swing concept focuses on turning the torso and shoulders hard because of the rotational action of the swing. I’ll need to make sure that as I progress, I eventually start to incorporate that into my learning.

This is one swing change that I’m going to have to dig out of the dirt. It’s going to take a while, so that’s a little frustrating. It looks like we’re in for some rain today, so I’m going to have to just sit here and stew over it.

One of the great things about golf is that it allows skilled players to compete with not-so-skilled players on a level playing field, all through the wonderful handicap system. Through the miracle of mathematics, players enter scores into a computer and presto, they get a handicap index. Then, they turn that into strokes on the score card and everyone is happy.

Sounds simple, right? Not exactly. The USGA handicap system is extremely sophisticated and complex. If you’ve ever wondered what it all means - well, I can’t tell you what all of it means, but let’s cover some of the basics and get your understanding of handicaps up to scratch (sorry for the handicap pun).

Before we get into it, I want to mention that golf handicaps are serious business. The USGA handicap manual is the final word on the subject, and it should be consulted for the latest official rules and regulations. Click here to access it online.

Handicap Index

Let’s start with the most basic concept: the Handicap Index. According to the USGA:

A “Handicap Index” is the USGA’s service mark used to indicate a measurement of a player’s potential ability on a course of standard playing difficulty. It is expressed as a number taken to one decimal place (e.g., 10.4) and is used for conversion to a Course Handicap.

This is where it all begins. This is the number that the Golf Handicap and Information Network^® (GHIN^®) system spits out every two weeks after you’ve entered at least five scores. Once you have a handicap index, then you’re portable. You can go to any other course that has been rated and compete against another player with a handicap index.

To do that, you need to convert your Handicap Index into a Course Handicap. Each course is different, so there are a couple of pieces of information that go into the computation: The USGA Course Rating and the Slope Rating

USGA Course Rating

The USGA Course Rating is defined as:

A “USGA Course Rating” is the USGA’s mark that indicates the evaluation of the playing difficulty of a course for a scratch golfer under normal course and weather conditions. It is expressed as strokes taken to one decimal place, and is based on yardage and other obstacles to the extent that they affect the scoring ability of a scratch golfer.

What that means is that the USGA has come and evaluated a particular course to gauge the difficulty. Aside from yardage and obstacles, things like effective length are calculated. For instance, the prevailing wind or relative quickness of the fairways is considered.

It’s quite a comprehensive analysis of a course.

Less well known than the USGA Course Rating is the Bogey Rating. It’s like the Course Rating, but instead gauges the relative difficulty of a course for a bogey golfer instead of a scratch player.

Slope Rating

The other piece of required course-specific information is the Slope Rating. The Slope Rating is defined as:

A “Slope Rating” is the USGA’s mark that indicates the measurement of the relative difficulty of a course for players who are not scratch golfers compared to the USGA Course Rating (e.g., compared to the difficulty of a course for scratch golfers). A Slope Rating is computed from the difference between the Bogey Rating and the USGA Course Rating. The lowest Slope Rating is 55 and the highest is 155. A golf course of standard playing difficulty has a Slope Rating of 113.

For men, the Slope Rating is computed using the following formula: 5.381 x (Bogey Rating - USGA Course Rating). For women, the formula is: 4.24 x (Bogey Rating - USGA Course Rating).

Wow! That’s a lot of work to get a handicap!

The good news is, you don’t have to do any heavy math. The Course Rating and Slope Rating are done for you ahead of time. Your handicap index is calculated through a very complex formula. Now, you just need to turn that into strokes given or gotten.

Some courses have handicap charts where you just look up the Course Handicap in a big table. The other alternative is to compute it by hand.

To do that, you simply multiply your Handicap Index by the Slope Rating and divide by 113, then round to the nearest whole number. Let’s say your Handicap Index is 10.2 and your home course has a Slope Rating of 121, as mine does. That results in a Course Handicap of 11 strokes. That means you’d get 11 strokes when competing against a scratch player.

Applying The Course Handicap

Now, all that remains is to apply your handicap to your score. If you get 11 strokes, as in the example above, then you’d get one stroke back on each of the 11 most difficult holes. If you look at your scorecard, there’s a handicap listed for each hole (one for the men and one for the ladies). These are used to order the holes by relative difficulty. On each of the holes numbered 1 through 11, you’d adjust your gross score by subtracting a stroke.

That’s it! Welcome to the level playing field.

Equitable Stroke Control

Equitable Stroke Control is a mechanism that keeps handicaps from making huge swings as a result of blow-up holes. Handicaps are supposed to be representative of potential playing ability. Even a scratch player can have a bad hole now and again with a really high score. Without some protection in place, handicaps would fluctuate too drastically.

ESC is a cap placed on how large a score you can count for handicap purposes for an individual hole. For a scratch player, no score of higher than double bogey can be counted. For instance, say that a scratch player scores a 10 on a par-four hole during a round. For handicap purposes, the score would be adjusted before entering it into the handicap system. The score for the hole would be a 6, dropping 4 strokes from the final score.

Players with higher handicaps are allowed to post scores composed of hole scores higher than double bogey. Refer to the handicap manual for a table of ESC limits.

Criticism

The USGA has put a lot of effort into developing a robust handicap system. The question you might have: is it fair?

One of the criticisms I’ve heard is that low-handicappers are at a disadvantage when playing against high-handicappers. The reasoning behind that is that for a scratch player, scores don’t vary much. On the other hand, high-handicappers are much more likely to have wide swings in scores. It might be a 95 one day and 80 the next. In competition, a high handicapper is more likely to have a “round of a lifetime” and end up with something crazy like a net 60 score. A scratch amateur is less likely to do that.

That’s part of the reason that competitions use flights, so that there are several levels of players. That ensures that there isn’t too large a gap in skill levels.

Another issue that crops up is sand bagging, where players enter purposely inflated scores in hopes of getting a higher handicap and thus undeserved strokes. This isn’t really a weakness in the handicap system, though. Like golf itself, the integrity of handicaps relies on the integrity of the players. Cheating is cheating, and sand bagging is cheating.

There’s another class of pseudo-sandbaggers: players that keep honest scores, but who don’t really try as hard, and don’t score as well, during rounds that don’t count. These players may not intend to cheat the system, but the end result is the same: an inflated handicap.

In spite of the criticisms, my personal feeling is that the handicap system does a fairly good job of leveling the playing field for players of differing ability. It’s certainly better than negotiating strokes on the first tee, or not at all.

There’s So Much More

Believe it or not, this post barely scratches the surface of the handicap system. It really is that complex and extensive. There are caveats for tournament scores versus practice scores, nine-hole scores, unacceptable scores, and so much else.

The good news is, players only really need to know a few of the concepts, and I pretty much covered those above. Play honest rounds (by the rules), keep and accurate score, enter it with ESC applied and you’re doing your part. Your Handicap Index will be as valid as it can be.

As I said at the top, refer to the USGA website for all the details about the handicap system. If you’re interested in learning more, the online reference has more information than you probably want to know. Enjoy, and remember - keep accurate scores and post them all, or else I’m not giving you any strokes (I’ll take strokes, though).

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Further Reading:

USGA Handicap Information

Golf Handicap and Information Network^® and GHIN^® are registered trademarks of the United States Golf Association.

It’s been an interesting week. My swing went south, so it seemed like the perfect time to do something I’ve been meaning to do. I broke out the video camera for some analysis. I’d like to share the video here, but my technology is a little outdated, making it difficult to get the videos uploaded in a usable form, so we’ll just talk about it until I work that issue out.

My main goals were to see how I’m progressing with the one-plane swing and to see if I could figure out my swing problems. Over the last week, I haven’t been playing terribly, but I’ve been seeing the following symptoms:

• Contact with the ball has degraded slightly
• I’ve been smothering the ball, especially with the driver
• I’ve been blocking the driver way right

With those things in mind, I broke down the video this morning when I got home and took a lot of notes. I was very interested with what I saw. Some things were better than I thought, and some things were worse.

One positive thing I saw was that my swing plane on the back swing was pretty good. My perception was that I wasn’t quite on plane yet. However, my left arm was just about perfectly on plane. On some of my shots, the club was in good position, but sometimes it was getting on top of the plane.

Another positive I saw was that my posture is pretty decent. I’m bent over a little more at address, which is a fundamental of the one-plane swing. One thing I’d like to change is a little slumping in my shoulders, and I’d like to get my chin a little higher.

Also, one other good thing I noticed was a full 90-degree shoulder turn in the back swing. That’s right where it should be.

There weren’t a lot of notable positives beyond that. There were quite a few negatives, though.

One big one that I had perceived without the video is that my left wrist is not flat enough at the top of the back swing. Often, it was very cupped.

If you don’t understand what I mean by “cupped”, here’s what I’m talking about. Hold your arm out in front of you with your palm facing the floor. Bend your hand toward the ceiling without moving your arm. Your wrist is now cupped.

Doing that at the top of the back swing causes the club face to be very open. To get back to square, the hands need to be flipped closed near impact. This is a possible cause of some snap hooks I’ve been seeing.

The biggest problem I saw was a serious hip slide on the down swing. So much so, that my weight was getting to the outside of my left foot my impact. That’s causing me a whole slew of problems.

The one-plane swing is very rotational. The player’s head remains fairly steady during the swing, and the idea of “staying behind the ball” is not part of the one-plane swing philosophy. The player is encouraged to stay centered during the swing and turn the upper body hard through impact.

What I saw on video was the down swing starting with that lateral slide, starting a chain reaction of other problems. The club immediately got very steep (more vertical than the swing plane) as the down swing started. That forced me to get my head behind the ball and tilt my spine more to the right as I approached impact. This is a defense mechanism to keep me from smothering the ball. With my weight shifting so far left and the club getting so steep, it’s the only way to keep from coming right down on top of the ball. Obviously, I’m failing at times on the course and seeing some smothered shots.

Tweaks

The biggest tweaks coming up are going to be on the driving range.

By far, the most important thing I need to work on is conquering that lateral hip slide. That will help me iron out several of the problems I’m seeing. I also want to work on getting my left wrist flatter in the back swing.

Those two things are my immediate concern.