I know I do. The WGC Accenture Match Play Championship really reminds me of that fact. Of course, I enjoy playing and watching all forms of golf. But there’s something about that one-on-one competition that really gets me going. Playing a stroke play tournament provides a definite set of mental and physical challenges, but in the end, you just need to go out there and put up the best score you can. The rest is out of your hands. Playing against someone in match play adds a whole new dimension. It’s not about going out and shooting a score. It’s about playing the individual. Getting out-driven by 40 yards by a fellow competitor in stroke play doesn’t carry the same weight as it does in a match, where that hole is on the line. Same thing for stuffing a wedge close. Gamesmanship can become a bigger part of a match than it can during a stroke play event. That one-on-one situation just leaves so many openings for mental manipulation of your opponent. I love it!

Long putters have been around for several years. You might have heard of them referred to as “belly putters”. That only really describes some of them. For those unaware, I’m talking about putters that are significantly longer than what we’d think of as a standard putter. The basic idea is that a player holds the end of the putter to their belly, chest, or chin. What that does is produce a more consistent pendulum stroke, removing some of the things that we now recognize as flaws in the modern putting stroke, such as wrist break. The benefits aren’t just perceived, though. In his Putting Bible, Dave Pelz recommends giving it a try. His tests of thousands of players from his scoring game schools show that the majority of them make more putts of 6 feet or less with long putters than with any other putting method. His testing also shows that anchoring the putter under the chin (creating more of a vertical pendulum) is marginally better than fixing it to the chest or belly. Long

Over the years, I’ve known people or just overheard conversations of people who seem obsessed with backspin. Of course, every golf shot that isn’t rolling forward has backspin. I’m referring to shots into greens that spin backward from where they land. It reminds me of a story involving Tommy Armour. He was asked by a member at Winged Foot how to spin the ball back, like the pros do. Armour asked the player how often he hit the ball past the hole, to which the member replied, “Why, hardly ever.” Armour’s response summed up the situation nicely: “Then, what do you want to spin it back for?” I personally very rarely spin the ball back. It’s not a conscious decision. The ball just never reacts like that for me. I typically hit the ball high and hard. Any well-struck shot with a short iron normally hits the green and ends up within a couple of feet of the pitch mark, if the greens are receptive. When they’re hard and fast, those factors come into play

Recently, I stepped on to the first tee with my brother for the start of a 9-hole round and virtually the first thing out of his mouth was, “What are we playing for?” Naturally, my gut reaction was, “so I can get better and become a golf pro”, but I saved that one for myself and just told him that we could play for anything he wanted. Within the next 30 seconds, I was just trying to understand what I was on the hook for. I think it was a $1 a hole skins match with $0.50 pars, $1 birdies, $1 greenies, $1 sandies and who knows what else. I just went out and played my normal game (I had an average round) and ended up with $5.50 at the end. It had me thinking, though: how many people gamble on golf? Let’s just consider games that a person is a player in, not betting on the PGA Tour or anything else. Since I’ve been playing the game, I’ve known people who refuse to bet