This month, as I was leafing through the current issue of Golf Magazine (Feb. 2008), I came across an article featuring Retief Goosen about how to dominate par three holes. It’s a nice article with some good tips, but there was one bit of information in there that blew me away. Now, I should preface that by saying that I’m amazed sometimes at what I think I understand but really don’t, at least until something clicks. This article gave me one of those moments. We all know all the old standard par three course management tips about staying away from trouble and not under-clubbing. What clicked for me in the article was the par three scoring average for Goosen, Tiger, Phil, and Vijay. Going back 1,468 holes (that’s a lot of seasons), Goosen’s par three scoring average is 3.02 strokes per hole. That’s right, it’s over par. Tiger was the best of the four at 2.97 strokes per hole. You’re talking about the guys on Tour that usually score in the 60′s. If I had
Use The Tee To Your Advantage
Most people know that the teeing ground consists of a rectangle whose width is defined by the two tee markers and whose depth is defined by two club lengths back from the markers. Too often, I see people just going right to the center of the tee markers and hitting their drive without consideration for their typical shot shape and to the shape of the shot they intend to hit on that hole. One of my favorite course management tips: tee up your ball after careful consideration of the shot you’re about to hit. For example, assume your typical shot is a slice. If you tee up the ball on the right side of the tee (close to the right marker) and aim for the left side of the fairway, you have a lot more room for the shape of the shot you typically play. If it does what you expect, you’ll be in the middle of the fairway. If it unexpectedly goes dead straight, then you’re on the left side of the fairway. And
Play It Like A Chess Match
Effective course management means you should be playing the game like a chess match, thinking a few moves ahead. When you start the day, you know several things including your skill level and what your current tendencies are. For instance, maybe for the last week, your tendency has been to draw the ball, and your consistency has been off with a number of thinly-struck toe hits so your misses have been short and left. You should be attacking every hole with that information in mind. Before you stand over every shot you should be thinking where you’re trying to hit the ball and where a miss is most likely to go. Then you need to evaluate how likely you are to miss, and what the consequences are for the next shot if you do miss. If you’re hitting a driver off the tee and a sweeping hook that goes shorter than you expect has you flirting with an out of bounds area, then you really should be thinking of a more conservative approach if you
Don’t Short Yourself
A common bit of golf knowledge is that high handicappers tend to under-club too often. All things being equal, this is a fix that can be made that will result in instant improvement. Many times, ego gets in the way. But in reality, most of the time it comes down to playing statistical probabilities. Think of it like this: every golf shot we make that employs a full swing will either be perfect or will contain some degree of error. Let’s pretend that skulling the ball over the back of the green isn’t an issue for now. That means that each full shot is either going to go the precise yardage and direction that we’re expecting or it’s going to be short and possibly right or left of the target. This will happen through mistakes or inconsistency. Hitting a ball off-center on the club face will result in some lost yardage, even with today’s forgiving clubs. Now we have to ask ourselves: how many shots that we hit every round are perfect? Technically a perfect
Decisions, Decisions
It seems like at times I get so mentally sloppy that I can’t be trusted to make course management decisions on my own. Case in point: yesterday, I played at my new club for the first time since I joined (and for the first time there in a year or two). I wasn’t playing great, but the conditions were pretty rough. The course was saturated, there was a ton of wind, and the greens had recently been de-thatched for the spring and haven’t healed yet which made putting tough. So I’m teeing off on the 5th or 6th hole (I’m still trying to memorize the holes) and there’s some water kind of off to the right off the tee, but not in a position to be any trouble. I was kind of tired from a session at the driving range and got lazy, let myself get out of whack and duffed the ball weakly low and right off the tee. The ball either skipped once on the water or just made it across on it’s
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