Photo: Robert1407/Flickr

When you end up in a bunker, the last thing you want to try to do is pick it clean as you try to get it out. A properly played bunker shot results in the ball being thrown out on a cushion of sand. Typically, you want your club head to contact the sand about two inches behind the ball.

I found a helpful drill from Marty Fleckman over at About.com, called the “Point of Entry Drill“. I’ve done it myself in the past (same principle, different implementation) with positive results. It really helps to condition you to make contact with the sand in the proper area.

The drill is simple. From your setup position, draw a line in the sand perpendicular to your target about six feet long. Using your club, make a series of indentations in the sand about two inches in front of the line and several inches apart from each other, following an imaginary line parallel to the one you drew. These dimples will represent imaginary golf balls. Click on over to the drill using the link above for a photo of the setup.

At that point, assume your setup at each imaginary ball location starting at the leftmost one (or rightmost if you’re a left hander). Make your swing, trying to get your club to enter the sand two inches behind each indentation, starting at the line you drew. Move down the line to each successive indentation and keep trying to start your divot two inches behind the indentation. When you get to the end, rake the area and start again.

It won’t be long before you get a good idea of the feeling of getting the club into the sand at the right point. Remember to not let the club dig in. You want it to enter the sand and scoot under the ball.

After you get good with the imaginary balls, set up and use the real thing. I think you’ll see some good improvement in your sand play.

There are two things I want to note.

First, in the sand, proper set up is important. I’ll cover basic sand setup a little later in the week.

The second thing is that sand play is considered one of the easiest skills to pick up, mainly because the margin of error is larger. While contacting the sand two inches behind the ball may be considered optimal, missing that by a bit either way isn’t necessarily going to lead to a terrible result. For instance, if you contact the sand a little closer than two inches behind the ball, what will normally happen is that the ball will fly further but with more spin and will stop quicker. Conversely, if you hit a little further back, the ball will fly shorter, but will have less spin so it will roll a bit further.

Obviously the margin of error is not infinite. At some point, the shot will become a total failure. But you absolutely have more margin for error than you would have with a shot of the same distance played from the fairway. Next time you’re faced with a 20 yard pitch from the fairway, set up to the shot and make contact with the turf two and a half inches behind the ball and let me know how it works out. Remember that next time you find yourself in the sand. With proper fundamentals and the right frame of mind, sand play will become much easier than you might think.

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Further Reading:

Uphill and Downhill Lies in Bunkers (Life in the Rough)
The Basic Sand Shot (Life in the Rough)
The Buried Lie: A Sandy Grave (Life in the Rough)
Fairway Bunker Shots (Life in the Rough)
Point of Entry Drill (About.com)

The Scorecard Always Lies: A Year Behind the Scenes on the PGA Tour was written by Sports Illustrated golf correspondent Chris Lewis after spending nearly a full season traveling with the Tour.

I know I said up front that this blog isn’t intended to be a fan blog because there are already so many good ones out there. Plus my mission is a little different. However, being that I’m on a quest to be a golf pro, a book that delves into the most prominent facet of professional golf is of great interest to me. I’m also a golf fan so this book piques my interest on two fronts.

Chris Lewis spent 30 weeks on tour in 2006 and this book is the result of those 30 weeks. It covers a lot of things that were well publicized and some things that were not so well known (at least to me). It shows a side of the players that we don’t see in front of the cameras. It brings us the good, the bad, and the ugly from life on the PGA Tour.

The chapters are organized chronologically and cover the highlights including the majors and the Ryder Cup, but each delves deeper into the player’s lives, covering up and coming players, Tiger Woods’ struggle with his father’s illness and eventual death, Phil Mickelson’s U.S. Open meltdown, the ongoing Michelle Wie saga, and the latest Ryder Cup disappointment for the U.S. Team. These big stories are interesting but equally compelling are the small stories. The stuff that you’ve probably never heard, in some cases involving figures whose names you might not even recognize.

Chapter List

1. The Men Who Weren’t There: Hawaii
2. Phil in Full: The Bob Hope Chrysler Classic
3. Tiger, Distracted: The Buick Invitational
4. Cinderella Stories: The FBR Open, Phoenix
5. Coast to Coast: The West Coast and Florida Swings
6. Augusta Remastered: The Masters
7. The Katrina Classic: The Zurich Classic, New Orleans
8. Playing Through: The Wachovia Championship
9. The Dog Days of Not-Quite-Summer: The Colonial
10. Of Fathers, Sons, and a Daughter: The Memorial
11. Lefty Agonistes: The U.S. Open
12. “This One’s for Pops”: The British Open
13. Tiger Mach Three: The PGA Championship
14. Eire’s Mud in Your Eye: The Ryder Cup
15. Epilogue: The Fall That Wouldn’t Finish

The Good

• As a fan, I can’t get enough detail about the tour. This book delivered.
• It was well written. It kept me interested and flowed well.
• The book gave a glimpse of what it’s really like to be a player on tour. Lots of information ranging from the elite down to the guys who are just scraping by.
• I liked how this book added to what I knew about some of the bigger stories, while presenting me with a ton of stuff I had never heard about.

The Bad

• At times, the detail was somewhat mundane. However, I think this is to be expected. PGA Tour life isn’t all glamour and glitz. A realistic picture has to include some of this minutiae. It wasn’t overdone, though. At the same time, I recognize that some readers will say, “why do I care that so and so took his kids to the pool?”

Conclusion

I’m definitely recommending this book. If you’re a fan of the PGA Tour and crave detail about what goes on behind the scenes then I think you’re going to like it.

One of the nice things about doing this blog is that I learn from it myself. I pretty much lay out what’s in my head and augment it with a little research and fact checking to make sure I’m not out in left field and also to fill in gaps in my own knowledge. Beyond that, it keeps the things that I need to do fresh in my mind. If I was doing all the things that I know are correct, then I’d already be on tour. The point is for me to absorb these things, but also to share them with you, in hopes that they help your game as well.

I’m doing my best to plug all the holes. At first, my game had as many holes as a pasta strainer, but slowly I’m plugging them up. Unfortunately, I can’t address them all at once. You’ve seen me identify alignment as a problem area in my game, but until now I hadn’t actively addressed it because I just have been working on so many things.

I decided that after I advocated using an aim club during practice sessions, I better make sure I make it a habit myself. This became especially important after a friend noted that both my feet and shoulders were misaligned.

I made it a point at my next range session to make use of an aim club. It really helped to align my feet. But I also noticed that while I had perceived that my shoulders were then square to the target, holding a club across them and comparing it to my aim club showed that they were seriously closed (aligned right of the target).

Eureka. This was explaining why I was so consistently drawing the ball. Taking a closed stance encourages an in to out swing (relative to the swing plane), which encourages a draw.

When I fixed my alignment and started hitting shots, something weird happened: I started naturally fading the ball (and sometimes slicing). I also had a tendency to block the ball way right.

At that time, I felt that my alignment was correct, and it also seemed that my swing plane had actually improved (I need to get myself on video to verify that).

That pointed to one culprit: I don’t believe I was correctly releasing my hands through impact. It all makes sense. Closed feet, closed shoulders. Strong grip. Serious inside-the-plane swing. All these things want to cause a draw. That means that to keep from hooking every shot, my hands had to intervene and not allow a complete release. I think I’ve been “holding on” through impact, just to keep the ball going near the target.

Every once in a while, I actually suspected as much after hitting a shot, but with the ball drawing, I think “no, can’t be that.” Well, now I think it was. See? I told you the body is smart. It was smart enough to realize that if I was going to do all those things to promote a draw (especially the strong grip) that there was only one way to stop from hooking the ball. Keep the hands from turning over until well after impact.

At today’s session, I’m going to try and see if I’m on top of things, or if I’m chasing shadows.

The reason I’m sharing this relates to what I alluded to in the title. In your own swing, it’s not likely that there’s only one thing wrong. The act of fixing one problem may uncover others. And the old adage is true: you may get worse before you get better. Resist the urge to casually eliminate possible causes just because symptoms don’t seem to add up. Take the time to prove to yourself that what you believe is happening really is happening.

Until recently, I’ve always been a cart bag person. When I walk, I’ll typically use a walker to tote my bag. A while back, the strap on my bag broke, so I used that as an excuse to start shopping around.

For a while, I’ve been admiring the double-strapped stand bags that have come on the scene over the last five or ten years. I figured that since I’m looking for exercise along with golf, carrying my bag will only help.

A couple of weeks back, I stopped by my local Golfsmith store and set out to check out some of the bags. I tried on the Nike Xtreme Sport bag and loved it. Being tall and big, I was concerned about the shoulder straps being comfortable to me. But I was able to adjust them so the bag felt great. It was hard to imagine how comfortable the bag would feel when it was full of clubs and gear. Of the ones I tried, thought, it definitely felt the best.

I bought it up for a price of $99 and took it home. That day, I played my first round with it and was pleasantly surprised. It was my first double-strap bag, and the first time I had carried my clubs for a long time. With all my gear in it, the straps were extremely comfortable on my shoulders. The weight was distributed perfectly. At the end of nine holes, I could hardly tell that I had been carrying my bag instead of using a cart. I had only normal fatigue in my back and shoulders, nothing extra from carrying my clubs for the first time in a long while.

Being new to that style of bag, I was curious as to how it would feel to be constantly slinging it over my shoulders and then off again. Again, I was surprised that this was a very comfortable action. Getting the bag to comfortably plop down and spring the legs was a breeze and never got tedious or uncomfortable.

Here’s the lowdown:

The Good

• Very comfortable on my large frame. I’m 6′3″ and am a big guy with broad shoulders. After a few 9-hole rounds, comfort has not been an issue.
• It has seven pockets, providing a reasonable amount of storage room. Things aren’t as nicely segregated as I’m used to with my normal cart bags, but I had no trouble transferring everything out of my old bag into the new one. I don’t normally carry extra shoes or clothes or anything like that, so I didn’t have a ton of extraneous stuff.
• The top has a six-way divider to keep clubs organized.
• Two mesh water bottle pockets (included in the seven-pocket total) on the side work well for dropping in extra balls and tees and anything you need to access frequently. Of course, dropping in a water bottle or two might make sense for many, but at my course there are an adequate number of water jugs out there, so I’m not worried about dehydration, at least not until it starts getting really hot.

The Bad

• Obviously in a carry-bag, light-weight design is important, but I can’t help feeling that the “rugged nylon” design is a little flimsy and over priced at $99. But, in fairness, virtually all the carry-bags are designed similarly of the same materials and are comparable in price. I think I’m just amazed at what $100 would get you 13 years ago when I first started playing, versus what it gets you now, even in cart bags. Yes, I know. And I walked uphill to school in the snow, both ways, too.
• The 6-way divider with putter well gets a little crowded with a full 14-clubs in there. It’s just a minor nitpick. Remember, I’m a cart bag guy, so it’s taking some getting used to.
• This is more of an unknown than something bad, but obviously I can’t comment on durability after only a couple of weeks. I’ve had nothing go wrong while breaking it in, but be aware that I can’t make a judgment in that area yet.

Conclusion

I would definitely recommend this bag. My top priority was comfort and it more than met all my expectations in that area. In all the other categories, including storage space, convenience, and so on, it performs well. I’d certainly like it if the price was lower but it’s right there with the rest of the market so it’s not a big deal. If you’re in the market for a bag of this kind, try it on. I think you might like it.

I haven’t posted a progress update in a while, so I figured it was time. Well, I have the shanks. Just kidding. That’s a little karma joke dating back a couple of days.

You’ll notice that I haven’t updated my stats for some time. Don’t worry, I haven’t given up and I definitely haven’t slacked off. I’m working hard at the range, at the gym, and on my diet. When I get out to the course, right now it’s mostly for exercise and to be able to try out the stuff I’m working on at the range. My scores and stats aren’t good yet, but that doesn’t mean I’m not showing excellent progress so far. I’ll break it down in the following sections.

Diet/Weight Loss

I have a lot of weight to lose, but I’ve come to the realization that “diets” are recipes for failure. It almost sounds like a cliché, but I firmly believe that the only way to lose weight and keep it off is by changing my lifestyle. I know what’s healthy and what’s not. I just try to make better choices now. I also don’t say, “I can’t eat this or that”. I eat what I want, but realize that either I’ll have to pay for it with more exercise or eating less later on, or it’s just going to keep me from reaching my goal. Often, I find myself saying, “I’d like to have <something bad>” then I’ll realize it’s not worth it and just forget about it. That, coupled with increased exercise is my formula for success.

So far it’s working. I’ve been keeping stats for about a month, and I’m losing around a pound a week. A nice slow, steady weight loss, coupled with a lifestyle change will help make it permanent this time. I’ve only lost a few pounds, but I can already feel it.

Fitness

I’ve drastically changed up my fitness regimen. When I first started this, my routine consisted of some cardio at the gym followed by some weight lifting which hit the big stuff like biceps, pecs, etc. That was a waste of my time. I’ve since realized that flexibility and core strengthening are what I need. I burn a good amount of calories just walking nine holes a few times a week. That’s a nice conditioning workout.

After that, I’m doing exercises to keep my back in shape to combat my herniated disk as well as to provide strength and flexibility to the other parts of my body. I’ve switched from using heavy weights and machines to using an exercise ball, light weight dumbbells, a medicine ball, and a foam roller. I’ll be adding a balance board and some resistance bands shortly. I’m doing golf-specific exercises to target my weak areas which, right now, are my back, hips, and shoulders.

I do frequent stretching and I find that it’s like a miracle pill. This past Saturday, I had a 2 1/2 hour practice session in the morning, followed by a 13 hole walking round (up until dark). When I got home, I was completely beat. That night, I slept terribly and the next day I got up and thought there was no way I’d be able to play, like I had planned. I was sore all over, especially in my back, and just felt awful. After laying around for a while, I decided to dive into my stretching and exercise routine. It was rough at first, but after an hour or so, it was like I was a different person. I was able to go play 9, felt great that night, and even the next day. That’s proof to me that my new approach is working.

I visit the gym less frequently now and when I do it’s for cardio and to work the muscles in my legs with leg presses, leg raises, and leg curls. It’s not as easy for me to do these things at home, so that’s a perfect use for the gym.

Long Game/Full Swing

The full swing is finally coming around. I haven’t gotten myself on video for a few weeks to see if I got rid of the chicken wing, but it’s definitely improving. I had a nice breakthrough at the range on Saturday thanks to my friend Keith (think: “you’re gonna bogey it“). He noticed that at address, my feet were closed (aimed right of the target) while my shoulders were aimed left of the target, no doubt the result of subconscious compensations over time. Also, I was getting very quick at the top of the swing and getting out of sync. After patching those things up, I immediately hit the ball better. Like the very next shot. Unfortunately, it was at the end of the session, so I need to pick that up again at the range tomorrow. I’m hitting my driver well, but somewhat inconsistently. I’m shaping shots well with all my clubs. I’m definitely seeing a little more improvement after every session.

Short Game

My short game is really the weak link right now, because I’ve been preoccupied with exercise and with the long game. I need the long game to get to the point where I’m keeping the ball on my own hole and not topping it. Soon, I’m going to focus a lot of effort on my short game. My wedge play is decent right now, but under 30 yards, I’m having trouble getting my feel back. When I hit the ball solidly, most shots are going long, except when I start thinking about it and then flub the shot. I’m not worried about it right now. I know I need it to score well, but I really need to build up confidence on the course again. Getting the ball in the fairway and hitting a few greens is what I need most at this point in time.

Putting

My putting is coming along well. I’m getting a lot of benefit from the 100-putt drill. My confidence is high, even though statistically, I’m not doing great. I most certainly three-putt too much, but I’m rolling the ball well. It’s just a matter of getting my touch back and grooving a better stroke to give me more consistency.

Overall

So far, I’m quite happy with my overall progress. Obviously, I’m not where I want to be. Right now, that’s just back where I was. I’ve been rebuilding my body and my swing from the ground up. That’s going to be a slow process. I’m having trouble coming up with any negatives to report right now. My aim is to do something actively to work toward my goal every day of the week. So far I’ve done that.

I’m normally my toughest critic and I don’t have anything bad to say right now. That doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have done anything better over the last month. There’s always room for improvement. But right now, the results are good enough for me to savor a little happiness and get right back to work. But the time you read this, I’ll probably be back at it and complaining about more problems, but I’m going to enjoy it for the rest of the evening (20 minutes).