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Playing a Three-Club Round

September 19, 2010 By 6 Comments
Golf Clubs

You might have noticed the poll in the side bar that’s been running for a while that asks, “If you had to play a round with only three clubs, which would you choose?” My golf league does a three-club event which, unfortunately, I missed this year. It got me thinking about it some, though, and I thought I’d see which clubs you all would choose. It’s really a great exercise in course management. It forces you to think about which clubs you need most and which clubs you can most easily adapt to fill in the holes. Many teachers would tell you that a limited set is the best thing for juniors, too. It gets them out of the analytical mindset that overburdens many of us and teaches them just to grab a club and hit a shot, and if they don’t have a club that’s perfect for that shot, then they have to make that shot with what they have. It’s a great way to learn creativity and to become versatile shot-makers. As of now,

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Can You Miss On Purpose?

April 12, 2010 By 5 Comments

We all know golf is a game of misses.  The only shots that come off exactly as we want are the ones that go in the hole, and many times they still didn’t happen exactly as we wanted. Have you ever made a putt that hit the hole so hard, it popped a few inches in the air before falling? Then you know what I mean. So often, I find myself (and observe others) being fixated on the cup, no matter what it will take to get there.  I contend that, sometimes, the best play is to miss on purpose.  Maybe calling it “missing on purpose” isn’t the best way to state it. Let’s refine that to mean that we choose a target different from our natural tendency to shoot for the hole, the flag, or the green itself. Sometimes, it’s an obvious choice and sometimes, it’s not. Take, for example, your classic sucker pin.  Say the flag is tucked way to the side, behind water, just on the green, with a nasty bunker off

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Reading Lies on the Golf Course, Part I

March 1, 2010 By 2 Comments

A few weeks back, I was contacted by a reader who is interested in learning how to read lies and suggested the topic to me.  I thought it was a great idea, so here we are.  He pointed to a recent golf telecast where Nick Faldo, in discussing the new groove regulations for 2010, pointed out that players are going to have to do a better job of reading lies now. As most of you probably know by now, grooves in irons have been dialed back at the highest levels to try and reduce the spin that wedges and short irons can impart on the ball.  In recent years, it became common for players to just bomb away off the tee, because they knew that their wedges would still provide high spin from the rough. Now, with grooves providing less help to players out of the fairway, Faldo made a good point, that reading lies will become more important.  (Note that the new grooves won’t affect most of us for quite a while, but all

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Five Recovery Skills You Need in Your Game

January 12, 2010 By 10 Comments
golf_tree

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times.  Golf is a game of misses.  If you think about it, you only make 18 shots per round.  Every other shot misses to some degree.  As we all know, some of them miss by an extremely high degree.  Unfortunately, they tend to build golf courses so that the worse you miss, the more harshly you’re punished. Golf courses are filled with trees, water, sand, rough and so on that are just waiting to dole out some punishment.  It’s critical, if we want to score, that we learn basic recovery skills so that these trouble situations have a minimal impact. Following are five recovery skills you need in your golf game. Learning to Say ‘No’ That’s right, one of the most important recovery skill is a mental one. We’ve all been there.  Off the tee, your drive was off target and you end up in the rough.  It’s fairly thick, but you can see the ball.  You have 200 yards to the green with a creek guarding the front,

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Use The Tee To Your Advantage

May 12, 2007 By 1 Comment

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

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