Couple why questions

Why do you have to pick the ball cleanly out of a fairway bunker? I know you have to but I don't understand why exactly. If you catch the ball cleanly striking down on the ball before you hit the sand what causes it to behave differently? We know from watching slo-mo vids that the ball doesn't actually compress against the ground so what is going on? I understand the club slows down drastically after coming in contact with the sand but that also happens when pros smash the club face into the ground causing the shaft to deflect but the ball is already gone at that point.

Another quick question. Why is it that I can chip off cement fairly easily but not off dirt? I know its not just me having seen tons of people duff shot after shot on dirt lies. 'not hardpan'

1.you lose alot of distance if you hit sand first

2.your catching them fat and concrete keps you from doing it

I don't think that answers either one of my questions. By picking it cleanly I meant you have to hit ball first and following that you aren't really supposed to hit any sand. I'm aware of what hitting the sand first does.

Secondly wouldn't the bounce on my sand wedge cause a skulled shot the same way off cement as it does off dirt? All other things being equal, it seems cement would cause even more deflection than dirt.

you where saying you were duffing shots

So your answer to my question of why am I duffing is that I'm hitting the ball fat. Thats what I meant by duffing so yea I know. My question had more to do with why one extremely tight lie 'cement' seems more forgiving than dirt.

If I had to guess it would be that dirt doesn't have the same surface consistency that cement has making it even less forgiving on a flat angle of attack.

The old bumpy dirt lie in my opinion is the hardest surface to chip off of. Would the bounce on a standard pw or lw be better suited for this lie maybe?

This is another situation where some people encourage picking the ball with little contact with the ground but this goes along with my first question. Why would this be necessary.

what it sounds like is your bottoming out early and keeping the club on the ground try moving the ball back in your stance for a chip.trying to hit down on it.

Maybe I'm explaining this poorly. I'm not asking for help on how to hit this shot. I'm trying to understand why it is so difficult to begin with. I know the obvious answer is people tend to hit this shot fat, swing bottoms out before the ball etc... or skull it, the club head deflects and they hit it thin I get all of that which is why I compared it with hitting off cement which poses less of a problem for some unknown reason. <- my question.

Its possible the answer to the first question might shed some light on the second.
The difficulty of this shot is similar to the difficulty of chipping out of bunker which people don't generally have to do.

its a difficult shot because you have little room for error in both situations. where as with a good lie on the fairway you can hit the ground a little early and not lose much club speed and strike the ball well but in sand you would lose to much club speed and hit a short/fat shot.

Its a tough shot just concentrate hard on the contact point.

If we could get into your head and hear what you are thinking during these shots, we might be able to answer your question. Your questions assume that everyone has problems with these shots. We all miss shots for different reasons..

i can't touch the cement vs dirt shot. really need a visual to see exactly what happens.

the other question,,,here is my take:)

for greenside bunker, to sandwich sand in between clubface and ball is important because partly it helps to dissipate the force of the blow. so, a regular sandwedge may carry the ball 80 yard, but the same swing under the above condition in the greenside bunker may carry 20 yards. of course, there are other factors at play, but keep only the above in mind when we look at fairway bunker shot.

we can assume then that if sand is sandwiched in between clubface and the ball, it will travel less far than if there is no sand, aka, direct contact between clubface and ball.

it has been mentioned that the sand does not help squeeze the ball during compression. i am not so sure about that because as with everything, it is not a matter of black or white, meaning no compression or total compression. i think sand still provides some degree of upward vector, just not as much as regular turf. some more physics inclined may argue that the simple fact that the ball is sitting on a little patch of sand is indicative that the sand is exerting a force on the ball, so as the ball is struck at an angle, downward and forward, sand provides an reaction.

another angle to look at this is that some folks, on regular turf, can hit a well struck iron shot without taking any divot. based on that observation, one may argue that some shots can be made with predominantly downward, accurate strike on the ball---that alone can send the ball up and forward.

i suspect that some folks strike fairway bunker shots with similar principles.

While that might be true, they certainly advocate picking it cleanly as this is what I kept finding while trying to find the answer to my own question. From Tiger Woods book How I Play Golf.

"Hitting the ball solidly, without touching a grain of said if possible is the only way to get a lot of distance on this shot" "I try to pick the ball cleanly." 'There's a picture showing almost no sand contact' I also read a number of times last night that the the sand doesn't compress the ball and thats why it must be picked cleanly so I can understand why many people think that.

The compression myth reminds me of a couple others: draws/hooks have top-spin and a tail wind blows the ball forward.

The first one is just dumb. And I've never heard anyone say it. The second one seems true just from physics. It might also be true that it does something to the mechanics of the air flow and increases lift, but it seems a tail wind would decrease the force of the air through which the ball has to travel right off the club, and then as the ball decelerates the wind would actually be pushing from the back, and push the ball forward as it comes towards the landing zone.

so here is a theoretical question, possibly a clinical question that can be verified if proper set-up can be arranged...


put a golf ball on a scale. the scale registers the weight of the ball,,,as a baseline.

set it up so that the ball on the scale sits at "ground" level, allowing a decent golfer to take a regular swing at the ball.

run a high speed video cam with view on the ball and the scale. it will be interesting to see what happens to the scale at the moment of impact, before the clubface bottoms out after the impact (assuming then the clubhead strikes into the scale...bang!)

my hypothesis is that at the moment of impact, when the clubhead makes a contact with the ball below the equator cleanly, there is enough of a downward force on the ball and the scale will register a higher weight for a split moment than the original ball weight, suggesting that at impact there is an additional force into the "ground" that the ball sits on, thus a reaction if one looks the other way, which helps explain the well known yet fuzzy term, uh, compression...

unless such an experiment (or a similar one) is done, it is geeks' playground in the air...aka, anyone is entitled with an opinion

umm i dont think there is a scale that could registerthat in the millasecond your talking about,but then again i could be completeley wrong