Author: Erik J. Barzeski

When you’re warming up before a round, and even when you’re just at the range beating balls and working on your swing, go through your pre-shot routine. Walk behind the ball, pick a target, take your practice swings… whatever you normally do on the course, do on the practice range. A pre-shot routine is one of the most under-rated aspects of good golf, and solidifying your pre-shot routine by practicing it – while practicing your swing – builds familiarity and confidence.

If you get the chance, play with some high school kids. They’re too young to know any better and old enough to be fairly competent. They’ll hit the impossible shot (and pull it off more than you’d guess). They’ll go after that testy downhill curler and ram it into the hole.

Scoring well means walking the line between reckless play and ultra-conservative play. If you’re veering too far towards the latter, a round with some high school kids will put you back on track. Best yet, you may be doing them a favor. Beat ’em and show them what they have to look forward to.

When you play by yourself, it’s difficult to remain focused. Stave off boredom, complacency, laziness, and sheer apathy by inventing games for yourself. Play one ball against the other. If you’re good enough, play a draw against a fade. Try to keep the ball within 10 yards of the cart path. Play the even holes with even-numbered clubs and the odd ones with the odd-numbered clubs. Make bets with yourself: you’ll clean out the den if you don’t break 45 on the back nine, for example: it’s win-win, regardless of your score (you play well or have a clean den).

When you execute a proper bunker shot, your club doesn’t even make contact with the ball. Take your mind off of the ball by hitting small plastic toys, a tee, a used cleat, a mowed half-ball, your keys, or anything else you can think of. It’s fun and it gets your mind off of hitting the ball: you want to slide the club through the sand.

When you get good, borrow your friend’s Rolex and hit that out of the bunker, too, landing it just in the fringe. You may want to wrap it in a plastic baggie to keep the sand off of it, but then again, it is your friend’s watch, not your own. 🙂

You’re often taught to swing the club, not to hit the ball. However, there are sometimes occasions in which you do want to do something more than swing smoothly.

When playing out of the sand, many people envision sliding the club through the sand. Some envision spanking the sand, or pulling the heel of the sand wedge down into the sand.

When playing from deep rough, a “hit” is certainly required to wrench the ball from the tall grass. When playing a knockdown shot underneath a canopy of trees, many times you’ll want to “punch” the ball.

Golf, strangely enough, can sometimes be a game of vocabulary as we make associations between verbs and the actions required to pull them off. Who know a dictionary and a thesaurus could lead to lower scores?

The course on which I grew up had a difficult par three – bunkers and mounds left, right, and long, a rather significant ridge in the green, and tight pin placements. The yardage? 227. Needless to say, this wasn’t ranked a bit higher than the 15th toughest hole on the course.

At the time, I’d typically hit a 5W, 3W, or a 2I to the green. I’d usually be short, and I’d usually be in some trouble in a bunker, on a mound, or more. Until I decided to play the hole with a regular old 4I. There was no trouble short, and I could pitch the ball relatively close. I parred the hole half the time and bogeyed the other half. I almost never got up and down when going for the green, so my scoring average on the hole dropped when I played it almost as a very short par four.

Golf is a game of scoring, and sometimes the path to the lowest score involves a bit of creativity in how you play those holes that seem to have your number.