Play with Kids

Play a round with high school kids if you’re playing a bit too conservatively lately.

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.

Make a Game

When you’re playing alone, get creative on the course by making up a game.

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).

Blast Anything

Practice hitting balls out of bunkers by hitting anything BUT balls out of bunkers!

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. 🙂

Choke Down for Control

When you are in between clubs, take the longer club, grip an inch down the shaft, and make your normal, positive swing.

There are times out on the golf course when you find yourself “between clubs”; that is, at an awkward distance from the flag. You may find that you are slightly too far away for a full 8-iron, but slightly too close for a full 7-iron.

You should resist the temptation to hit the shorter club slightly harder. This will most likely result in an out-of-control swing, a poor ball strike, and ultimately a wayward shot. Another common mistake is to take the longer club and try to swing slower. This can cause an awkward, tentative swing, which increases the chances of catching the ball “fat” or “thin”.

Instead, opt for the longer club, but grip down the shaft about ½ inch to an inch, and take your normal swing. Gripping slightly further down effectively decreases the length of the shaft, which takes those extra 5 yards of your ball flight. Remember to maintain a positive strike, and resist the temptation to swing harder or softer than normal.

hammY Putter

The hammY putter is an interesting take on rolling the ball into the hole. How does it fare?

hammy_stance.jpgThe pitch goes like this:

If I handed you a golf ball and asked you to roll the ball to the hole, how would you do it? Assuming you’re right-handed, you’d probably face the hole, put your left foot forward, and roll the ball underhand towards the hole. The hammY Putter enables you to putt the same way; the natural way.

After all, a three year old can roll a ball to a hole, right? They don’t do it by standing facing perpendicular to their target and throwing the ball straight sideways. That’s how most of us putt, however. Sideways. The hammY Putter aims to change that (pun intended).

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Big Break II Challenges

The Big Break II challenges are boring. Let’s hear some suggestions for new ones.

I finally got around to watching this week’s Big Break II. Thank {insert your own deity here} for PVRs. The first challenge (skills) was interesting, having each player hit four balls (two draws and two fades) around a huge obstacle to a green 180 yards away. The player with the lowest cumulative distance between their best draw and best fade was exempt from the next two challenges.

Then I thought they stepped it up a notch for the next challenge in which each player was represented by a small pane of glass mounted in a frame and the players took turns attempting to break other player’s panes thereby elminating that player from the challenge. It required a pretty low trajectory punch shot to hit the glass.

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Know When to Hit

Sometimes a nice, smooth swing won’t get you very far. Sometimes you need to just hit it.

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?

Long Par Threes

Play golf intelligently and score well, even if it means playing that difficult par three as a par four.

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.

Woods Goes Fishing (and Lands a Wife)

Tiger Woods marries Elin Nordegren in Barbados.

Elin and TigerEnding weeks, even months, of speculation, Tiger Woods did indeed go fishing in Barbados yesterday. To entertain himself – and the gossip columnists – while he was there, he also married his fiancée (who else?), Elin Nordegren, in “a lavish but top secret $1.5m ceremony.” Click one of the following links for the tedious details.

I can now see one of two things happening. Either Tiger’s game will improve, and everyone will claim that the stability of married life has allowed him to be less distracted on the golf course, or his form will dip (or stay the same – Woods not winning at least eight tournaments a year, including three majors, will always be considered a failure in the eyes of the media), and further speculation about the supposed effect of Elin on his game will ensue.

Congratulations to both of them anyway.