Improving Your Game

Golf can be broken down into all sorts of things – wrist cock, spine angle, short game, long irons, trouble play, mental aspects, rules and their benefits and penalties, and so on. For this week’s Trap Five, we’ve broken the game of golf into five main areas – the mental game, iron play, chipping/pitching, driving, and putting – and ranked them in order along with the single best tip we can think of to help you with that aspect of the game.

Quick, before you look, which order do you think they came in?

Number Five: Driving
Ask a PGA Tour player what the point of driving a golf ball is and they’ll tell you that it’s to put the ball in the best position for an approach shot into the green. Ask a lot of weekend golfers and they’ll tell you “to hit it far.” Which do you think has the better approach?

Nearly everyone would drive the ball better if they simply made a swing instead of trying to kill the ball. When your timing is off – as it often is when duffers try to “rev up,” you actually lose distance. Hitting the ball anywhere but the center of the clubface loses tremendous distance too. Take it down a notch – hit all of your drives at 80% and you’ll find the fairway a lot more often… and be surprised by how far you hit it.

Number Four: Iron Play
Irons have loft, yet that simple fact seems to escape most golfers. Loft gets the ball in the air, yet too many amateurs try to help the ball by lifting it or flipping it with their hands.

Pros take divots because they’re hitting down and through the ball. Their left arm is straight at impact and the shaft is leaning towards the target, further de-lofting the club.

Hitting down on the ball often increases the distance you hit your irons, too. They’re de-lofted, of course, which adds distance, but hitting down instead of flipping also tends to delay the wrist cock or “lag,” allowing you to really whip the clubhead through impact.

Number Three: Chipping and Pitching
Chipping and pitching are two very different things, and when possible, a chip is far safer. In fact, putting is often the best choice, and there’s an old saying that says “your worst putt is never as bad as your worst chip, and your best with both is the same.” Putt when possible around the greens. The corollary when chipping is simple: make your chip act like a putt as quickly as possible. Choose a low-lofted club and get the ball running.

Pitching is different, though, and yet so simple. If someone hands you a tennis ball and asks you to lob it into a trash can, you do so without thinking of mechanics. You don’t think about the length of your backswing or follow through. You just “pitch” it.

When you’re faced with a pitch shot, choose the appropriate club. Envision the loft of the clubface and the trajectory the ball will have as it leaves the clubface. Now simply swing the club as if you were pitching the ball the proper distance on the envisioned trajectory.

Advanced users can mess around with changing the length of their backswing – a longer backswing that pitches the ball 25 yards will produce a different kind of shot than a short-backswing 25-yard pitch – but speed through the hitting zone should still be a matter of feel – how fast should the club swing to lob the ball the proper distance, as if you were just tossing it underhanded.

Number Two: Putting
The mechanical side of putting consists of two things: line and speed. Eliminate the difficulty in lining up your golf ball by using the ball’s logo (or a line drawn with a Sharpie). Then you never have to think about the line again.

Stand behind the ball and make practice strokes looking at your ball and the intended line. Speed is all about feel – some players die the ball at the hole while others play every putt to two feet past the cup. Make speed an aspect of “feel” and not mechanics.

The other side of putting is, unfortunately, the most difficult to grasp: the mental side. We may talk about the mental side of putting in future articles here on The Sand Trap, but for now, we’ll summarize what we know, as entire books have been written about this: attempt to make every putt and be confident that you will.

Number One: Mental Game
Countless books have been written about the mental aspect of the game of golf. Jack Nicklaus often said that he succeeded by playing only high percentage shots, and there’s a discussion in the forum about this right now. Many amateurs would do well to take Jack’s advice. Hitting the middle of a big green from 150 does more for your score than going at the pin and short-siding yourself in a hellish bunker. As a player’s skill level increases, what were once low percentage shots become high percentage shots.

Aside from that, the mental game is really quite simple if you realize one very simple thing: the only thing you can do at any point in time is play the next shot. You can’t play two shots ahead or three holes ahead, and you can’t replay the shot you just hit. The only thing you can control is your next shot.

Next Week
I’m not sure – and I’m open for suggestions. What would you like to see counted down next week?