Audaxi

That seems sort of nuts. I'm trying to figure out how you can be so traumatized by a golf ball hitting a cart that you're riding in. I guess it must be the hormones at that age, or something like that. I personally just pick up any ball that hits me, unless it was an obviously good shot, a ball from a different hole, a freakish coincident, or there's nobody in front of me and me/my group is moving somewhat slow. If I'm waiting behind someone on the green though, and you hit a tee shot into me, I find that picking up the golf ball stops the behavior faster than if you were to call the pro shop, and I still give them the ball after the round or on the next tee if they catch up to me.

Rubbing alcohol is pretty handy for this. Took the sticker with the barcode off of my wedges fairly quickly.

Nice drive, sounds like you must've caught it right in the sweet spot. I've had unfortunate timing with good drives too, and once nailed one right after telling someone on the first tee I wasn't great, and didn't want to slow him down as a 24 handicap (a while back). He thought I was a huge sandbagger until it came time to hit my second shot, which I promptly shanked into the weeds on the right.

They only last for a couple hundred drives when your main objective is smacking it as far as you can down the range. With a 150 mph SS, he might see a tad bit more wear and tear of his clubface than me or many others do :p.

Replace the watch number paint on the bottom with some white paint and they would be very nice. But seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if the iron numbers glowed in the dark or were painted with radium.

Well said

When I read the first sentence, I thought you were referring to the song, "Sing, Sing, Sing". Then I read your second sentence and felt bad for my assumption.

Going driver iron is still quite possible with 230-240 driving distance. Unless you likely to play 400+ yard par 4's, a 240 yard drive will leave you with a 160 yard or less shot in. At 160, I'm hitting an smooth 7 and then you're hitting short irons on anything shorter than 400 yards. I only play 1 long course, therefore I have no need to be hitting it 270 yards and then having PW or shorter on a few holes at my local courses. I see no need to hit longer, so why should I want to just because?

I personally think that Iacas just can be frustrated when people misrepresent facts. I haven't ever seen him truely flame, at least on matters concerning opinion. However, I do think the OP was a little overboard. You could have just told him some "scoring tips" and tell him to stop lowballing himself for his handicap, and possibly have made a couple of dollars on lessons if you are a professional (amateurs can't accept money for lessons). I see no reason to laugh at him, all he wanted with his handicap was to be respected a little more than a 30 capper might be when he steps up to the tee. Also, how are you sure it isn't honestly a pressure deal? I know that I started playing in tournaments when I had a 24 handicap (mostly to get experience) and I shot 108-116 in my first tournament. The next tournament I played in was a 3 day 9-hole deal, where I shot 51-47-49 on average difficulty courses. It takes a bit of time to get your tournament scores lower, and they will inherently be higher than your handicap more often than not (not counting sandbaggers) due to the pressures of tournament play. If someone wants to genuinely improve, why would you shut them down that harshly?

If you get the RBZ irons, just remember that the reason they go further is because they're even more delofted than regular modern irons, having each iron play about 1/2 club longer than other modern counterparts. However, I have heard good things about the RBZ 3-wood, and have seen it in the bags at tournaments more than any other 3-wood I can think of off the top of my head, even with people who don't have another Taylormade club in the entire bag. The driver's of either tend to be more of a preferential thing, depending on what you are looking for. The R11 was about 5-10 yards shorter for me, but it was more accurate than the RBZ when I tried them for laughs when testing irons.

They look to be in fairly good shape, considering their age, so I'd have to agree with Clambake on this one. If only the 8 irons has those small dings though, I would assume you could sell them for closer to $150 than not.

This is a lot of what makes it hard to learn a golf swing, because while a batter in baseball still swings, it's a completely different objective. Same with tennis, cricket, and other sports like racketball. Those sports are more of a hit, unless you are trying to apply a specific spin to the shot. Golf is so different in that fact that it isn't even on a similar plane as these other types of swings, because golf is more of a rotational axis than any other. In baseball, they do rotate more than in sports like tennis, but they start with their shoulders in the same position that a golfer's are at address, and they only rock back slightly for their "backswing". What helped my contact was when I stopped thinking about hitting down into the back of the ball, but focused more on coming into a full finish with a shoulder turn past perpendicular to the target. In addition, golf is on of the only sport where you swing down (slightly) to make the ball go up, with variable lofts depending on the club used. Golf's just so different from any other sport that it's difficult to feel a natural swing at first. It took me almost 8 years to get a natural feeling swing, and that only happened when I started playing golf more seriously than just going out every couple of weeks with friends or family. The best remedy for this would have to be to just swing, swing, and swing some more until it is so ingrained in your muscle memory that you can do it whenever and wherever you are. Keep repeating it until you get to the point where you could do it at 2 AM without though if your instructor called you and told you to. However, remember to have fun while doing this, and don't let it become a second job. Golf is a game played for enjoyment, so just keep that in mind while you practice before you get frustrated, and think about how much better it is than being at work.

DON'T: -Practice heavily after a round of a three day tournament at the course that provides free range balls, your skin will tear if you hit too many. -Eat a hot Santiago's breakfast burrito (habanero pepper green chile) 20 minutes before your tee time -Carry more than 14 clubs -Take a drop at the point of where a shot went out of bounds -Get tense or frustrated if you do worse than a practice round, it's normal. -Assume that there is a DQ penalty attached to improper procedure while dropping the ball DO: -Count your clubs before a round -Know the rules, and call an official if there is any doubt -Carry a wet towel with you (A bath towel hung on the clubs, with half on each side, makes a great wet/dry towel combo if you only wet the side away from your legs) -Mark your ball anywhere outside of 6" -Carry plenty of tees, ball markers, and ball mark repair tools (the latter two are there in case someone forgets theirs, because I hate seeing balls marked with a tee or ball marks left on the green) -Remember to relax and have fun playing the sport you enjoy. Learned my lesson on the OB rule the hard way, because I played with some real jerk who convinced me it was a DQ penalty for not taking a proper OB drop (I was newer to golf then) so I dropped out of the 2nd day of the tournament. Didn't even bother coming back the next day to play the second round (they'd pair me with the first group, and just not count my score) since I knew I'd be paired with the same ignorant guy again. Never trust a guy who tries to give you advice, advice that matches what you already planned to do, says, "See, trust your pro" after it works, then complains when you give him the proper penalty for advice and proceeds to shoot a 107 with a handicap of 10. He even tried to hit it out of the ESA that was obviously full of snake dens after we had seen a rattlesnake on the course earlier... However, don't let stuff like that get to you, and just have fun. That's the most important part of tournament play.

I don't generally carry one during the round, but I have a miniature notebook that I keep in the car for if I discover something important. For example, my most recent thing was about how I finally got my swing to bottom out more forward to improve my ballstriking, and I have other random things that seem to help in there. Then, when I go out to the range I can bring this with me to try and remember what to work on, since I have a terrible memory. I also write down the most important parts of lessons in there.

The thought that really helps me to start the club down the slot is to remember that your arms and your shoulders shouldn't swing together, per se. Your arms will lag behind your shoulders, so relax them, and remember that your hands lag behind your arms, so they aren't in a rush. Essentially just let gravity help you drop it into the slot, instead of swinging with your shoulders only and losing power as well as coming over the top.

As a general rule, a stiffer shaft will cause more of a fade. However, I know that my swing is an exception to this rule, and yours might be as well. I have about an 85 mph 6i swing speed, which would usually correlate to about a 6.0 stiffness shaft. I currently have irons with a 5.2 stiffness shaft, and am getting ready to replace my irons soon anyways. When I went into a store to demo irons, I found that the stiffer shaft actually turned my usual fade into a nice little draw, which I found surprising. I have clubs with a fair bit of offset, but the irons with a stiffer shaft and almost no offset (MP-69's, MP-64's, MP=-59's, and s56's) actually had me hitting a draw. However, I did have to reshaft my 3-wood form a reg flex stock shaft, because I did hook that. You can go look at stores to try different shafts, but keep in mind it's another $200 to buy a full iron set's worth of shafts.

This is what I was thinking, because I honestly have never heard a TV announcer say anything about Rory's ballflight except for him hitting his usual high draw. Tiger, however, you always used to hear about how he would shape the ball into the green, with a possible fade preference. Tiger has also had far more individual shots that were amazing in and of themselves, and I can't seem to recall 1 specific shot that Rory has hit to help him win a tournament. Tiger definitely has a swing that is designed to shape the shot, which I think matches his mentality, whereas Rory seems to aim for having one shot that he can hit time and time again.

Tell him to live on the putting green for a while when he practices. Over the summer perhaps, practice a lot of chipping and putting. This will help scores improve immediately, but for the long term he should also practice trying to hit more GIR.

I'm saying that proportionally, there is no difference between similarly built tall and short players, not the power that they can generate. I said that a taller player can generate more power with the longer lever, not that the proportion does it.

There is more moving mass, correct, but you have to remember that larger golfers are also stronger, and built to carry that extra mass. Think proportions, because the bigger guys, when in shape, are proportionally stronger to handle the extra mass, therefore making the only difference being the fact that larger players have a longer lever and a stronger swing, creating more distance. While some may argue it's harder to get a square face when the shaft is longer, it's a fairly moot point when you get into professional golfers.

I've got a special tube that's meant for cleaning grips, but all it really is is a short piece of PVC pipe with plastic bristles on the inside. Just get some mildly soapy water, dip the grip and the tube in, then scrub the grip with the bristles. Works pretty well for removing residues, but I'm not sure how effective it is to visible stuff, since my grips are black.

Same with me. It just feels like a waste of a tee if you do that, and it's almost become a mental thing where I physically cannot hit a good shot with a full tee on a par 3.

You can contact Ping, but are you sure it's the extensions that make it hard to hit them? If they were fitted for you, they should be easier to hit, besides the obvious fact that the i20's are more of a player's iron than the r9's. If you hit the 7-W well, you might just ask about trading the 6-4 in for g20's and have a combo set.

I played when it was about -5 last year. The day started out pretty nice, it was about 30*, but it plummeted when the clouds came. The worst part was when it started to snow at the turn. Unfortunately, I was playing at a course that doesn't give rain (or snow) checks after the 7th hole, so I kept playing thinking it would let up. It wasn't too bad actually, because there wasn't much snow, but I had approach shots act like they hit a cartpath.

I would definitely look at a stiffer shaft, or one with a higher kick point (kickpoint and ballflight have an inverse relationship).