Chunky

Misty your are right on, most people with knowledge in this area will tell you they would bet against the IGF stuff even being stable enough to survive in the spray. Bottom line the only thing they could suspend VJ for is being stupid enough to believe it worked.

Dropping your hands on going into the swing maybe what you need to do, but it may not be the swing thought that works for you. Find a different teacher with different ideas. Here are some different approaches, keep your front arm straighter through the backswing and push the club grip away from your body in the backswing. keep your backswing on a lower plane, put your weight more toward your toes, take a backswing that feels like you are pulling the club toward you butt and feel like you swinging toward the left. All these swing thoughts will work for different people. A good instructor will work with you to fine a way to get you swinging right. Many instructors get caught up in a cookie cutter approach and don't get into the head of the head of their student enough.

I watched the golf channel and it was not clear on the rule. A ball in embedded anywhere but short grass on the fairway or green is play as it lies. Many courses have winter rules that give you a free drop through the green. Which means anywhere except behind red, or yellow stakes or ground under repair or sand traps. So, the embedded ball rule in this situation was a local rule based on conditions. That part I got because I figured it was the only possibility. As for the sand rule, that is irregular and the only time I've heard anything like it was Dustin Johnston from some casual sand and not a trap (players championship east coast?). Anyway, I never heard about the sand part, which I can only infer. There are a lot of answers here from people that really don't grasp the situation and rules.

Who's rules you playing by? THe rules of golf say if you don't replay an out of bounds shot from your original lie you are disqualified. I'd say that means you not only lose the match but are still responsible for all bets in the match that anyone else wins. But... if you are on a public course, which most of us are you aren't going to get time to look for your ball or go back to a tee, so I would make a rule, lost balls and Out of bounds shots get a drop near where it went out or is lost and a one shot penalty. Some people say two but most times people would be in a better chance if they would have taken the second shot, lying three from the tee. The other alternative is you make your bets and say we are playing by the rules of golf an throw down a rule book on the first tee and say here's the rules.

Both PRo V's give lots of spin if you have the swing speed. That is a problem if you don't have the shots and accuracy and hit it hard enough to spin it. YOu will find occasions where the ball will spin back 30 feet or more and off the green unless you know the greens and know how to hit three quarter shots or half shots. A second issue with Pro V's and Pro Vx is that they react differently to chipping. When the greens are nice and holding well you will finds that a short 3 foot chip to a 6 foot pin will spin and check and come up short, so you hit it a little harder and it goes farther but checks more. So, unless you are good at using different clubs to chip and can make a ball that does that work for you, you will lose some strokes. Another issue, if you have the swing speed is being capable of hitting past the hole and getting the ball to come back. THis will mean you will be hitting one club more sometimes and maybe that's not a route you want to take. I use ProVs occasionally depending on the green conditions. I prefer the NXT Tour ball because it more or less checks and stops or occasion backs up a little. THis is a much easier way to get your distances right. Watch the pro's play and pretty soon you will see some guys spinning balls way too far back from the holes, Those balls will be PRoV's. As for the DT solo it's a good ball for players with sub 90mph swings. If your a long knocker you will lose distance with the ball on many of your clubs.

First no one has said why they would have gotten a free drop for a ball plugged not on the fairway. Was there a local rule in effect for a free drop for a plugged ball through the green? If so why didn't Tiger know he was in a sand trap or was it just a sandy area? Was that another special rule that even sandy areas outside a trap was not a free drop. This whole situation is what pisses me off about the news, the lack of relevant details that explain what was going on.

Rating a course is a bit like sitting in a bar with three buddies on ladies night and trying to agree on which is the prettiest lady. I think from a Pro golfer you will get a better answer, the reason is it won't come down to how well he plays the course as a factor, it will be how well he competes against a field of players on that course because score is a relative thing. In the case of a weekend player he will factor in the type of shots he can hit. If it's windy, he won't like the course unless he can hit a low shot into the wind or a high shot with the wind. If a person is a bit wild with the driver he won't like narrow fairways with a lot of out of bounds. If a guy is good at getting out of trouble he's not going to like three inch tall grass with lots of trees. So if you come up to me and tell me a certain course is great, I'm going to want to know a little bit about your game which will help me figure out what factors are going to influence you more.

You got to take the GIR numbers very generally as opposed to being a statistical calculation of how well you shoot. There are other variables that come into play, different courses and how the pins are placed which can skew the number or just conditions in general. So, yah, I think 3 greens in regulation to break 90 makes sense, but it's certainly not an iron clad rule. Some days your just lights out putting. I'm pretty confident with my putting, meaning I hit the ball exactly the direction I aim, but on my good days I also get the break right and that can change my GIR relative to my score real fast.

Slow people rule the world, they are in front of you when you drive, looking for their credit cards in the check out line, unorganized and unready at the bank teller window. So why are we nice to them, I don't know.

National Enquirer, really? If the National Enquirer ever writes anything that is newsworthy or true another bigger paper will pick up on it. There is only one reason Tiger would want Erin back, to be with his kids, monogomy sucks.

Do you have some clubs you tend to hit better. The idea here is that your wedges and maybe some short irons you swing can be a bit over the top and work well. As you go up in the bag to your longer stuff you don't want to be over the top and use a shallower angle. In my case I also angle my chest toward the back of the swing from my five iron on up. My wedges I just take it up high and swing. Other tricks are to focus just in front of the ball and think of hitting that spot ahead of your ball. If you think you might be dropping your shoulder think of making a rounder swing. To test if weight transfer is an issue swing the club and take a step with your rear foot as you finish the swing. You have to transfer your weight to do this and Gary Player actually played this way.

Teeing it forward has a major flaw. It is a one horse pony and doesn't work everywhere. The course I play is already short and the owners have short course syndrome, so despite having small greens, very multi slopey greens and guarding them with sandtraps and tall grass and Out of bounds markers, they also ignore most USGA recommendations on pin placement. They place the pins on the edge of slopes, near fall offs (less than the three feet recommended) and in ambiguous areas and make getting through the course without a bunch of three putts a major event. So there are lost balls because of all the tall grass around greens and people taking forever to putt. The USGA should do more to make the courses live up to setting up a fair course (in respect of setup, because golf ain't necessarily fair) and quit letting idiots try and attract players who like tough courses by making there courses more of a lottery than a skill challenge.

It depends on the balls and who I am playing with. I mark them all the same and if a provisional is a factor I uses different numbers and note them before the shot. The biggest issue I've had is with a Pro V, if another player is using one they think any Pro v is theirs, so I mark them good.

I get the temp cold weather thing on my clubs and account for it but I am just beginning to realize t it seems to creep into your carry a lot more as you get to longer irons. So the ten yard per club concept gets out of wack for my 19degree hybred and three wood and 4 iron. Since I don't have flat driving range, I can't dial it in, but the way I figure out my other clubs is to use balls I find on the golf course for the driving range. When I have 20 or so I use them to check distance. Since I am not counting on hitting more than an occasional shot that hits a green with the long clubs, I'm not looking for a scientific distance, just a good guess.

Actually, the assumption is not that someone else left the rake in the bunker, the working premise is that the golf course groundskeepers put the rakes in the bunker. Sometimes you can reach them with a club and other times you half to step in to get them. If you are in bunkers on rare occasions, you either don't play golf often or favor courses without traps. The course I play has small greens and a number of them are surrounded by bunkers. Sometimes the best play is in the bunker, but then I can play from sand reasonably well. Even the pros are in the sand some of the time.

I had a conversation with a local golf pro who has worked tournaments and been around some of the PGA pros. The gist of it was companies submit clubs for testing get them okayed then change the head for the pro. There was some talk about putting an end to this but the manufacturers are where the money is in golf, so nothing is done about it. That's politics.

Okay you want some swinging out of your shoes info. When I was in my30's I was having timing issues with my 3 wood (who doesn't) so I decided what the heck and took it back as far as I could, aka John Dally, and let her loose. I hit 285 to 300 yards off tees for the rest of the day and straight, my three wood at the time was 250 yard club from the tee. Last year on the last hole a par five, I was having a bad day and figured let's punish this ball. I rared back with the driver and give it my all, a slight pull on the left of the fairway 330 yards. My typical driver distance is 265 at the range. Swinging hard is a calculated risk, you have to look at where you are, what kind of a chance you are willing to take and where will a bad shot end up. Sometimes the odds are good that your bad shot will end up nearly as good as a layup. Yesterday, I was in the rough and the grass in front of my ball was 8 inches long and bent over, thick enough to kill a low shot to a few yards. Behind the ball the grass was little thinner and I knew I could swing through it without getting hung or slowed up much. I took an extra club, my eight and gave it the hardest swing I could, viola, six feet from the pin 140yds with a beautiful high shot. If it hadn't worked I would have been maybe 130 yards from the hole, so the risk was worth it. So it's all about sizing up the miss and the risk/reward. My driver shot was to a generous fairway, a bad eight iron from the grass would have been marginally worse than a lay up, my three wood was a desperate move in a game that was already crap. If I am having a good day and my game is on, the less likely I am to try shots like that. As for how far you're going to hit a ball with a given club under the circumstances is a feel thing, but you can learn the feel by grabbing a club and slamming it at the driving range. If you are in good shape this a good thing to do a couple of times a week because it will strengthen you body to swing faster and add distance ot your regular shot.

I do several things to gauge my distances for my irons. First I use a range finder on the range every now and then and test a club or two. I also know when I am on a par 3 what the distance is and if I hit it well and can get information from that. Even par 4's can give you a distance if you are near a yard marker. I find that if I hit the ball well with my usual comfortable swing speed I am often pin high. So, I'm figuring I'm within 2yds on my distances. The real challenge is figuring distance when one or more parameters change: altitude, temperature or humidity. I hate golf courses that give me too hard of a starting hole or two and don't give me a chance to see how my short irons and wedges are doing. The best purchase I ever made was the range finder, it has helped dial in my pitching and chipping distances and get a lot better close to the hole (30 to 90 yds). I have had a player see me take a distance and try to guess the number, more often than not they are off by ten to fifteen yards. So, if they were to hit their perfect to distance to a bad yardage they would think they are a bad chipper. I'm a 11 to 15 handicap, lately and my game is governed mostly by how often I hit the ball solid, but then I bet this is true for most decent players.

On rare occasions I will swing hard with an iron. Usually it will be to get an iron that has enough loft to go over a tree but it needs some extra oomph to get to the green. My hard shot is usually good for ten extra yards, I don't swing out of my shoes, though. Also the shot has to have a safety factor if it doesn't work, meaning even if it fails I will have a chance to hit something on the green, even if it is under a limb or something.

Pro Vs marked PRACTICE are sold at some golf shops. They are not necessarily range balls. My experience with Pro v's is that they are possibly a good ball for really good players or poor players. If you fall in between skill levels and are capable of swing speeds in excess of 90 mph then you will have occasional issues with controlling the spin and find your ball whipping from the center of the green back off the front.

I play a public course in the San Francisco Bay area that is the cheapest in the area. It's a budget issue. The course sucks and many of it's issues aren't money. Last year the course was over watered all summer and any high or even low shot made a crater and stopped in most of the greens. This led to a green that developed some fungus issues and has been closed all winter. Basically the course superintendent sucks, I think he should go to some seminars on course maintenance. Then you have amateur pin placements, the greens here a small and very uneven. They like to put the pins on the edge of the slopes and high spots. Evidently they don't believe in a predictable short putt. On top of that the greens vary in speed from mowing , wind, uneven watering and different grasses. Hackers love this course but aren't good enough to realize that much of their bad putting is brought on by the conditions of the greens and stupid pin placements.

I go with the rules wise advantage of having a rake outside the bunker, but what irks me the most is having to step in the bunker grab a rake and then rake your tracks and then go hit your ball and rake again. Two words: SLOW PLAY!

I have no problem with Taylormade using changing the loft on an iron to get more distance, unless, I lose loft of height from the club. My understanding is that Taylormade off sets the loss of loft with a bottom weighted club head that gets the loft back up so the club hits higher with less loft in the iron face. If that's true I like it, because it's a definite advantage to hit a higher shot further, to get over a tree or land a green that is tough to hold your ball on. As for the Rocketbalz or however they spell it, distance, I go to the PGA tour stat page and look at how far they hit a driver for the last four years and see if it goes further with a new club You know what, it never does.

GPS devices have 10 foot error factor in accuracy, but this only applies to some devices, it is possible to have some gps devices that have a thirty foot error factor. It depends on how many satellites the device calls on 3 or 5. The next issue is if your gps is in an area of trees or hills it may not be able to get enough satellites to gather more accurate information because the terrain will block its view of some of the sky. The accuracy of your gps device is actually determined by the military that doesn't want them to be accurate enough to guide bombs to exact locations. Hand held range finders are usually accurate to 3 feet or less, they work by sending a pulse out to a target and timing it's return to the unit and making a calculation. I believe somehow they are designed to like to focus on targets that contrast to their surroundings. This is why it can be hard to get a reading in areas where the flag has a lot of trees and shade around it. Some range finders are tuned to pick up the funny little glass crystals that some courses are using in their flag sticks up near the flag. So the best method of determining distance is to have combo unit because sometimes you can't even see a flag to get distance from a range finder and other times the gps can't find enough satellites to be reasonably accurate. The beauty is that the GPS can give you the distances from center of the green to the edges and sand traps and the range finder can give you a more accurate distance to the pin itself. If and where I play this a problem, you can't determine where the flag is on the green (back, front, center or side) then you only know how far the pin is.

Pace of play is a management issue. There should be a marshal and he should be trained to approach slow groups and speed them up. Most players resist the "ready play" directive of most courses and play the honors system or a combination of both. A marshal can run herd on them and get them going. This should work most of the time because I believe there are 1 or more people in a group ready to do this but are too polite to say anything and won't step in front of a slower or unready player. The other slow play issue is a lost ball. This is nearly always handled inefficiently. The player with the lost ball needs to get looking and one player or several players should get ready and hit their shots and if they aren't too far away go help and play should still keep going to the hole and the lost ball guy can catch up which means someone is always moving forward and keeping the downtime to a minimum. I hate being behind a group or assigned to a group where everyone starts looking for a lost ball and nobody is hitting their ball. Even if they eventually catch the group in front of them, a group that got held up behind them may not be fast enough to increase their speed. The handicap system also slows up play. If you're keeping a handicap you hate to take a lost ball or waste a putt because you didn't look a green over good enough I thing the handicap system needs to modify the lost ball rule and the out of bounds rule to speed up play. How many times have you hit a ball OB and didn't know it till you got to the ball? On the hilly courses I play this happens fairly often. Not to mention blind shots over hills into the rough that get lost.