Pretzel

I've noticed that the 2013 ProV1's and X's each have the Titleist logo printed on almost the exact same spot (in relation to dimple patterns) on every ball. This made me very happy and I started putting one dot on each side of the Titleist logo. Before I just would pick one dot somewhat underneath the number.

Micah, I'd just like to stop you here before you get too far. If you continue to persist with this, it's only going to serve to further damage any credibility you may have left. You are correct in saying that a "square" clubface would technically hit the ball far and straight, but only if it is square to your path EVERY time you hit a ball. If it's the slightest bit open you bring a draw or a fade into play, making for more inconsistency than a clubface that is always slightly shut or open to the swingpath. You see, if you tried to hit a straight shot using your method the result would be inconsistent at best. You might hit 2/10 that were reasonably straight, but then hit 4 with a draw and 4 with a fade. This means that 8/10th of your shots didn't really go where you wanted them to and, to make things worse, you have no way of predicting which way you will miss. When I hit a golf ball with my preferred push-draw, I know that 1 of two things will happen: 1) I will hit it and it will draw back towards the target leaving me reasonably on line with my intended target 2) I will get myself "stuck" and end up blocking my shot, leaving me with a miss to the right. The things that I know won't happen on a reasonably decent swing are: 1) I will not push-fade the ball to the right (I try to hit a fade sometimes, but the results are usually ugly). 2) I will not hook the ball far to the left (unless I get too armsy, but the hook is a good indicator of that in my swing). This means that I have a miss on only one side, to the right, rather than having an opportunity to miss both right and left. In addition I will have a larger margin for error since 3 yards more or less of a draw to my shot will not leave me that far off of the pin. However if you hit any curve at all with your technique, it will be rolling away from the hole when it hits the green regardless of which way it curves. My shots have a 50% chance to roll out towards the pin and come slightly closer if I draw the ball less than intended, giving me even more margin for error. Lastly, it's really much easier to hit a curving ball than a straight shot. I could go an entire round where my clubface is closed to my swingpath on nearly every shot. You might hit 10 shots during a round where your clubface and swingpath are within .5* of each other going straight down the line. It's really all about you not knowing where you will miss your shot (will it go to the right or left if you miss it?) and me knowing that I will miss it to the right 90% of the time.

I actually think it's sound advice that geauxforbroke gave him. You can "fix" your problem with a bandaid where you just modify a couple setup things and ignore your swing faults, or you can go in and fix the actual swing that's the root of the problem. Also, a square clubface does NOT "ensure a straight shot and good ball striking". You can hit massive hooks and slices with a square clubface all day if your swing path isn't straight through the ball. You can also hook the ball with an open face (relative to the target, not your swingpath), and slice it with a closed clubface (again relative to the target). Now, if you are talking about a square clubface relative to the swingpath, he will hit straight shots all day. That doesn't mean that those straight shots will go where he is aiming (they go where the swingpath and clubface were aiming), nor does it automatically improve ballstriking. What if he hits it fat or thin a couple times a round? Is he still an exceptional ballstriker because he has a square clubface? Finally, to the original poster, please do post a swing video in the "Member Swings" section. Iacas and Mvmac are both highly qualified to look at it and give a few suggestions if they have time. In addition we can then see if you are coming from too far from the inside to cause your hook, or if you just have a very shut clubface. Each of those would have a different fix that allows you to fix the cause in the swing rather than only trying to fix your hook.

Speaking to this, I have a 3-wood that this happened to. I had it reshafted at a Golfsmith and they left the grip about 1/2" off of the shaft at the butt. I used compressed air (inserted through the hole at the end of the grip) to get the grip off and redo it myself. Over time though a lot of grips will end up twisted slightly after thousands of swings. I know that not one of my irons has a grip that is perfectly straight, but I do know that they all started out looking straight to my eye when I put them on.

Coming over the top causes a slice, not a hook, in probably 95% of cases unless it's a severe pull-hook with an extremely shut face. Anyways, on topic, I believe that a swing video would be the best way for anyone here to be able to help you. Without seeing what it is that you may be doing wrong it is hard for anyone to give you more than general tips or tips that may have worked for them in the past. That means that they may end up hurting more than helping depending on how you swing compared to the tip-giver.

I'm hoping to go and see it, but having trouble getting grounds passes since I would only be able to go on the weekend. It would be cool if they used this as a test to see if Colorado can really host more of the big tournaments since The International at Castle Pines stopped happening. I'd love to have a U.S. Open around here someday if they like what they see this week.

I love my 3 hybrid and personally enjoy my 4 iron hybrid. The main reason that I am prevented from buying a 5 hybrid is that I have a strong tendency with my hybrids to hook it more than with other clubs. I think Ping may have gotten a little sneaky with their G10 series and designed them similar to their "draw" drivers of the time to help out most people looking into hybrids. Regardless I hit the 3 and 4 hybrids more consistently than their respective irons, so they stay in my bag. I would recommend you take in your 5 iron (and 5 iron only) to a golf shop that carries the hybrids you're looking at. Get yourself a properly fitted 5 hybrid to test and hit 25-50 shots with each club. Count the number of serious mishits with each club and check the overall dispersion and ballflight with each. Use the numbers to help your decision, but ultimately it will come down to which club will allow you to feel most comfortable when you have a pressure shot to hit.

I know when I take lessons my instructor will tend to exaggerate the distance a little bit. Part of it is his joking personality, which I understand, and the other parts are that we hit range balls and he likes to be optimistic. You just have to remember that these guys make their money on giving people lessons and people want to leave a lesson confident in their abilities. Even if the guy isn't hitting it that far, it's likely that the confidence the instructor is giving him will help him in some way that may not be apparent to you.

Quote: You can easily cheat the system here, but that would only confirm the lack of a soul in your worthless, subhuman cheater body. That's just the problem as to why I feel it wouldn't really prove much, is because you could cheat. If you lie about distance off the tee already, why bother to reveal the truth when you could easily cheat without anyone necessarily knowing it. People could still doubt it the same as a number off the top of your head, but I'm not sure it would change anyone's distances except those who only guesstimate at their distance and weren't intentionally misleading people. I'm not trying to really say that people will try to mislead you here, but I feel that those who would try to mislead in the first place would either cheat anyways or avoid a thread like this. Unfortunately that is how the internet's anonymity affects some people. That's still not to say that I'd be interested in seeing how this measurement technique pans out compared to using with a laser and shooting the distance back to the tee box/to the ball from the tee. I'm guessing the real difference may be in that the GPS has fewer depth perception/human errors of misjudging where the teebox was but less overall precision on the numbers by a slight amount.

This would be sort of interesting to see posted along with swing videos, but I don't see much point to it. Does it matter so much how far you hit it so long as it's in the fairway and close enough for a mid-short iron on a reasonable-length par 4? I like to track my accuracy stats off the tee much more than anything else since I know my carry distance cutoffs from experimentation for going over lakes or doglegs and that's good enough for me. There's just so much variability based off of altitude, humidity, temperature and ground conditions that I can't really see how the distances would be very comparable to anyone except yourself under the same conditions. That being said, I don't want to poo-poo this thread and would be hopefully optimistic to see how well this method of measurement works.

I'm the same way here in that if I were to buy new irons my distances would improve just because of the lofts. Really all it is though is that they essentially replaced the 7 on the bottom with an 8 when I compared my Eye 2's to the new i20's or s56 irons. However I would assume that they've figured out how to make irons more forgiving to compensate for the reduced loft on the long irons.

Well, to be fair, he only started to really lay into you when you started pushing back. I can understand you being able to hit a pitching wedge 160 (a player on my high school team recently aced a 190 par 3 with an 8), but your accuracy claims seem slightly far-fetched. I mean, getting it on the green EVERY time is pretty great from that distance much less being more than 2x as close as a touring pro. I'm not trying to be mean, and I hope you understand that, but you should never use an absolute superlative such as never, always, etc. unless you are referring to the fact that you should never use them or are saying you never miss putts that already went in the hole. I think Shorty is just getting frustrated that you won't acknowledge his points and instead choose to insult him personally. The fact that he hasn't made it that personal beyond questioning your honesty (I've seen him do it to other people looking through old posts) is quite impressive actually after some of your abrasive and inflammatory comments. He is merely trying to point out how your claims stack up against those who do this for a living. If you do hit it to 10' every time though please improve your putting, go on tour, and give me 5% of your first winning check for giving you that tip.

Living in Colorado, I know that my golf ball should travel a good deal further in the air and total than when at sea level. However in a recent trip to Michigan, I noticed that my distances only changed by 5 yards or so with the irons and around 10 with hybrids and woods. I expected a much greater change myself and it makes me wonder if I subconsciously was hitting the ball harder to try and match my usual distances or compensate for the air pressure. Has anyone else played at altitude and close to sea level and noticed a small difference as well?

I love Harvey Penick's Little Red Book. One story that stuck out to me in there was the one where a player complained to him of a ballflight that was slightly too high, to which he replied, "The ball is still going towards the hole, is it not?". Moral of the story: It doesn't matter too much if you slice it or hook it (so long as it's consistent) if you can account for that and hit the fairway. I used to play a slice for a couple years and I would just aim 10-15 yards to the left of the fairway if there weren't any trees. I only started to fix it in earnest when I began to play different courses that called for draws and penalized you heavily if you missed to the right.

Once I had a dead battery in my rangefinder, but only found out on the range 5 minutes before my tee time. As such I never took it off my bag, and it ended up falling out at one point in the round (it occasionally does that since the magnet in the case isn't strong but I usually find out when I next use it). Luckily the person who found it saw my name and phone number that was written on the bottom and called me to have me pick it up when my round was finished. I was amazed that he would return it immediately, especially since he could have easily taken a wet towel and wiped the sharpie right off to call it his own.

I think for iron shots, I would love to have Adam Scott's swing. However when it comes to the driver and woods/metals, I would love to have Rory McIlroy's swing. For the short game and putting I like Mickelson's techniques and results. If I were to choose one player's swing for everything though I would love to have Rory McIlroy's just because I can't stand Adam Scott's belly putter and Mickelson is far too long in the backswing for me personally.

He was just using a metaphoric statement to help describe how useless it is to watch a person swing without a ball. I'm sorry to repeat this for you, but he's just trying to tell you that the swing changes when you swing at a ball. It's not the ballflight we care about, because most cameras can't follow the ball past 20 feet or so, but the actual swing and your impact positions. Impact positions can tell you a lot since they're what really matters when it comes down to it (Jim Furyk being a prime example), but swinging well will help you set up into a good impact position. You just can't get an impact position when you swing without a golf ball in front of you. For clarification though I am taking into account the direction and velocity of the club when I mention an "impact position" as being the most important to me.

I just do it with one hand and sort of flick my wrist with the remote, which makes my mind think that it is nothing that is close to a real golf swing. It also works better than a real swing in the game, which I found very odd.

Your swing looks nicely on plane, at least in the ones in the video. The only thing I saw was that it looked like you stood up through impact on most of those swings. I used to do that myself and I know that lead to real problems with my consistency before.

Shot an 83 at a 73.1/129 par 71 course. This thing wasn't exceptionally long, but it was tight. Was an alright day until I doubled the last two holes due to lost golf balls. That and the fact that I only hit 2 greens in regulation really hurt my score.

When I took that quiz, it gave me questions that were almost entirely devoted to match play. I've never played match play before in my life, which makes me think they ought to add another option for match or stroke play rulings and penalties.

I personally find it distracting from the shots, but when watching from a television it isn't too bad. Mainly because I'm busy trying to figure out where the golf ball is going in relation to the fairway when all I can see is a lurching view of just the ball in the air. I wish they would use their shot tracker, or whatever they call it, that highlights the line the golf ball took much more often than they do. It's interesting to me to watch the variety of shot shapes and trajectories that different players will use.

Hello, I've been reading some of the articles and forums on this site for a while and found some pretty helpful stuff (most notably the free version of the golfshot app I'm waiting to try out) so I figured I'd try joining. As a junior in high school I just made it this year as the #6 man on our high school varsity team that usually goes to and competes at the state competition. Unfortunately four of our top five players are seniors and I am the only one after them that can shoot in the 70's, but we have one freshmen this year that made the #2 spot and we can only hope for more. Some of the things that I enjoy to do are golfing (obviously), working with my horse and browsing various golf websites or magazines. Some of my favorite types of courses are the ones where you can't hit driver off of every tee and really make you think hard about your different shots. My least favorite are probably the ones that are just overly long (Heritage at Westmoor comes to mind as a tournament location and former US Open qualifier course at 7450 yards). My largest pet peeve on the course has to be a tie between people not fixing ball marks and recently sanded greens, due to their effect on the lines of your putts and the fact that sanded greens force you to clean your ball after each stroke. Some of my favorite things are when I either strike an iron shot perfectly or when I hit a putt on the perfect line and watch it trickle down into the hole.