mirv

i've been gradually weening myself from mulligans over the past year or so. i used to just take a mulligan wherever and whenever i felt like it, but i've got myself down to what i refer to as "driver mulligans," meaning that the only place i can call mulligan is on the box, and then only if i hit my drive out of bounds or into a water hazard or something. plus i only allow myself of those for every nine holes. it's really forced me to tighten up the rest of my game, which has forced me to acknowledge the problem areas in my game and correct them. as a result, just like the first poster said, i've gone from mid-high 40s with mulligans to mid-high 40s without mulligans, and then even went another step and started shooting low 40s without mulligans. basically, mulligans let you ignore your problems. the sooner you can get yourself away from them and start focusing on what's causing you to have to use mulligans in the first place, the sooner your scores will start improving. P.S. - there's a plumbing company here called "mulligan plumbing." i'd be nervous calling them, cause i'd be thinking the entire time "these are the 'whoops, i'm going to try that again' guys."

my bad luck tends to be on the more ridiculous side. example - in a tournament just a few weeks ago, i was facing a 170 yard par 3. perfectly flat fairway area, big green and pin was front and center on it. i hit a 4 iron into the wind, which i guess was stronger than i'd thought it to be, because the ball came down probably 12 feet short of the green, right in front of the pin, which would have been fine except it hit a water sprinkler coming down, bounced about 30 feet back up into the air, and ended up 20 feet behind the green in some super thick rough. if it had just fallen short of the green, i'd probably have been sitting on the fringe right in front of the cup and easily saved par, but as it was ... bogey.

today at the range, i was a couple of spaces down from some highschool kids, probably 16 or 17 years old. they were hitting balls pretty poorly, thudding the club against the ground on every other shot, but still announcing - and seemingly with all seriousness - "oh yeah, that one got down to the 300." now me, when i'm hitting good drives, i usually get 20-30 yards behind the 200 sign (though my actual average is around 270 on the course - the local range's balls are all old and crappy and cheap), so a bunch of kids proclaiming to get to the 300 sign on damn near every shot got my attention. i moved as if to just rest on a bench for a minute and watched them out of the corner of my eye. i watched for probably 10 shots, and not a single one got near the 300. in fact, not a single one even passed the 200. moreover, they all sliced. i don't know what those kids were looking at - if they were just joking around (though like i said, it sounded like they certainly meant it) or if they were delusional or what, but i thought of this thread as i watched them, haha. i'm sure they'll go tell all their friends at school monday about how they came to the range this weekend and were hitting to the 300 sign every time. oh, and i'd put them at higher than a 20 handicap, too. if i were to just guess - considering they didn't hit a single club other than the driver - and judging based on their drives - i'd say their handicap would probably closer to 30.

i've had two in my life - one i have a hard time counting because it was such a short par 4. the hole was only like 230 yards. i drove it to the green with a 3 wood and then 1-putted. the eagle that i really count and am proud of was a 330 yard par 4 where i drove the ball just shy of 300 yards . my second shot, i took a nice soft pitch that landed on the green and rolled about 10-12 feet straight into the cup.

i went to a guy for a handful of lessons and basically lost my game for a solid six months. he was trying to recreate the wheel, as someone previously put it. the day before i went to him, i'd shot a 79 on my home course. i was lucky to get below 90 in the months after i went to him. finally one day i just told myself, okay, stop trying to do what he taught you to do and rebuild your swing from the ground up. now i'm back into the low 80s on average. anyway, point of the story is that i became very defensive against the idea of lessons. my dad would see me have a bad day (by which i mean i'd shoot 89 or 90) and would say "maybe you need to find someone for some lessons," and i'd immediately whirl and point at him and say "no, don't even suggest such a thing, it's not going to happen - you saw what happened to my game after tommy got ahold of it." however, i've recently realized that i've got some posture/alignment issues. just a small adjustment here or there, except i'm not entirely sure what those adjustments need to be, so i've been shopping around for a pro who will just f'n tell me what i need to know and won't try to restructure my entire game. ...in other words, what everyone's already said here - that it's all about finding the right person for you and what you need.

i almost always keep note on my scorecard of my fairways, GIR and putts, but for some reason, i've never bothered tallying them all up for an average. i take it on a day to day basis cause my game might be right on it one day, and it won't be anywhere near it on another. a quick average estimation, though, would be about 30% of fairways (though a LOT of the time, i'm only out by 5-10 feet), GIRs is probably about 30% as well (i'm rather ashamed of that), and i 2-putt consistently, usually with just one or two 1-putts and also one or two 3-putts.

yeah, the plane line is pretty vertical. that's something i've been trying to fix but just can't seem to break myself of the habit. any drills that might help me along with that? misses are mostly to the right by about 10-15 yards. i rarely actually slice the ball, i just get a bit of a push-fade. i really strongly suspect my left hip isn't clearing in the downswing - it turns, but i'm honestly not sure exactly how far it's supposed to turn. i'm not exactly mr limber, either, so they may just simply be turning as far as they want to go. i'll try to post a more down-the-line video tomorrow (which hopefully will include me from the knees-down as well).

hey guys... i finally made a video (low quality and i forgot to get my feet in the shot, sorry) of myself swinging, and there's obviously some things amiss in it. most noticably to me is my follow-through. i know it's not supposed to loop out there in front of me like that, it's supposed to be more around, right? i've got a handicap of 11-12, and have had half a dozen rounds or so where i actually managed to get into the upper 70s, but a lot of that is really just luck. i've spent so much time in trouble that i've gotten pretty proficient at getting myself out of it. recovery and putting are definitely the strongest points of my game, with my irons by far being my weakest. so anyway... i'll officially embarrass myself for the world by posting this quick little video of me making a practice swing with a gap wedge in the garage and thank everyone in advance for whatever advice they can offer.

there's a very tough par 4 on my local course - it's about 315 yards long, but there is not a single level spot on the entire hole other than the tee box. the entire thing slopes sharply down to the right. the fairway is at most 30 yards wide with a neighborhood up the right side and woods up the left side. basically, you need to pull out a 7 iron or something and just try to keep yourself in the middle by hitting the left side (top) of the fairway and letting it roll relatively center. well, three or four years ago, i was out by myself one wintry day and i caught up to a group of school kids and their phys ed instructor out playing some golf on a field trip or something. and of course, they were going to let me play through on the aforementioned hole. i'd only been playing about two years at that point, so i didn't understand/didn't care about the idea of playing it safe - by god, i was going to hit a driver. and as fate would have it, i busted out one of the best drives of my life - straight up the left side, landed on the top of the slope, rolled down to within 30 yards right in front of the green. now like i said, it was winter, and it'd rained the day before, so the fairway was pretty soggy. i got out the wedge and was just going to gently pitch it up aaaaand... i hit it fat. real fat. the ball went about 3 feet. i thought to myself "i'm so glad i'm almost 300 yards away from those people so that they hopefully didn't see that." next shot, i wanted to make sure i didn't hit it fat, so, of course, i topped it and rolled it across to the wrong side of the green. follow that up with a 3 putt (the green slopes about as badly as the fairway itself, and i had to come down), i had myself a double bogey when i'd drove the ball to within 30 yards.

typically, i'll take three sleeves out with me (which is overkill, i rarely lose more than three balls in a round), and i usually have a couple of old balls rolling around in the bag somewhere too.

for some reason, just this morning i was thinking about when tiger was sporting the goatee - i thought to myself "maybe that wasn't tiger at all. maybe that was Evil Tiger from an Alternate Dimension." you know, like on the old star trek episodes.

i'd say on average i shoot around 12-15 over par for a round (though occasionally i do get some kind of nice score like 6 or 7 over par, which knocks the handicap down), but usually at least once a month i'll pull a 90+ score out. sometimes (like now) i'll get in a funk and be lucky to stay in the 80s. i can safely say i haven't shot over 100 in a long, long time though. *knock on wood*

i used to 3 putt several holes per round, myself, and every last bit of it was a distance control problem for me. the ball would almost always roll straight at or very close to the cup, but it'd either stop well short of the hole or it'd zoom past it far enough that it took another 2 putts to get the ball home. someone here already mentioned a shorter backswing and a longer forward swing. this was something i read somewhere, as well, and it really did wonders for me. sometimes i still hit it short or long, but instead of being 10 feet short or 10 feet long, it's more like 3-4 feet either way. another thing i did was employ imagery. when i first started golfing, i was still living at home with my mother, and she worked the night shift, so during the day when i'd be practicing my putting around the house, i'd have to be careful to not make much noise. i'd usually set up a target in front of the wall and putt the ball at it, but if i hit the ball too hard, it'd hit the wall and make a loud *THUMP!* noise and bounce back towards me, which i really wanted to avoid. now when i go to the course, i almost involuntarily imagine that there's a wall right behind the cup, and my goal is to roll the ball up to that wall without making it go *THUMP!* and bounce back. i want it to, at most, gently roll up and touch the wall, that way i'm hopefully only a foot or so behind the cup (unless it dropped, of course).

i keep it as simple as possible on par 5s - put the ball in the fairway, put the ball in the fairway again, put the ball on the green, 2 putt. i use the exact same strategy on par 4s, except there's one less "put the ball in the fairway," obviously. i don't bother going for birdies (though they do occasionally happen) - i aim for pars for now.

i started out with an interlock, but i took a handful of lessons about a year ago, and one of the first things the instructor suggested i do was change to a vardon grip. it felt a little weird for a very short time, but i took to it really quickly overall, and now the interlock feels strange and unstable to me. i've got a real mother of a callous on my left index finger below the joint, but mine's on the outside of the finger instead of the inside. i'm pretty sure that's not good, but i haven't taken the time out to correct it yet.

i'm going to vote with the majority here and say a good stroke is the more difficult part. honestly, i barely even examine the line very much when i putt. i'll look at it for a second or two, establish a kind of "general" line to the hole, and then try to putt down it. i usually keep a tally of how many putts (as well as greens in regulation and fairways) i hit during a round, and typically i've got 2 putts across the board. when i miss a putt, 90% of the time it's from my poor distance control and not failure to establish the correct line. the ball will either stop short or will have just enough speed on it to hit the hole and hop over it.

recently, i met up with a guy on my local course that i had been best friends with in elementary school. he said he'd only been playing about 18 months or thereabouts and generally shot in the mid 90s. so going up to the first box, i expected the classic top the ball, roll it about 50 yards maybe, or if he did hit it halfway decent, it'd be a banana ball. now, this particular hole is a par 4 that's marked as being 337 yards, and it's pretty much just a straight-ahead hole. so i hit my shot with a 5-wood up the fairway probably 210 yards or so and walk away feeling pretty good about myself. he walks up to the box with driver in hand and proceeds to practically drive the green - he was probably 15 yards short of being pin high and 20 yards at most to the left of the green. i gaped at him and asked "how did you do THAT?" i thought he'd just been yanking my crank about being a 20+ handicapper, but reality set in when he tried to pitch up onto the green - completely fat and goes about 10 yards. next attempt barely makes it onto the green, and then follows up with 3 putts to a pin that was maybe 25 feet away (so he ended up with a double bogey). next hole, he busts out another huge drive, but this one is so far off target that it doesn't even matter - it's off in the adjoining fairway somewhere, but once again, it carried close to, if not, 300 yards. over the next few holes, he has a mix of dead-straight 300+ yard drives, and drives so bad you can't even bear to watch the ball. and he had no short game or iron game to speak of, so by the end of the day, he was definitely approaching 100 on his score. that sort of thing seems to be a big focus for people who've only been playing a short time - who cares about score, they just want to hit it as hard and far as they can, and in their mind, that somehow will equate to good scores. another friend of mine had that exact mindset, and i don't know how many times i heard him rant about "i had that BEAUTIFUL drive, and i still end up with a double bogey. wtf is that?" and i'd tell him, that's you putting too much focus on driving the ball. you need to work on the rest of your game and forget about hitting it into the next zip code. he didn't want to hear that, though.

when i started out about four years ago, i hit a fade on just about every shot. i couldn't draw the ball to save my life. but for the past year or so, and after changing practically every single aspect of my swing, i tend to hit a fairly strong draw and have trouble with fades. i can hit a soft fade if i only put a 3/4 swing or less on it, but if i really try to rear back and hit a power fade, it either flies dead straight or goes banana ball. :/