CalBoomer

I believe "after 40" means 41 and beyond. Beemer and Yang did awfully well for "lawn chairs."

Tiger is 35. Even for golfers, that is not hitting your prime. Consider at age 35: Faldo had won 5/6, Nicklaus 14/18, Nelson 5/5, Palmer 7/7, Trevino 6/6. Hogan won 9 in a seven year span in his late 30s and early 40s and Snead won 7 in an eight year span at about the same age, in the late 1940s and early 1950s when they were each others main competition and the overall field was thin. Gary Player, the fitness freak, is the main exception to this data, winning 5/9 before 35 and 4/9 after. The bottom line here is that golfers, like most professional athletes, are not hitting their prime at 35. Kenny Perry may have been competitive for routine tournaments into his late forties, but he was not winning majors. I have nothing against Tiger. If he should break Nicklaus record, though, he should be given credit for an incredible achievement, not something that was/is a forgone conclusion.

Jack Nicklaus won exactly one major after the age of 40, and he was not playing against the extremely deep talent pool that exists today. I really don't understand why people expect Tiger to be superhuman.

Is that on the basketball court or the golf course?

Are you kidding? Why should anyone be annoyed about taking a divot off the tee? Watch the pros or any good golfer on a par three. Even if the ball is on a tee, it is so low as to be nothing more than a good lie. And they ALWAYS take divots, because they are hitting down on the ball.

Good golf, even mediocre golf, requires that you learn how to perform correctly many different types of shots. You do not, and cannot, learn how to do this on a golf course. You simply do not repeat the same shot enough times on the golf course to learn much of anything. So read or take some lessons and spend the bulk of your time on a grass driving range. Think of the course as an exam and the driving range as study period.

Most of the buzz around Tiger's recent funk and whether or not he will break Nicklaus' record for major wins devolves into "Yes he will" or "No he won't" camps. Here is a more nuanced view. Sports has always had transcendent athletes who--for a period of time--excelled way beyond their contemporaries. Babe Ruth, Jim Brown, Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Lebron James--and Tiger Woods. None of them have, can, or will maintain that level of performance indefinitely. I do not think anyone could make the argument that, for peak performance, Tiger is now just as good as he was 10 years ago, all the other crap notwithstanding. At the same time, the general level of excellence among young golfers is increasing, not just in the US but around the world. So, in this environment, a Tiger with deteriorating skills will need to win one major every other year over the next ten years or one major per year for the next five years to exceed Nicklaus. Given that five major wins is a lifetime, Hall of Fame achievement for most very good golfers, I would have to say that the odds are against him. Were I handicapping for Las Vegas, I would give him no better than 5:1 odds, if that.

Jim Furyk is an octupus falling out of a tree.

Got the same results from the calculator as other folks. Drives a little too long. Short irons a little too short.

To all the one-club chippers out there: Expand your horizons. No matter how good you are with the sand wedge or (fill in the blank), you would be better and more able to deal with the endless variety of possibly necessary shots if you used other irons when they are appropriate.

I have to second this opinion. The driver swing is different from all the other clubs, in that the ball has to be contacted with a slightly rising club head. And the swing plane has to be flatter than with the irons. For the longest time, I could never hit my irons and driver well at the same time. Reason? The same swing doesn't work for both. Sounds like you have everything but the driver working. You need some instruction more than you need to find the "right" driver.

Let's get a bit more generic here. A punch shot can also be called a knockdown shot. The idea is that the ball is kept low, sometimes under an overhanging obstacle, sometimes into the wind, with decreased spin. The ball is hit with an abbreviated swing and a delofted clubface with the hands always ahead at contact. I personally can achieve these conditions better with the ball back in my stance. Some people have described it as a very hard chip. It can be hit with virtually any club from a 2-iron (Tiger's "stinger") to a wedge, depending on how far you want the ball to go and how low it must be kept.

Ok, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a major-league cynic, but here goes. We've all heard the saying, "Close only counts in horseshoes." Clearly, the first guy who said that wasn't a golfer. The closer you are to the pin--after any shot on the golf course, from drive to putt--the better the shot. More better shots = better golfer. Did we really need a mathematician/statistician to tell us this? I will not be keeping this data on my next round. I will be concentrating on hitting the best possible shot each time I address the ball.

I want to amplify on this insightful comment. Many people assume that the only thing that causes a hook is an inside-out swing and that the only thing that causes a slice is an outside-in swing. Hank Haney educated me (via his book) that the swing plane can profundly influence whether you are likely to hook or slice. A very flat swing plane is almost guaranteed to produce a hook. A very vertical plane (even with an inside-out swing) is very likely to slice. When I find myself hooking too much, I make a conscious effort to get my swing plane more vertical. It usually solves the problem. Fact is, most people do not pay a lot of attention to their swing plane and allow it to drift in either direction at random, which then causes problems that they can't "explain."

Several responders have said that the "Majors" attract the best fields. Well, the Tournament Players Championship pays $1,700,000 to the winner, well beyond the $1,350,000 paid to the "Majors" winners. You think the best don't show up for that kind of payday? Or, as someone else mentioned, there is the $10,000,000 prize for the FedEx winner. Where does/will that fit into the "greatness" computation. As for the Masters, it could also be called the Bobby Jones Invitational. As someone else said, why is that a bigger deal than Jack or Arnie's invitationals. They easily did just as much for golf. The simple fact is that all the hype over the number of "Majors" wins was actually started by Tiger and has been way overblown by the media.

Should the number of major wins be the main determinant of how great a professional golfer is/was? Tiger's fetish about beating Nicklaus' record of 18 major wins seems to have established this as the major determinant of greatness? But is it? It would seem that the hardest tournaments to win are those that attract the largest number of the best players in the world. Certainly the US Open, the British Open, and the PGA qualify (with the US Open usually set up as the hardest track the pros ever see). But is the Masters (with all its tradition) really a harder test than the Players' Championship or the Memorial or any of the other really high profile tournaments. I think not. The Masters has a limited invitation list which inevitably excludes a number of younger players or journeymen who may get hot for four rounds and win (see the PGA history). Also, Augusta National is far from the hardest course that the pros play. So what we really need is a new list of what are really the hardest tournaments in terms of players and courses before we start adding up how many victories anyone has. Just my 2c. Any thoughts?

Diogenes has found an honest man here. When someone posts that 300 yard swing, I would also like to see the average, determined by GPS, of their last 100 consecutive drives. Until then, i will not be holding my breath.

First comment, your mechanics are all really good. I especially like how you keep your backswing on a really good plane. You should be working out the details with a good teaching pro at this point. This forum has a lot of good tips and a lot of opinionated junk. Not always easy to tell which is which. Good luck.

Please look at the video at 1:19. At contact, Phil wants to hit the ball with his hands ahead of the club so as not to lift the leading edge and blade the ball. And he says so. If his wrists do anything, it is after the ball is on its way. On thicker grass, there is a lot more leeway. On a very tight lie, trying to time a wrist flip is a prescription for a blading disaster. Try actually doing what Phil says, not what you think you see. It is a lot more reliable and fool-proof. Try your technique and his on flat dirt and see which gives more consistent results.

Just took a look at the introductory video for this "revolutionary discovery." I'm a 66 year old physician who can no longer execute a traditional full golf swing. So for several years I have been using a 3/4 single plane swing. My drives are consistently in the 230-250 range which is pretty decent for my age. Guess what? This is basically the "Perfect Connection Golf Swing." I must say that it does work and doesn't bother my back at all. But "the result of extensive research"??? Balderdash.

Flatten your swing plane if it's too steep.

He specifically says at 1:21, "If you flip your wrists, you'll blade the shot." Did you miss that? The fact is that you can't tell how active his hands are just because he follows through. By dead hands, I mean no wrist break until after the ball is hit. Usually the bigger your follow through, the farther the shot goes. But it ain't done with the wrists/hands.

"I seriously disagree with some of the advice expounded here, especially the concept that this is a "wrist flip" shot. Phil Mickelson is a master of this shot and his advice on a great youtube video is as follows: ball slightly forward in stance, slight forward press, clubface widely open, hands stay ahead of clubface, hit slightly down on the ball with relatively "dead" hands. Should be obvious from all of that, that this is no flip shot. I have practiced this a fair amount and can hit it off bare dirt without blading the ball. Wrist flip shots, on the other hand, are high susceptible to blading. I wouldn't recommend them.

Now Pavin is telling us that Tiger is "high on his list for the Ryder Cup" team. Such a crock. If the PGA and all the sponsors weren't worried about their TV ratings without Tiger, there would be absolutely no question that he would not be on the team. Between the Ryder stuff and the PGA fiasco, I am getting very turned off by golf organizations.

Comparing the first picture of this video with the Golftrak animation clearly shows what the problem is. With all the people crowded around (and it was even worse initially), it is much less clear that the area is a bunker. There are no people on the golf track animation which "clearly" shows it to be a bunker. And the description of it by the commentator as a "relatively flat lie" shows that he was not clear that it was a bunker at that time either. All of which strongly supports the argument that fans have no business standing in what the PGA and rules officials consider to be bunkers. As for Jim Nantz, is he a rules official? And a final comment, the wide discrepancy in all the comments in this forum from reasonably knowledgabe people, show that this is a very gray area. The very least the PGA could have done was to acknowledge some culpability in this area with a promise for future improvement. Even MLB apologized when an ump took away a perfect game with a blown call at first base, even though the ruling stood. Clearly the PGA, like the Soccer federation, prefers sanctimony.