B-Con

I've fallen back on low-end distance balls before when I was conserving my normal balls. I think I always I regretted it. I just can't stop them nearly as well as a decent mid-priced spinning-oriented ball. Last time I tried a Pinnacle Long because the tee shot was a forced carry of 150ish yards and I was running low on good balls (and not driving well). When I got to the green (a par-5) I approached with a PW. It felt like a great shot, dead on line with good distance. It hit the green just in front of the pin and rolled all the way to the back and off a couple feet into the fringe/rough. I'm pretty confident that my normal ball would've held the green and given me 10 - 15 foot putt. Balls aren't a game-breaker, but I sure appreciate the ones that stay about where I put them. Maybe I would have better success with the lower end balls if my swing were better, but for where I am right now I appreciate any help the ball can provide me. That said, it's been a couple years since I tried and the spinning quality of balls certainly continues to improve.

Just started playing some yellow balls. I played both the white and the yellow versions (this year's Srixon Q-Star). I have not noticed a difference in any performance between the colors.

It doesn't help me, but then I never find music helpful for concentrating when I'm doing something out and about in the world.

A lot of people don't like the idea of rules separating the pros from the ametures. I doubt that'll happen soon.

And caddies should make them even faster. No waiting to clean clubs or balls or to juggle headcovers. Caddies can take complimentary reads at the same time as the player. The player can walk as briskly as he'd like free of weight. Etc. Not a monumental time saver, but over a full round a good player-caddie pair might be 10 or 15 minutes better off. I can walk with two others and play a course in 3:45 if we're not waiting. (That was our time last time that situation happened.) I don't see why removing a player and adding an aid would make things go anything but at least 15-30 minutes faster. Sure their course is probably 700 yards longer than mine, but they're also hitting about 20 fewer shots a piece.

Sure, some clubs from one model might benefit a player over clubs from another model. But the scale is way off for that comparison. Irons, drivers, etc, have detailed specs they have to conform to. Ultimately any difference between clubs comes down to using the clubs the same way while getting a different experience from them. But anchored putters change how the club is actually used, which is very different. That's really the crux of the complaint against anchored putters: That they change a fundamental manner in which the putter is used.

I hate when the first swing with a new club really sucks. Oh well. It gives me a feel for what it'll feel like on the majority of my shots. :-D

When in doubt, find a high-ish resolution picture of the real thing online and compare to that. [img]http://img.diytrade.com/cdimg/1911699/26058453/0/1338083012/Ping_G15_Golf_Driver_Clubs.jpg[/img] (This is another home-taken image, but I compared it to official images and it's very similar. I chose it because it was the best resolution I could find in a quick search.) Not even close. [list] [*] The font for "G15" is slightly wrong. (Too thin.) [*] There's a missing black border around the "G15" test. [*] The orange color should be red. [*] The black paint at the base of the hosel is the wrong shape. [*] Missing serial number where it should be at the tail end of the club. [*] etc? [/list] A lot of fakes can be spotted via this test. But if you're still in doubt after a careful comparison to an image, you can take a club to a local golf store and see if they have any clubs in the store of the same model. Most stores should have popular clubs at least on the used rack or the demo rack even if they're not being sold new any more. You can compare the suspect club to the real thing in person there, and test things beyond just the visual like weight, feel, and sound when you flick the face. Even that's not a guarantee, but it should rule out the majority of fakes at that point. If it's fake and matches those tests, it's one of the much better ones.

Because technology has limited benefit (no club fixes fundamental swing problems), or because clubs perform similarly (everyone replicates and copies successful designs), or something else?

I don't even see what benefit there would be in switching balls (of the same model) to putt. I find it hard to believe that a wedge mark or two is going to alter the ball's roll. After you remove any shards off the ball there's just a very slight imperfection on the surface, and you're putting on a soft cushy surface (the tops of grass), so I would think that the minor blemish would be further rendered irrelevant.

He meant no benefit if you replace it. You may have bumped it closer to the hole, but after you replace it your error margin is pretty much humanly negligible. You're directly watching the ball there and you see it move, so you can replace it pretty darned accurately. An error margin of a blade or two of grass won't even get you around a spike mark.

I play by myself quite often. It's a great way to get in a set of super-twilight 9 holes after work.

If you're interested in confirming your shaft needs, take a GPS with you and measure all your drives for the day and find your real average. Then get on a launch monitor and get some real numbers for your swing. Your swing feel can be very misleading, especially if you aren't an experienced or precise golfer, so fitting should be done by an expert or by numbers rather than by feel. You can sometimes get onto a launch monitor for free if you're demoing a club, but at worst you'll have to pay something like $10 for 30 minutes. Get an idea for how fast your swing speed really is. The actual flex will vary per shaft (there is no absolute or objective definition of a "regular" or "stiff" shaft, it's all up to the manufacturers to label), but the general rule is that you're going to need to drive 240+ and/or swing at 94 MPH+ in order to say that your swing is adversely affected by having only a regular shaft. You aren't guaranteed of it, but if you aren't hitting those numbers you don't stand much of a chance of actually [i]needing[/i] a stiff.

Frankly, this is one of the few "kind" rules where the golfer is actually given the benefit of the doubt. You get to accidentally disturb the ball/ball-marker and get out of it for free in this situation. The rule makes sense, but it does violate the "move it and get penalized" intuition that we have.

Rotating the shoulders on their plane. Just watched some video of my swing yesterday and noticed that I'm starting with a half-decent take-away (left shoulder is down, hands are deep), but then I flatten my shoulders a bit during the rest of the swing and then actually lift my arms a bit off plane at the top to compensate and get them higher. I'm pretty sure I used to be better, I think I've slowly morphed back toward my old form. Flat shoulders tend to cause unintended pulls, fades, and slices for me. And I've been fighting that recently. You'd think I'd have clued in faster...

Look for deals at Dicks Sporting Goods, if you have them nearby. They routinely have some deal like "buy 2 get 1 free" or "get the second 50% off". You can definitely score good balls for $1.50 per ball. The Top Flite Gamer v2 is a great ball for $20/dozen. On sale it can reach $15/dozen. You're already ponying up money to play golf, don't make yourself miserable while you play by playing with equipment you don't like.

I thought he volunteered the confession. In which case I was wondering why he didn't just take the 4 strokes and move on. If he was caught, well... That's different. Although I suppose that rule 4-4 came into play regardless of how he was caught, so under that it may not have been a judgment call.

When I first started I didn't hit my driver for a long time. I think I played for about two years (of on and off golfing activity) before I even tried to hit it. It was disastrous (although, so was the rest of my swing). I stuck to my 3-wood for a while longer. It was definitely a good decision and it kept me in the fairway. My driver still gets me into trouble, but I play a course with wide fairways so I can afford to be less than terribly accurate with it. Being comfortable with the 3-wood for holes where the driver is iffy is definitely a good option to keep, IMO. I use it off the tee 3 or 4 times per round on my home course.

I don't know about "serious attempt". He fessed up on the same hole, seemingly pretty quickly. Are DQs handed out to people who try to sneakily break a rule, but eventually call themselves out? What about a foot wedge that a player later admits to after holing out? There are rules to handle that sort of thing. I can see wanting to make an example out of would-be cheaters, but that seems best handled by at the organization level, not the tournament level. Banning the caddie fulfilled that purpose. 33-7 gave the official the ability to hand out a DQ, not an obligation to do it. It was definitely a judgment call (and yes, arguably a good one), but it seems safe to say that not every official would have made that same decision.

Absolutely. Logically, there's basically nothing different. Actually, I remember the first time I tried on golf shorts a long time ago. That there was my first thought, "Wow, these feel like stiff swim trunks. Am I going to feel weird wearing these?" I didn't, but they still feel like stiff swim trunks. :-D (Don't even get me started on bikinis vs underwear. Seriously, like there's a difference. :roll: )

That's vague. It what was what? For either case, it's not clear. Both would require judgment calls outside the literal interpretation of the rules.

It's funny. What "looks good" is predominately social conditioning, yet the people who feel the strongest about it are the most likely to feel that those criteria are borderline objective. Beyond a base level of looking moderately decent, people have to admit that looking "nice" is all personal preference and has very little fundamental truth of nature. Collared shirts are not objectively better or nicer. Society taught you that they look better, but it's purely a personal thing. Like I said before, it's economics. People who think a certain way will pursue certain things. Dress codes will reflect market demands.

Average. I'm efficient at not wasting big chunks of time. I prepare to hit while others do, I move quickly between shots, and I don't stop to talk. I'm ready when it's my turn on the teebox, etc. But I do stand over shots for a bit, and I'll step back and re-address the ball occasionally. I'm sure I stand over the ball for longer than average (although nowhere near as insufferably bad as some of the pros). In my defense, it's hard to find the correct position of the ball, alignment, weight distribution, etc, for my stance, and sometimes I get into it completely wrong. At any rate, I keep working at it. I figure the two cancel out. I definitely play with much faster and slower players than myself. [quote name="trackster" url="/t/59628/are-you-a-fast-slow-or-average-speed-player#post_729958"]Another one of these threads? What is this like the 14th one now. I can already tell you what you are going to see. About 15% for the much faster than Average and the other 85% split between slightly faster than average and average. No one on here thinks that they play slow, and if they do they aren't going to admit it. [/quote] Slow players rarely think they're slow. And nobody in the world is a bad driver. We're all just a bit above average.

Wow, that's terrible. I wonder how easily that caddy's going to find work again. I'm curious what the other players "being suspicious" looked like. Did they ask the caddie what he was doing? Did they see anything weird? Did they pressure him/Lara to provide an answer? [quote name="RollTide" url="/t/59617/lara-disqualified-after-caddie-tried-to-hide-club/18#post_729918"] You could carry 30 clubs with you and let the situations on the golf course dictate which 14 clubs you use, but that wouldnt be fair.[/quote] They weren't even done with the second hole. It depends on what the extra club was, but it seems unlikely that it influenced anything. An extra club might influence, what 5 or 6 shots per round at most? It seems unlikely that happened in the first hold and a half. And most players know what 14 clubs they're carrying or want to use for a course, so the extra club was very possibly an extra he carried but hadn't selected for the day and didn't know was in the bag. He could have been making all his club decisions without even knowing that one was in there. Seems unlikely that it gave him any advantage, but it's impossible to be absolutely certain with limited information. Still, it definitely wasn't a DQ-type advantage.

I'd probably give you a challenge for that title. :-) And I've never had that issue either. Sounds like an issue with the bag.