The Hacker

Looks to me like your left knee is being pulled right (whether that's good or bad) by a HECK of a hip and shoulder turn. Your left shoulder is actually right of the line between your eye and the ball, and your hips are turned further than the other guy in the comparison picture.

Titleist NXT Tour

My ball = casual water. Your ball = hazard.

I played an NXT Tour today. Great ball. Spent an hour chipping and putting with them before tee time, and they feel great around the green. Gave me good control.

I have some Nikes and some Reebox. I never wear either. My Footjoy Contours feel way too good.

Do your clubs fit you? Are your shafts too limber? If not, that might be the cause of the inconsistency. ??

Some guy on the range the other day started talking to me, and he wanted me to hit his new driver to see how far it would go. I hit it once, and HOLY COW! It sounded like a high-pitched gunshot. I just handed it back to him. I don't even know what kind of club it was. I just didn't want to hear it again.

I lift regularly. There are pros and cons. Whenever I lift heavy and hard enough to get sore for a day or two - especially upper body - my swing goes to pot (and it isn't the most consistent swing in the world to begin with). I think tearing down muscle is good for strength gains, but it's hell on muscle memory. Of course, soreness isn't good for flexibility either.

Why do people that can't hit very far need it to be impossible for other amateurs to be able to hit long drives? LOL

It'll definitely hook ya. I do a lot of bass fishing as well - fly rods and hand-tied flies. It's a lot of fun.

Fishing and golf....it doesn't get any better, unless you are flyfishing and maybe can figure out how to combine the two. We used to stock a pond on a local course with trout each winter. We'd have 5-6 months' worth of trout fishing in West Texas, and you could have a cast and blast (down the fairway) day if you wanted to. My son caught one of the biggest ones all by himself when he was 5. I helped him cast ahead of the cruising fish, and then he did the rest - on a 2 wt with 5X tippet (that's an ultralight rod and 4# test tippet). It was quite a battle with the 5.33# 23" rainbow. Some other good memories.... Green River - southwest Wyoming Bonefish - Islamorada, Florida Rio Grande - Creede, Colorado Stock tank (pond) - Baird, Texas Ummm......well, they'll bite a fly too!

Footjoy Contours are great. FJ makes multiple widths too. If you need a wide shoe, you can get it with FJ. Nike and most of the others are nice shoes if you have average to narrow feet, but if you have wide feet (like me) they suck.

Please don't think I'm trying to brag at all here, because I'm certain that most of you would beat the crap out of me if we played a round together. I just wanted to comment on my own personal experience as it relates to this topic. I can attest to the fact that low handicap and long drives don't always correlate, although I agree that most of the time they do. It's certainly possible to have a low handicap without hitting 300 yard drives, and it's possible to drive 300 and have a high handicap. Like some have mentioned, an athletic swing from a guy with good hand/eye coordination can result in lots of 300 yard drives. That doesn't necessarily translate into low scores by itself though. Low handicap results from a good short game more than anything else, and strength and/or swing speed has little to do with that. Touch, feel, proper reading of the green.....all of that kind of thing can be mastered without ever hitting the ball 300 yards. I am just getting back into playing regularly after 4-5 years of only playing once or twice per year, and my short game is currently non-existent - especially my wedge play. Even when I was playing regularly before, my wedges were always the weakest part of my game. But I have always been able to hit a ball a long ways. I'm 43 now, but I can still hit it as far as I ever could before. I work out regularly and haven't gotten too large around the middle yet (certainly wearing a different belt size than I did 20 years ago though!). I'm sure that helps some. I'm 6' tall and weigh 215. Not a huge guy, but not small either. Just average sized, I guess. I just downloaded Google Earth and measured a few drives from this past weekend as best I could trying to put the little dot as close to where the ball ended up as I could remember. If my margin of error on that is +/- 20 yards, the vast majority of the balls hit with a driver were 300 yards or a little more. Now that is with roll, and I'm in West Texas in the winter with dead grass. The ball rolls more here right now than it does on lush PGA courses in the tropics. We actually had very light winds this weekend, so wind wasn't a factor either way. Measuring a couple that I knew about where they carried to, carrying over a tree or a bunker or a creek, etc....the carries were 250-275. I wasn't always in the fairway with the drives, and 2 or 3 of them were well out of the fairway. I'm no pro-level ball striker at all. It just goes far - not always at my target. On the first 2 or 3 holes, my brother-in-law who has played with me a lot before, kept telling me to wait on the group ahead of us to move off the green before hitting. My father-in-law, who I haven't played with much, kept saying, "Go ahead and hit. There's no way you can hit them from here." I waited. After #3, he quit saying that I should go ahead and hit. Abilene Country Club is a short course - only about 6,300 yards (par 71), so on every par 4 I had a wedge shot that was much less than a full swing - the worst part of my game. Same thing for the 3rd shots on the par 5s. On some of the shorter par 4s, I was even with the green, just off to the side. Twice I was on the frog hair. I shot an 87 - I even bogeyed one of those par 4s where I drove to the frog hair. On probably 3 out of 4 of those holes, I pitched and chipped at least twice - sometimes 3 times. My putting wasn't bad, but my wedge play was horrible. Again, I'm not at all trying to toot my own horn here. I'm just saying all of this to show that it's possible for a sucky golfer to, in fact, consistently drive the ball fairly long and still end up with a crappy score. Like some have said, there is a LOT more to golf than length, and I am a long ways from being a good golfer even though I usually knock the little ball a good ways down there off the tee box.

Just for the record, I never said that I hit it as "well" as tour players. I can hit it as far as they can, but they hit the ball consistently straighter than I could ever hope to. There are many times where hitting the ball long in the wrong direction is a really bad thing. LOL

Short game, no question. I can drive the ball as far as most tour players (not trying to brag, just saying - they hit it WAY straighter than I do). Yesterday and this evening, on several 310-370 yard par 4s, I drove between 2 and 25 yards from the green. I bogeyed probably half of those because I SUCK at chipping. If I have a perfect lie with plenty of green to work with, I'm usually OK. But if I have to chip over sand and stop the ball on a short green or something like that, then I'm screwed. I just recently started playing again after 3 or 4 years off, so I'm way out of practice. My full swing is starting to come back. I can always hit long, but not always straight. I'm getting mostly straight now after a couple weeks of practice. But chipping is a completely different story. Full swings are pretty much all the same. You just change clubs for different distance and swing the same. Once I get inside 100 yards though, I don't get to use that same swing. I have to try to guess how much swing to use to hit my target. It requires a ton of feel, and you just can't have that feel without a TON of practice. I can put fairly well. I'll 3 put some, but not very often. I will often have 2 or 3 holes where I chip 3 times from within 50 yards. I'll have several where I'll chip twice. Either I leave it short or shoot it too long. Drives me freakin' crazy.

So Hogan's Five Lessons proves that Hogan's slo-mo drill doesn't work?

Golf is like everything else in life....we often get overly fixated on the few negatives rather than the many positives. Sounds like you are appropriately fighting that human urge.

When you hit 9 out of 10 good shots, do you think "Cool! Maybe they're right and this DOES work after all."? :)

Um...................... Oh, nevermind. I don't want to know.

I will. Thanks.

Great thread. My daughter just started playing golf at her high school, and it has given me the reason I needed to start playing golf again. I plan to start back up this week. I stumbled upon this forum today, and I've read this entire thread this evening. Good stuff! I will make a comment/observation that may or may not be helpful, but I hope it will be. I haven't played much golf the last 5 years or so, but before that I was playing a lot. I was always a mid-upper 80s golfer due to inconsistent direction with irons and woods - always long, but rarely consistent flight. I made some swing adjustments just through some trial and error experimenting, and I stumbled on some things that really worked well. In reading this thread about Stack & Tilt swings, I think this is similar to what I stumbled upon for myself back then. I had seen a training aid infomercial a few years ago that advertised a practice club that had a sliding lower portion of the grip. The idea was that by letting your right hand slide up the shaft during the back swing and then slide back to the "normal" grip position during impact and through the release, then you would train your right elbow to stay in closer and develop an inside/out swing followed by a good extension toward the target through the release. I didn't buy the club with the sliding grip, but I did try making some practice swings while sliding my right hand up the shaft during the back swing. Also, I was doing a lot of this practicing in my office with an 8-foot ceiling. I am pretty sure that was forcing me to not let my back swing fly up and out too much. I also focused on keeping my eyes directly over the ball throughout the entire swing. I wasn't really thinking about "stacking" or leaning toward the target or anything - just keeping my eyes on top of the ball. I didn't worry about what my legs were doing, but in order to get a full turn in the back with my eye and left shoulder on top of the ball, my right leg would straighten out and my left knee would flex some. Oh yeah, and I kept my toes turned outside my heels a little bit so I could rotate my hips better. The last thing I focused on was driving my lower body forward toward the target through impact and releasing my hands and the club head straight downrange toward the target. I always started with the ball well forward in my stance (just inside my left heel), so I would drive my legs and hips well forward to get passed the ball at impact. Anyway, once I started this swing instead of the old rocking back on the right foot and then rocking forward to the left deal that I'd been taught years before, I started hitting consistent laser beams. Now, my chipping was still weak, so I was still a hacker. But I went from shooting mid-upper 80s to shooting high-70s to low-80s. It was actually kind of bad because I was hitting so long and straight that most of my 2nd shots on par 4s were less than full swing wedge shots (the weakest part of my game). Driving up close to the green and 2 putting is good, but if you chip twice it still sucks. Sorry for the long post, but does it sound like I was doing something similar to the Stack & Tilt? If so, maybe my "swing thoughts" might be beneficial for somebody? If not, then nevermind. I've just ordered the book. I'm hoping that I can find that groove again (eventually) when I dust off the clubs. I'm thinking that the S&T; book and the info here will help me. Again, sorry for the long-winded post.