Mordan

Makes sense, thanks Erik. I've been working on not kicking the right knee in towards the ball and not letting my butt come off the wall and the result seems to be this armsy swing. It feels awful but I couldn't really pinpoint it. Now to try and get more turn back, and more slide forward without bringing back some of those other problems.

It's been a while... I haven't been playing as much golf as I would have liked since moving half way around the world but I've joined a club and am getting back into it. My game has been all over the place, some truely awful golf and some ok golf. Handicap has gone up 4 or 5 shots. Here's where my swing is at. [VIDEO]http://youtu.be/W-uiR086cNs[/VIDEO] [VIDEO]http://youtu.be/MtbHbTgJVqk[/VIDEO] Struggling with a weak fade right now though contact is pretty consistent. I can see the problems, but I'm struggling to make any headway right now.

My club isn't in the sandbelt but another part of Melbourne, however we also have a rule that push & pull carts may be taken across greens. Often there will be one or two greens with a sign saying no access across green but generally they find it better to have traffic spread across the green rather than concentrated on the surrounds. Almost everyone walks and pulls or pushes their clubs, so there is quite a lot of traffic each day.

Your mate isn't a vanity handicapper, he's just a cheat. A vanity handicapper will manipulate the handicap system to lower his handicap, by doing things like not turning in bad rounds, or turning bad rounds into practice rounds. Your friend is actually recording scores he hasn't shot, that's simply cheating.

Can you show us some examples and how it affects their right knee at impact?

You have 3 cards marked by a club member and submit them to the handicap committee who allocate you an initial handicap. So it's not difficult to get started. Clubs also run more competitions over here, I've heard of some having one running most days of the week.

Well recently it's probably been prompted by the complaints about the complexity and difficulties of playing by the rules. Not once have these related to play during an actual competition, so take away the USGA's insistence on posting social rounds for handicap and let these players do whatever they want. Chances are they do anyway but still end up including these rounds in their handicap. But I do also think that it's sad that the cries of bandit would detract from the kudos that a golfer would otherwise receive for putting together that 1 in 100 round that beats their handicap by 10 shots.

The blurring of the lines is between social golf and competitive golf. Only rounds played in a competition, played on a course overseen by a committee and signed for by a fellow competitor should count towards a handicap. That you can put it cards from social golf and use that handicap in a competition severely dilutes the whole concept in my opinion. And when social golf rounds aren't being submitted for handicap you don't need to worry about dropping a ball if one goes missing, or wanting to play two balls etc. It doesn't count for anything other than whatever you've decided to do within your group that day, and thus you can sort it out amongst yourselves. No complaints about the rules because they make sense in a competition with a committee to resolve issues and where fairness sometimes needs to come before practicality.

Golf strategy is more interesting when you need to consider different penalties for where your shot might end up. As soon as you say that it's a one shot penalty, somewhere up near where your ball lands, no matter what then you might as well bomb away every time. But ultimately what determines which penalties result from what conditions is down to practicality. The idea that you can decide what your search area is, and then decide to drop wherever your ball would have entered that area is ripe for abuse. It works for water hazards because they're a clearly define area, either it is virtually certain that your ball ended up in that area or not. If it did then you estimate where it entered that area and drop there. That way it's the same for everyone. Unless the course is going to mark "wooded hazards" or the like then there is going to be no consistency. And I think that the main reason you'll get no traction with the OB idea is because it's not very often that the out of bounds fence has clear land right up to it. So in many cases you won't be able to drop two club lengths from the fence because it's deep in the trees etc. When there isn't clear land outside a hazard the rules say that you should mark the hazard further out. That makes sense and doesn't unfairly penalise the golfer. But imagine if they moved the out of bounds to the edge of the woods so that you could drop. Would you really be happy that your ball was in the woods and playable only a couple of yards from the rough but now that's out of bounds and you need to take a penalty and drop? The rules as they stand work remarkably well in a very wide variety of situations. You can go to a course you've never played before and are very unlikely to meet a situation where you're unsure how to proceed, even if the course is very different to anything you've ever played before.

I've played with good golfers who hit those sort of distances, but they tend to top out around the mid single figures range. And those guys are deadly inside 100 yards and on the greens. Every medium distance course I've played has at least one and often two par 3s that you won't reach with your 160 yard 6 iron. And a couple of par 4s that are over 400 yards that you won't be reaching with those distances either. So that's 3 or 4 greens you can't reach without even hitting a bad shot. Now remember that the PGA average for hitting the green from 150 yards out while in the fairway is only 75%. So even if you reach that level you're probably going to miss the green another 3 or 4 times per round. Again this is still without putting a ball into the trees, or the water or out of bounds. Without a very good short game and dynamite putting you're no where near playing to par.

By social golf I mean anything not played in a competition under the direction of a committee. All my competitive golf has been played with handicaps under a couple of different handicap systems both of which I thought did a good enough job of levelling the playing field while being far from perfect. But while the handicaps are gained via playing on many courses and different tee boxes I've never had competitors going off different tees within the same competition. It seems a pretty basic thing that all competitors play the same course on the day. Unfortunately the USGA has muddied the waters by blurring the line between competitive and social golf. It leads to rules confusion and devalues the idea of a handicap. But that's heading off topic.

I would only consider then to be directly competing if they were playing match play or part of a competition. In both cases they'd be playing from the same tees. Two people playing social golf from different tees aren't competing.

You said that it was unfair that you'd lose your distance advantage over shorter hitters. Yes he can move up a tee box but then you're not in direct competition. In any situation where you're competing then you haven't lost any advantage by being a longer hitter. Thus it's not unfair to you.