Everybody wants to hit the ball farther. You hit the ball farther by having more clubhead speed at impact, proper impact geometry assumed. You have more clubhead speed at impact by being completely relaxed as you swing the club through impact. (The tension that accompanies muscular effort slows down your swing, even though it might feel like you’re swinging the club faster.) You have a relaxed swing through impact by having relaxed arms and hands. When you begin your forward swing, your hips turn, making your torso turn. The arms get carried along for the ride, nothing more. They should feel wet noodle relaxed during the entire forward swing. Your hands stay relaxed, too, doing nothing more than hold on to the club with the minimum pressure needed to control it. At some point, the momentum of turning will release your relaxed arms and hands to swing the club through the ball at incredible speed. That is how you hit the ball farther.
Clubhead Speed
Your Pre-Shot Checklist
Golf is a game you play. Given two golfers of equal ability, the one who knows more about how to play the game will win much more often.
You could write a whole book about that, and Raymond Floyd did just that in his book, The Elements of Scoring.
These four considerations need to be a part of your pre-shot checklist.
1. Where do you want the ball to go? Pick a place where you can reliably get the ball to, and will make your next shot easy.
2. What shot do you have in your skill set that will get the ball there? You often have choices.
3. What club will you use to hit that shot? There will often be more than one.
4. How will you hit the shot? This is about making the ball do what you want it to do.
The more options you have to answer each of these questions, the more fun golf is, and the better player you will be, given your skills.
Feel is Real
Go to any online golf forum and sooner or later there will be someone saying “feel is not real” in response to whatever you can imagine. I can’t think of anything more wrong to say about golf.
When we learn to play golf, we learn certain techniques that get us to swinging reasonably correctly. We make those techniques our habits on the practice range. But while practicing, we are not learning how to perform the technique. We are learning what it feels like to perform the correct technique.
And those feels are real. They’re not imaginary.
Now, what you feel like you are doing and what you are really doing, might be different. That’s what people mean when they say, “feel is not real.” But who cares? Your practice has given you a feel that you have associated with a proper movement, and that feel is every bit as real as the movement is.
I’m not playing with words here. Your understanding of the relation of “feel” to “real” is critical, because your feels of the right technique are what you play golf with.
For a while, you have to concentrate on “what am I supposed to do?” But while you are learning that, concentrate on what it feels like when you do what you are supposed to do, because feels are what you play golf with, and are what will bring you back to normal when your swing goes a bit sour.
The Pitching Stroke
How to make a pitching stroke is controversial. There are those who would say that it is a unique kind of stroke, separate from the full swing. Within that school there are different varieties of different. There is also a school, which I agree with, that says you should build your full swing around your pitching stroke.
That does not mean the two strokes are identical, though. The grip pressure for a pitch should be lighter than the one used for a full swing. The stroke will of course be shorter. This is a finesse stroke, so you don’t have to power your way into the ball. And though you don’t have to take a divot when pitching, if you do, it doesn’t need to be the size of a dinner plate. But other than that, the two strokes are the same.
Most important, I believe, is a similarity that leads to consistently hitting well-struck pitches. That is the finish. In your full swing you finish standing straight, facing the target, with the club wrapped around your shoulders. Finish your pitches the same way.
That might sound artificial, since the momentum of the stroke doesn’t really force a pitching swing to go that far. But swinging to a full finish creates a smooth, controlled stroke through the ball. If you cut the finish short, you’re subtly tensing up through impact, and we know that leads to.
Your Iron Distances
When I was a single-digit player, of course I hit pretty good shots more often than not. But the key to scoring was knowing my iron distances.
I hit my 7-iron 142 yards. I wasn’t a long hitter but a consistent one. I got right around 142 every time I got the club squarely on the ball. I knew my distance for all the other irons, too.
That gave me the freedom to adjust, depending on the shot conditions. I could take a few yards off the 7, or maybe play a 6 instead for that distance.
That’s what let me hit greens (i.e., not be short all the time) and often get the ball hole-high. That’s a real key to scoring, and you can’t do it if you don’t know your distances.
Go to a place where there is a launch monitor you can use and figure this out for your irons (wedge distances are another story). Having this information and learning how to use it will change you, as Johnny Miller says, from a golfer to a player.
Four Good Ideas
1. Pay a lot of attention to your rhythm and tempo. They are the glue that holds your swing together.
2. Your job is to swing the club, not to hit the ball. The sooner that feeling sinks in, the sooner you will start to improve.
3. Start the forward swing with your hips alone. Leave your hands behind for a split second. Starting the forward swing with your hands is a death move.
4. If you can’t break 100, and even 90, you don’t know what you’re doing. Get some lessons to learn what the right things are and practice until you can do them.
Gripping the Club Securely
I made a slight grip change recently that is solving a curvy shot problem that I have had for years. I thought it might be something you would want to try.
Something that has bothered me for a long time is that I can take my grip with a neutral-to-weak right hand, and when the shot goes drifting off to the left I find my right hand has turned neutral-to-strong, all by itself, at sometime during the swing.
I wondered if it was because my grip was too loose, letting my right hand rotate away from the left, carrying the clubface with it, without my even noticing it.
So I tried something. After I took my grip, I gently rotated my hands toward each other so they pressed together.
Voila! The right hand didn’t move when I swung. It was in the same place at the end of my swing as it was at address. Did this improve my ball-striking? You bet it did!
If you try it, you don’t want this pressure to be too hard, just hard enough so you know the right hand is always pressing leftward during the swing and thus not going to move out of position.
That’s all there is to it! This might be a good thing to try regardless of your ball flight.
There are lots of ways the clubhead can get out of square during the swing. This is a way of preventing a cause it might take you years to discover. Like it did me.
Double Bogey Avoidance
Oh, those double bogeys. They just ruin our day. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to not get any. Just once?
I did that once in my memory. I shot an 85, a few strokes above average, but with not one DB. In my golfing heyday, breaking 80 was always a possibility, and I never did it without having a double on the card.
On a golf forum that I used to belong to, until I got tired of the know-it-all proprietor, I asked the 80± golfers which was harder, breaking 80, or playing 18 holes without a double bogey. No DB won hands down as the harder one to do.
Yesterday I saw Rickie Fowler put his drive smack in the middle of the fairway and up with one. Also yesterday, Sebastian Muñoz of the LIV Tour shot a 59–with a DB on his card.
So don’t worry about it too much. You’re going to get them. But you don’t want to get the too often. Here are a few ways to get the less often.
– Hit fairways. Use a club off the tee that is a fairway finder, no matter how much distance you have to give up. If you miss the fairway, switch from thinking about par to bogey. That doesn’t mean giving up on par, it generally means salvaging a good score (bogey) and leaving par in play at the margin.
– Greens are smaller targets than fairways, generally. Play onto the green if you’re sure you can hit it. Otherwise, plan on playing up to the green and chipping on.
– Play away from trouble. Get out safely, then play to the green. Death to penalty strokes.
– Don’t get too precise around the green unless you have a short game to back it up. Just get the ball on the green with one shot and let your putting take over.
– If you make a double bogey, forget about it by the time you have picked the ball out of the hole. Keep your mind moving forward to the next hole.
All this sounds like stuff you have heard before, and it is. I didn’t make it up. Let’s just call it a reminder that you shoot lower scores if you play smart and play within yourself.
The Senior Golfer vs. the Driver
As we age, the driver gets harder to hit well. Up to my early 60’s, I hit my driver great. It went high and straight. And far enough to get me into single digits.
But now I’m in my mid-70’s. It’s gotten harder to hit a drive up in the air, and trying to launch it just makes things worse.
So I had a little chat with my ego and swapped my driver for a 12.5* fairway wood (Titleist 975F). Now I hit the ball high and straight again, and just as far all the time as the occasional times when I can nail my driver.
They say recreational golfers shouldn’t trade their driver for a fairway wood because if they can’t hit their driver straight, they can’t hit a fairway wood straight, either. That is advice to consider if you’re in the in the prime of your life.
But if you are a senior golfer, and I mean senior senior, there was the game you once played, and there is the game you play now. It’s a different game. Adjust and Make Golf Fun Again.
How to Succeed in Golf Without Really Trying
Just to be clear, it’s not Trump who cheated. It’s his caddie who cheated. Just want to clear that up.