Stop Chunking Chip shots

I don’t think anyone will disagree that the most maddening mistake in golf is to chunk a simple greenside chip shot. Just a little swing with a 9-iron, the hole is about 40 feet away, couldn’t be easier, and you lay up sod three inches behind the ball. #@9!!

Even the pros do this (Hunter Mahan in the 2010 Ryder Cup) though they do it much less often than we do. Here’s how to reduce chunking to a once-in-a-blue-moon mistake -- instead of something you worry about every time you chip.

I figured this out at the range a few weeks ago. Whenever I go to the range I am always looking for ways to make 2 and 2 equal four. The hard part is in realizing that 2 and 2 are right there in front of you so you can put them together.

The chipping stroke is by necessity quite precise. You should always take two practice stokes before you hit your shot. And we do that. It’s just that after we take two good practice strokes, we think, “OK, hit the ball,” and use a different stoke, one that brings the chunk into play.

My practice strokes throughout the session had all been identical. I mean identical. I practice this shot a lot, so I know what I’m doing. Each time, the sole of the club brushed top of the grass in the same place and at the same depth. What more needs to be right?

I realized that day whenever I moved on to hit the actual chip, I started thinking, “Hit the ball,” and my stroke would change. It took me a while to notice that’s what I was doing.

Then I realized that if I stayed with my practice stroke and played "Brush the grass" instead of "Hit the ball," I would hit these beautiful chips, one after the other, and chunking was never an issue.

I mean, I’ve chunked chips before, but I’ve never chunked a practice stroke. When I started re-creating the stroke that brushed the sole of the club against the grass just in front of the ball, my chipping got better and more consistent right away.

2 plus 2 equals 4.

Now this is nothing you’ve never heard before. Swing the club and let the ball get in the way. But do you do that? That’s the question. Can your mind ignore the ball? Can you just swing the club without thinking of hitting the ball or making it go somewhere in particular? That takes a lot of mental discipline.

That’s how to chip. Hit the ball with your practice swing. Simple. But, again, is that what you do?

How to Hit a Fade or a Draw, in 50 Words

(and one video, q.v.)

1. Always align your body parallel to the yellow rod.

2. Always aim the clubface halfway between the two rods.

3. Fade: the orange rod is the target line and the yellow rod is the swing line.

4. Draw: The yellow rod is the target line and the orange rod is the swing line.



Notes:
All this is predicated on being able to hit the ball straight at will. Otherwise, you’ll just be adding more uncertainty to your game.

Practice these shots before you use them on the course.

Make sure the swing line points in a direction that won’t hurt you if the curve doesn’t come off as planned.

When you set up, disregard your target. Think only of the direction you want the ball to start. If you think of where you want the ball to end up, you will try to move the ball there deliberately, ruining everything.

The amount of curvature you get depends on the angle between the two rods and your ability to curve the ball. Experiment to find out your results.

Multitasking

I used to watch this show on the Food Network called Good Eats. The host spent a good deal of time taking about kitchen gadgets, and he said you should not have anything in your drawer that does not multitask. That applies just as well to your golf clubs. Each of them should be able to do many things. (O.K., except for your driver. Driver off the deck is verboten unless you need a microscope to see your handicap.)

For example, can you hit a 9-iron, and 8-iron and a 7-iron 120 yards? Same distance, with different clubs? If so, then you can play in the wind, play to different pin positions, or even have a safer shot to play when another one isn't working so well that day.

The same thing would be true for your wedges. If a pin is 40 yards away, can you hit into it with a gap wedge, a sand wedge, or a lob wedge? Depending on what you're facing, each one of those clubs could be the right choice and the other two not so good. How about 50 yards?

Here's about this one? Say the pin is 40 yards away and there are 30 yards of green to work with. Or, the pin is 40 yards away and there are ten yards of green to work with. Could you hit both shots with a lob wedge, but run the ball to the hole in the first instance, and fly the ball up close and stop it in the second?

I could go on. Try playing a round with only five clubs plus your putter. You'll have to do things with those clubs that you've never done with them before. The more things you can do with any one club, the more options you have for solving problems the course gives you. This is a great way to become a better scorer.


Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

A Golf Shot's Four Parameters

Note: The September Recreational Golfer Newsletter will be published this Saturday, September 1. To have it sent to you, please sign up at my home page.

-----

When you have a shot from the tee or from the fairway, there are four things you can do with the ball. A shot-maker will consider all of them. They are the parameters of shot-making which, when mastered, turn golf into a whole new game. They are direction, distance, trajectory, and curvature.

Direction seems obvious. There's the fairway, or the green, so hit the ball in that direction. You know there's more to it than that. Which side of the fairway do you want to hit? Do you go for the pin or give it room because of disaster lurking nearby?

Distance seems obvious, too, but there's a great deal of finesse in a shot to a pin 170 yards away. Do you want the ball to land hole-high and stop, or land short and release? Maybe you want the ball to fly beyond the hole. Only one of those shots will go 170 yards.

Getting Out of a Greenside Bunker

O.K., let's get this shot down, once and for all. The pros say how easy it is to get out of a greenside bunker and you still can't do it. Following a great shower of sand the ball is still sitting there, two feet in front of where it was, or else it gets picked clean and takes off across the green like a bullet.

There is a way.

1. Take out your sand wedge and open the clubface until it is almost lying flat on the ground. Really open. Don't worry about how open that is. I watched Kari Webb do this in a practice bunker and couldn't believe how much she had opened the clubface. And how easily she made the ball pop out of the bunker.

2. Align your stance about twenty degrees to the right of the pin.

3. Swing with your hands and arms as in your normal golf swing, along your stance line (and not toward the pin), but keep your lower body as still as you can.

So far, so good. Now for the magic ingredient.

4. Swing through the ball as if you were going to slide the club underneath the ball without touching it. You could do this if the ball were sitting on top of 3-inch rough. Think that you're going to do the same thing here. The club slides through the sand on its sole, the part that is primed for the task because of how much you opened the blade when you set up.

5. Practice. There has to be a range near you with a practice bunker. If there's high grass around the bunker, swing through the grass a few times to get the idea of sliding the club through a medium, then step into the bunker and do the same thing.

This shot is like learning to ride a bike. As soon as you learn how to do it, it's easy. It really is.


Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

When the Ball Can't Just Go Right - or Left

There are holes where a miss to either side is playable and all you have to do is put your normal swing on the ball. Wherever it goes is all right with you. There are times, though, when there is one side of the course to where the ball just cannot go to.

For example, I play a course on which the 2nd tee is hard against the right side, which is also out of bounds. You just have to get the ball to the left side of the fairway, and hitting the ball with even the smallest fade is disastrous. Fortunately, taking one side out of the shot with certainty is easy to do.

Chipping From Greenside Rough

Each golf course I play presents its own shots that you have to hit well in order to make a good score. One course demands that you put the ball in the right spot off the tee. If you can do that all day, you're home free. On another one, getting up to the green is easy, but if you miss, you'll frequently be chipping off uphill and downhill lies. A third one has deep rough, and by that I mean 2-4", no more than five feet off the green. I didn't solve that course until I learned how to play from there, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

Before you take your club out of the bag, you must find out where the ball is in the grass, vertically. That is, how much grass is underneath the ball? It will seldom sit all the way down on the earth, but be normally suspended by a cushion of grass. To hit the shot successfully the club must strike the ball off the same part of the clubface as it does when the ball is sitting on the ground. If the club comes in too high, you will blade the ball and perhaps bury it further in the rough. If you come in too low, you will strike the ball high on the clubface and pop the ball perhaps just a few feet or pass underneath it altogether.

Elevated Tees

It is not unusual for a course to have a par-3 hole where the tee is elevated above the green. This throws a wrinkle into your club selection, and that's not all. The way you play the shot needs to change, too.

A golf ball in flight obviously has a vertical component of motion and a horizontal one. When the ball descends, it is going down, but still forward as well. A green that is lower than the tee allows the ball to fall down farther, which at the same time will also carry it farther forward. That means you need less club for a given distance. A general rule is to use one less club for very 50 feet of elevation difference.

If the tee is on a level with A', B', and the green at A, B, you can see that a club which would leave you short on level ground will be just right once it has completed its extra fall downward.

Elevated Greens

When the green is higher than the fairway or tee you're standing on, you have a problem to solve. Elevation adds yards to the shot. As the ball descends, it is also still going forward. When the ground the ball will land on is higher than the ground the ball took off from, the descending arc gets cut off. The ball will not fall as far, and it will not carry forward as far, too.

You therefore have to do two things when hitting toward higher ground: take more cub, and hit a ball with a higher-than-normal trajectory. But first, you have to read the slope.

Three Shots That Polish Your Golf Swing

Short and sweet today. Modern golf clubs let you get away with a faulty swing and still hit playable shots. Not great shots, but ones that will do. If you want to play better golf than that, learn to hit these three shots:

1. Drives with a persimmon/laminated maple-head driver. You have to hit this club dead center to get anything out of it. The secret to distance and accuracy is to hit the driver on the center of the clubface. Modern drivers do not encourage you to learn this. A wooden driver does.

2. 2-iron. If you can hit a 2-iron as well as you hit your 2-hybrid or 5-wood, you have a swing that is doing a lot of things right.

3. Chip with a sand wedge, using the right hand only. Again, you have to be doing a lot of things right to hit this shot as well as you do with two hands. If you want to go further and learn to hit a 6-iron 150 yards with only our right hand on the club, so much the better.

None of these shots are easy. It will take lots of practice for you to be able to hit them consistently. By the time you have learned all three, you will have ironed out the flaws in your swing and be an outstanding shotmaker.

Since you probably don't have a wooden driver or a 2-iron lying around, you can find one of each for not very much on eBay or at www.2ndswing.com. If you've never hit a ball with a wooden driver, you're in for a real treat. The soft strike and the gentle "click' of impact are quite something. You might want to start playing with it!

How To Hit a Fade and a Draw

Curving the ball at will is a necessary skill for the advanced golfer, and it's not hard to do. Let's first review the impact geometry that will curve a golf ball. The direction the clubface faces at impact is the major determinant of the initial direction the golf ball starts along, club path having a lesser role. The ball will curve if the clubface is not square to the path the clubhead is moving along at impact. A clubface that is closed to the club path will curve the ball to the right. A clubface that is open to the club path will curve the ball to the left.

To curve the ball intentionally, some adjustments must be made to set up the desired impact geometry. We hope to keep them as simple as possible so that you have to make the least deviation from how you normally swing the club. Both the fade and draw will be hit with an open clubface. The difference between the two shots will be the aim point and the club path.

Remembering Your Golf Swing

One reason why the golf swing is so difficult is that many golfers do not have a good idea from one day to the next just exactly how they swing the club. They often rely on the groove they got into last time at the range, but the move they thought was The Difference can't be found the next time out. Now what?

You would have to have daily lessons and daily practice to remember every detail in your golf swing and know just what to do to correct yourself when something goes wrong. The best bet for a recreational golfer is to remember how to perform five critical parts of the swing and just work on performing them the same way every time. If so, what happens in between has to be happening the same way, too.

The five parts of the swing to remember are: the takeaway, the end of the backswing, the start of the downswing, impact, and the finish.

Takeaway defines your club path and the plane of your backswing. The end of the backswing is the furthest limit of your being able to feel that the clubhead is still connected to the ball. The start of the downswing can be led in many ways, but never with your hands. Impact is, of course, impact, but it is a dynamic position, one of moving through, not of arriving at, a spot. The finish is where this all leads to. When the finish is right, likely everything that came before it was, too.

You can practice each one of these positions separately. The task is to memorize what each one feels like, installing the feeling into our subconscious awareness so that the movements in between will automatically seek the next position. When you play, you could take a slow practice swing to rehearse hitting all the right feelings.

Good golf is not played by having a great swing. It's played by making your best swing more often. Learning these five basic positions, given a fundamentally sound grip, stance, posture, and alignment, will take care of that.

Total Command of the Golf Ball

If you want to be a golfer who has the right shot for every occasion, you need to be able to control distance, spin, curvature, and trajectory. We will reduce direction, the fifth characteristic of a golf shot, to being able to hit a straight ball and assume that you already know how to do that, since the other four controls are variations of this shot and depend on your being able to hit it.

Please don't think, though, that I'm going to tackle that project in this post or in a series of posts. I want you to really learn how to do all those things, not just get a general idea, and you do that by signing up for a series of lessons of your own design. This is what you would tell the pro you want to learn.

Say you hit your 7-iron 145 yards. To get the ball close to a pin with a 7-iron, that one distance isn't enough. You need to know how to hit it anywhere between 133 and 145. That's lesson number one.

Sometimes when you’re chipping you need to put on spin so the ball will stop. Other times you need to take spin off so the ball will run. Ask the pro how you hit each shot, with the same club.

Sometimes you would like to bend the ball a little bit into a tucked pin. Other times you need to bend the ball a lot around a tree. Learn both shots, curving left or right. Find out how to do that.

Hitting shots into the green with a higher or lower trajectory will get you closer to the pin by design rather than by chance. With a pin in front, a high shot that sits quickly is best. A lower shot that releases is how to get to a pin in back. Hitting into an elevated green calls for a higher trajectory. Controlling trajectory is a vital skill for playing on a windy day. All of this is the fourth lesson.

None of these things are difficult to do, and winter is a good time to learn how. Your teaching pro will be delighted to spend time with you on these matters, since few golfers ask about them. Afterwards, just keep these skills in practice to be in command on the golf course.