Golfstruck

17 Aug 2010

This article, written by Ozzie Carlson, appeared in the Bergen Record 2010 series

Scoring From ½ Wedge Distance

 One of the questions I am most often asked is how do I feel and control distance from less than a full wedge shot away.  My first answer is don’t put yourself in the “throw-up zone.”  You need to avoid those 30 to 70 yard shots by laying up to a more comfortable full wedge distance.

 This past week I had the great pleasure of playing golf with two of my former Ramapo players.  James and Brian’s 300+ yard drives consistently split the fairway, but often left them at less than full wedge distance to the green.  Recognizing that perhaps they shouldn’t have hit driver, they asked, now that I am at less than ideal distance, what should I do?  What I have found to hold up in the heat of battle is the following method of feeling and controlling distance, trajectory and spin – so you can get close enough to one-putt.

 Think of your left hip joint (left pivot) as the center of a bicycle wheel (right handed golfers) and your arms as spokes attached to the center of the wheel at the elbows.  Now think of your clubhead as the rim of the wheel.  To get your clubhead to travel through an arc, simply turn the center of your wheel – the left pivot – away from and through to your swing target, or intended finish position.

 How far and how fast you turn your left pivot away and through to your intended finish position will determine the length of your swing arc and the amount of  clubhead speed you deliver.  The more speed you deliver the farther the ball will go, and conversely.

There are teachers who suggest that you gauge the length of your backswing to control your distance, but I have never found a player who uses that method to be any good, particularly under pressure.  That would be like trying to drive your car to somewhere while looking backward over your shoulder.  Good Luck!

 The beauty of feeling your arms merely as spokes in a wheel is that your elbows stay connected to your left pivot (the center of your wheel) rather than wandering around on their own.  When they stay connected (turn together), you will consistently make solid contact. No more chunking and sculling these difficult shots.

 The art of learning to control your distance is coming to understand and feel how far and how fast to turn your hips.  So start each shot by asking the golfer’s question: where do I have to finish to land my ball at that precise distance. 

 Then, simply focus on your intended finish position (now you are driving your car with your mind on where you are going), and turn your left pivot away from and through to there.  Always observe your finish position so that you can learn from each shot; i.e. did I swing “connected” to my intended finish at pendulum speed, did the ball land where I expected?

 Using this method you will soon learn the feel of motion required to land your ball at different distances.  And more importantly, your clubhead will naturally be accelerating at impact, so you have the benefit of gravity and centripetal force keeping it in the arc for you.

 In the 40 – 70+ yard range, simply choke down on the grip of your wedge, narrow your stance and adjust the speed of your left hip spin to control how much speed you deliver.  By focusing on the speed of your hip spin and feeling “connected” at the elbows, you will find that your hands/arms/shoulders can relax sufficiently to develop “touch.”  When James and Brian develop touch, look out world!

 Golfstruck – Better Golf – Right Now!

This article, written by Ozzie Carlson, appeared in the Bergen Record 2007 series

Fixing Your Game

 Article 14: Short Game Magic

 As I sign off for the 2007 summer golf season, my fifth of writing this column for The Record, let’s talk about the importance of what we refer to as the short game. 

To me, the chipping/pitching and putting game, the scoring part of the game, is the most interesting and fun to practice – when we know how.

Think about this: the leading tour players average missing 5 -7 greens per round.  And yet they are shooting scores of par or better. That means that they are either saving par most of the time or making a lot of birdies to make up for their missed greens.  They must be consistently getting it close enough to one putt. And since they only make about 60% of their six footers, that’s pretty darn close.  How do they do that, considering they are playing from all sorts of lies to often firm, fast and undulating greens?

Relaxed hands and Arms:  To the amazement of most of my students, the short game is not played with the arms and hands swinging the club.  The soft touch we see displayed around the greens comes from having thoroughly relaxed arms and hands.  So what does swing the club?

It is only when we learn to use the lower body as the initiator of our swing motion that we can relax our hands and arms.  Try this: Fill a bucket of water; assume your chipping stance, holding it by the handle with both hands and swing it along your target line without splashing any water over the sides.  What muscles are you using to swing the bucket?  The answer is that your arms are just hanging like spokes in a wheel and you are using the big muscles = legs, hips, torso to swing the bucket in a pendulum motion away from and toward your target. Once you have this feel, developing touch with your game from around the greens gets a whole lot easier.

To Deliver our DOWN: Next, we must position ourselves to strike a descending blow.  That is, we must hit down to get the ball up – with the backspin that produces a soft shot that checks and “walks” to the hole.  We don’t want that ball running away from us. So align your left heel and handle just ahead of the front of the ball. Set your tailbone into your left heel with your left neck against the back of the ball, and with all your weight on your left foot. You are now positioned to deliver your DOWN just beyond the ball.

Next, we can’t hit down unless the club gets up in the backswing, i.e. we must cock our wrists, using our right wrist and right elbow merely as fulcrums.  We accomplish this by pushing down on the handle with the left hand, arm and shoulder as we turn away from where we intend to finish our swing.  The wrists cock so that the toe of the clubhead cocks toward the right shoulder with the left wrist remaining flat.

Once we have learned to swing away from and through to our intended finish position, at pendulum speed, from high to low, we can begin to play different types of shots from various types of lies in the rough.  The most important of these is the one I term the semi-cut shot.  It works as follows:

The semi-cut shot: Our attempt here is to minimize the resistance produced by swinging our clubhead down into and through the rough so that we don’t feel that we have to swing hard just to get the ball up and out of the thick grass. We accomplish this by opening the clubface slightly so that the heel is leading the toe of the clubhead.  We then weaken our grip slightly so that the “V” between our right thumb and forefinger is pointed directly at our chin. We then cock along this “V” rather than over our shoulder so that as we swing down and through, the heel of the clubhead leads the toe, “knifing” our way through the grass, thus producing minimal resistance.

Finally, and this is critical: we finish as we started, with both arms relaxed and extended, the left wrist flat and the handle pointing to our left pivot.  The ONLY difference between our starting and our finish position is the rotation of our body from address position to facing the target in our intended finish position.

Golfstruck – Better Golf Right Now!

This article, written by Ozzie Carlson, appeared in the Bergen Record in the 2008 series

The Winners Circle

 Article 12:  Title:  The Feel and Flow of Greenside Bunker Shots

 At the PGA Championship this past week it seemed as if the players spent their entire rounds escaping from yet another of Oakland Hills deep and strategically placed  bunkers.  We saw some great escapes and some that were a little more like ours.

When you climb down into a greenside bunker are you afraid that you will skull it over the green or leave it in there?  How do the tour players make this shot look so easy?

When playing a shot from a greenside bunker you must learn to focus on swinging to your intended finish position at lullaby speed. How?  Start with the golfer’s question: where must I swing to – to land my ball there?  And when you swing to there you must learn the feeling of firing your right side (righthanders) to your target (smoothly – like a lullaby).

All too many golfers tend to play their bunker shots with just an arm swing – thus courting disaster.  The arms have joints in the wrists, elbows and shoulders – too many joints to be reliable, produce consistency, or to be predictable. So what do the arms do?

Think of the arms as merely spokes in a wheel.  When the wheel turns, the spokes – which are connected to the hub of the wheel (the hips) and the rim of the wheel (the club head) – simply rotate in an arc. So let’s leave our spokes connected to the hip turn and quit flailing them around at varying rhythms and tempos. Keep your elbows together so they work as a team connected to your left hip, as though with a bungee cord.

 What then should we be turning – the hub of the wheel (the hips) or the rim of the wheel (the club head)?  You’ve got it!  Let’s turn the hub of the wheel, in place, so that the spokes and the rim simply revolve in an arc. And let’s focus our attention on turning the hips through to our intended finish position (at a soft lullaby tempo).

There is no rush or hurry to get through the sand.  But get through it we must.  You cannot permit the resistance of the sand to stop you from completing your mission: to get to your intended finish position.

Let’s Talk Technique: Now that you are swinging smoothly TO SOMEWHERE, we can talk about your technique.  Virtually all players I’ve encountered who struggle in the bunkers are focused on trying to enter the sand approximately 2 inches behind the ball.  Well, in spite of what you may have read, that doesn’t work!  No good sand player ever really tries to do that.

Let’s understand that the ball rides out of the bunker on a cushion of sand taken from beneath and beyond the ball, not the sand behind the ball. To accomplish this objective, we want the bottom of our swing arc (the deepest point of our penetration into the sand) to occur just beyond the ball. The natural bottom of your swing arc occurs at the base of your spine, i.e. where a line drawn from your chin to your tailbone is pointing at impact.  So it is imperative that you tilt your spine in your set-up and throughout your swing so that your chin is an inch or so behind the ball (where your clubhead will enter the sand) and your tailbone is approximately and inch beyond the ball.

            Next, and this is most important, you must swing from high to low, not low to high.  We must avoid, at all cost, entering the sand too far behind the ball.  You don’t want to plow a whole field of sand before you even get to the ball.  That what makes you feel you have to swing so hard to get it out of the bunker. Then, when you miss the sand, you sail it over the green.

To get your club traveling steeply downward as you approach the bottom of your swing arc, you must do two things, lean onto your left leg in your set-up and throughout your swing (picture yourself as The Leaning Tower of Pisa) and keep your wrists cocked through to your finish as you turn your hips. By leaning (with all your weight) on your straightened left post and keeping your wrists cocked all the way through to your finish, your arc will be steep enough to avoid entering the sand too far behind the ball. By swinging smoothly through to your intended finish, the ball will merely float up and out of the bunker on the nice cushion of sand trapped between the clubface and the ball.

The next time you’re out for a practice round, skip the rest of a hole or two so you have time to play some extra shots from the bunkers – after you have taught your body this new focus and feel of motion, at home.

Golfstruck – Better Golf Right Now!

This article, written by Ozzie Carlson, appeared in the Bergen Record 2009 series

ONE MOVE TO BETTER GOLF

 Article 3: Title:           Lay-Up to Avoid that Disaster Hole

 Next Week the US OPEN will be played for the just the second time on renowned course architect A.W. Tillinghast’s Mona Lisa – the Black Course at Beth Page.  The first time was in 2002 when, after “The Open Doctor,” Rees Jones, masterfully updated the course, primarily to account for the greater distances of the current game, Tiger was the only player to break par.

To his credit, David Fay, Executive Director of The United States Golf Association, in his constant search for the best of courses to host a US Open, eTo his creditsaw something so special in the raw test of The Black that he went out on a very long limb to bring golf’s greatest tournament to a daily fee, public golf course. He has since duplicated that feat at Torrey Pines, the site of the 2008 US Open, also expertly updated by Rees Jones of Montclair, NJ. On behalf of the golfing public, our hats off to you, David! 

            I am at odds with the Golf Channel’s ratings of the most difficult US Open course of all time. I place The Black at the very top of the list, ahead Winged Foot (Tillinghast) Oakland Hills (Robert Trent Jones, Jr.) and Oakmont (J.W. Fownes). I’ve played all four. And while each affords the player rare birdie opportunities, I truly believe the shot values built into The Black to be so challenging, that without the need to “trick up the course” statistics will show more greens will be missed in regulation at The Black than on any other U.S. Open venue.

            So we are in for a real treat. When watching this Open we will see the world’s best players, all too often for their liking, having to get up and down to save pars. This course will make our heroes look human.  They will have to struggle, just as we do, if they are going to score well.

            As players, we rarely have the opportunity to observe the shortgame mastery, or lack thereof, that separates the world’s top players. In this tournament you will see the highly skilled shortgame players using their imagination to visualize and play shots that others simply don’t have in their bag.  You will see near miracle shots by those who can control both trajectory and spin; playing both high spinning and low running shots, as dictated by Tillinghast’s cunning variations of terrain both leading up to and within the greens, themselves.

            If we watch strategically, we will see the top players, when in trouble, laying-up to a place where they have a good chance of getting up and down; rather than giving-in to their ego by trying to “go for it.”  In short, they will be observing golf’s Golden Rule: “When in trouble, get out of trouble.” By laying-up, they take double bogey, or worse, out of play.

            There is a great saying in tournament golf, “you can recover from a bogey, but a double will eat your lunch.”  On a course where birdies are hard to come by, players must guard against doubles and worse.  There is no quick way back from a bad hole on The Black.

            So what kinds of shots will the players need to have in their bags when missing greens, to score well on The Black?  First, the greens on this course, like most traditional layouts, generally slope from back to front.  So you will see the best players laying-up short and in front of the greens.  From there, you will see the players with the better up and down games playing a lot of (8 or 9 iron) bump and run shots rather than trying to get to U.S. Open pin positions with a lob wedge.

Next, the semi-cut shot played with a gap wedge (52 degrees), rather than the full cut or high lob will prove most useful for their 15 – 40 yard shots, particularly from really tight lies or from the first or second cut of rough. Those who have the semi-cut shot in their bag will avoid the risk of chunking or skulling shots from tight lies. And just as importantly, they avoid the risk of shots coming up short by sliding too high up the club face of a 60 degree lob wedge.  The semi-cut shot produces sufficient backspin, yet less loft than the high lob, so it can be played to bounce once, check and walk to the hole.

Because The Black Course is so very demanding from tee to green, when picking a winner for this year’s U.S. Open, my money will be on the guy who brings the best up and down game and the courage to rely on it to save pars.

Coming off his recent victory at The Memorial where he hit 49 of 56 fairways and 14 of 14 on Sunday, his best ball striking tournament, by far, in the past six years, Tiger may currently possess the combination of ball striking, short game repertoire and clutch putting to once again be – the man to beat.

Golfstruck – Better Golf Right Now!