Category: Golf

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Golf: Playing The Game, Part 4

I originally was going to do this blog under the title things we should do but don’t. I realized that all the things I was about to write about happen when we are playing the game. I am not sure I would classify these things as mental aspects of the game but more on how we process a round of golf. These are the things we need to do in order to get a round back on track, or to accept on how a round is going, and what if anything to do about it. We all have the goal to score as well as possible during a round. There is no question for most of us that is our biggest failure. How to turn around a bad start or better yet just how to avoid a bad start.

The first thing you have to do is to accept the vagaries of the game or some like to call it the rub of the green. When tour players scores vary by 6 to 7 shots on a day to day basis, then we should never get upset when that happens to us. If you start out a round by missing a couple of 4 to 6 foot putts in the first 3 or 4 holes you had better come up with a strategy to deal with that. You have to get out of the mindset that you will try and make up for the misses. You should get into the opposite mindset and begin to play super conservative. Even on shots from about 70 yards and out start to ignore the pin and get the ball on the green. Drive the ball to the widest part of the hole. If you make a longer putt or push or pull a shot relatively close to a pin and make a birdie, then you may take a little more aggressive attitude. Let the round dictate your play, not you trying to dictate the round.

You must correct mistakes quickly. What does this mean? It means that if you leave a 20 foot plus putt about 4 feet short on the first hole, your next putt of that length better be long. Sometimes that next putt may not happen for 3 or 4 holes. Maybe you miss the green on the next couple of holes but hit the chip shots real close to the hole. You could hit one of your approach shots very close to hole and make a birdie. It might not be until the 5th hole or so that you have another putt over 20 feet. Regardless, you want to hit that putt past the hole even if it causes you to 3 putt, if you knock it way past. It is the only way you are going to get a true feel for the greens. If you don’t make the adjustment quickly you may never make it, and it will certainly cost you more than one stroke.

The same thing applies to bad shots. Let’s say your opening shot either goes way right or way left. Maybe your opening tee shot is good, but your iron shot is either a big pull or push. A quick fix for this is to aim your next shot where the bad shot ended up. If you hit a big push slice on your tee shot, then on the second hole aim to the right. This should allow a little more over the top action and a better release of the club, allowing you to get closer to the middle of the fairway. What should you do if there is trouble on the right on the next hole? Take a 3 or 5 wood off the tee. Just do the opposite if your opening shot is a big pull or duck hook. If there is trouble on the left, then to avoid another big push to right, swing with less effort and aim down the middle. Do the same for iron shots also and you should correct your errors quicker with no conscious swing changes. Once you get back on track you can begin aiming at your projected target again.

Finally, you should feel that the round is going to progress naturally with no interference from you. What I mean by that is that the round should start out slowly. No matter how much you get to warm up feel that you are swinging easily and in control. In the beginning of a round your distance should be less. In the early holes take more club. If you are at a 7 iron distance then take a 6 iron for your approach. Eventually your distance will increase during the round. It will happen around the 3rd to the 6th hole. You will notice this with your driver. Then use the normal club for your iron distance. If you get off to a hot start, then this may happen quicker and eventually if some adrenaline is kicking in you may see an increase in normal distance. Do not fight this. In this case when you have a 7 iron distance go to the 8 iron. Remember to always evaluate your lie. A tight fairway lie is going to travel less than a lush fairway lie. A ball in the rough will go farther than a ball in the fairway. A ball in the rough is much more unpredictable on what it is going to do than a ball out of the fairway, so plan accordingly. Remember let the situation dictate what you are going to do. Do not try to force the situation. If you can do all of this during a round of golf, you will score much better on a day to day basis. Trust me this is easier said than done. I know from experience. Hopefully, I finally get better in doing all of this. See you on the links.

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Golf: 2024 Golf Season Put A Wrap On It

It is officially 2025 which means that the 2024 golf season is over. Since I last wrote about my season on November 6th, I was able to play another 17 eighteen hole rounds of golf to make a grand total of 152 rounds for the year, which is my all time high for 1 year, breaking the previous record by 2. I shot my age another 4 times including three 73’s to bring that total up to 22 times for shooting my age. Nothing spectacular happened during these last 7 weeks of the season. Just a continuation of my up and down play. I have developed a new short game philosophy which has lasted more than 3 rounds and seems to be working out fairly well. The last round of the year was on the 30th under less than ideal conditions with some pretty high winds and temps in mid 40’s.

What am I looking forward to in 2025? Hopefully to play more golf and continue to improve becoming more consistent. I hope this new chipping philosophy works out. I have pretty much concluded that the key to consistency is to forget about physical keys. This can be difficult because when things are going bad in a round, you try to do various things, such as getting closer to the ball, changing ball position, or making a different swing move or temp. None of this ever really works and by chance if it does it is only for a short time. The mental process is the key. Having confidence in your club selection, the line of your putt or your overall shot plan will be the thing that makes a good score. All of this is rather a moot point at the moment because it does not look like it is going above freezing for about the next 10 days. Eventually I will get out there to start 2025, maybe this will be the year, if not I know I will drink lots of beer. Hit em straight.

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Golf: Playing The Game, Part 3

In this blog I am going to discuss the most important part of playing the game, putting. Putting can save your round or destroy your round. This will not be a how to putt article. There has been more written about putting than any other aspect of the game. I am going to look at 2 mental aspects of putting. One that I am very good at and the other that I am very bad.

The first one is you should expect to make every putt you attempt, no matter how difficult or long the putt is. If you don’t make the putt you should feel the disappointment. You don’t need to go ballistic over it but you need to really feel disappointed when it does not go in. This legitimizes your expectations. I do not advocate trying to get the ball in the 3 foot circle on long putts. In my view the more you are trying to make the putt the closer you are going to get the ball to the hole. I make my fair share of putts over 20 feet and that is because I expect to make it every time I’m over the ball.

Now we come to the dreaded short putt. Let’s define short as any putt that is 18 inches to about 6 to 7 feet from the hole. There are two things that make short putts unique. We not only expect to make the putt but we add that dreaded word should to the process. Ah, that word should. Like we should exercise more, eat better, sleep longer and make all putts between 2 and 6 feet. The 2nd unique thing about short putts is you have choices. You can try and bang the ball in the back of the cup, die the ball over the lip, or just try to find a happy medium. Even though longer putts can go in using all 3 speeds, no one is standing over a 20 foot putt thinking I am going to bang this in the back of the cup. Most of the time on long putts you are thinking of dying the ball in the cup or just going a short way by the hole. For whatever reason we rarely think of dying the ball in the hole on short putts. There was only one tour player who advocated dying the ball on short putts and that was Cory Pavin. Getting back to the dreaded word should. Why is it so bad? Because as soon as you start thinking should, it creates tension in the stroke, which leads to disastrous results. When you combine should with the perceived importance of the putt your chances of making the putt drops to well under 50%, no matter how short the putt is. As I wrote in the beginning of the blog, I am terrible at all of this and miss more than my share of short putts. I do not have any permanent solution. For me, if I make short putts early in the round then I will usually go on to have a good day. On the other side of the coin, if I miss them early then I have a hard time turning it around. All that I see on TV, I’m not the only one having this problem.

There will be one more post on playing the game and that will be on the short game. This post may be awhile because I am working on some things and with winter I may not be playing all that much to evaluate them. If I ever come up with a short putt solution I will pass that along also. All I can say until then, is get out and play, it is the only true measure of how good your golf game is.

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Golf: Playing The Game, Part 2

In part 2 of playing the game let us look at the type of shots you need to execute in order to play the game, when to apply them and what to do if you cannot. There are four shots you need to do in order to play the game well. You need to hit the low shot, the high shot, the intentional draw and the intentional fade or cut shot. This is not going to be a how-to article. There are plenty of places you can go online to see how to hit each shot. There are many methods and they all will work. Each player needs to find a method that suits their game best. What this blog is going to be about is when to hit these shots, and the mindset you need to have in order to play the shots. I am going to take the shots in order of difficulty starting with the easiest and finishing up with the most difficult.

Hitting the ball low is by far the easiest of these shots. It is the go to shot on a windy day. In fact, you might want to play the low shot even when playing downwind. Most people would think that you want to hit the ball high when playing downwind. This is true when you are driving the golf ball. However, if you are trying to hit the ball a certain distance then keeping it low is still the way to go. Wind is so unpredictable you want to keep the ball down out of the wind if at all possible. If there is a bunker or a ditch in front of the green, then you will have to go high on the approach shot to the green. Depending on how far you are from the green it still may be better to hit the low shot a little right or left of the green. If the green is open in the front and you are playing on a windy day going low is the best way no matter which way the wind is blowing. You also need to go low if you are too close to trees that you cannot go over. At times when you have to go really low don’t hesitate to hit the driver off the deck to keep the ball low and have it go a fairly decent distance. Even though it is the easiest shot of the group, it is by far, the most important shot of the group. If you are ever going to reach your potential on the golf course, you must be ablet to play the low shot. Go out and find a method and then practice that method until you can hit a low shot with 100% confidence.

The high shot is the next necessary shot if you going to play golf well. Going over trees and bunkers to a green will come up every once in a while, during a round. If you are close enough to the green the high shot takes care of itself because of the loft of the club. There is more skill required if you are trying to hit a fairway wood up to about a 7 iron with some height and maintain the distance. The most dangerous of the high shots is when you are trying to go over trees. If possible, it is always better to go low around or between trees rather than try to go up, unless you have a high skill level on hitting the ball high. The high shot comes in handy but do not overdo it. Most of the time you are better off thinking low rather than high.

Next, we come to working the ball, hitting left to right or right to left. The left to right shot is the easier of the two to hit. The fade or cut shot is a great control shot and has many useful applications during the round. There is one cardinal rule, never curve the ball toward trouble. If there is more trouble on right of a hole than on the left do not hit the fade. The next rule which should be obvious, but most players do not seem to want to do this, is to aim left. If you are going to move the ball from left to right, you have got to give yourself enough room to aim the ball to the left so it will move back to right and end up in the fairway. This is the shot that you can swing fairly hard at. The harder you swing, within reason, the ball will have a tendency to move left to right. You don’t want the ball to curve toward trouble, but you don’t want to have to aim at trouble in order to allow the ball to curve back to the middle of the fairway. There will be times when the best shot to play is fairly straight.

The hardest shot to hit is the draw or the hook. There are situations on the golf course when the draw is by far the best to play. Anytime you want more distance, and the course is wide open, the draw is the shot. When you want an iron to have a little more distance the draw is the shot. A pin on the left side of the green where you can aim to the center of the green and let the ball work toward the pin. This is another shot where you must commit by aiming far enough to the right to allow the ball to work back to the center of the fairway. Draws are harder to control because they will roll further and at can easily snap into the dreaded duck hook. In the execution of the shot, you must swing easier to create the right to left movement that you want. Overall, the draw is not as intuitive as the fade. The rules are the same as they are for the fade but even more so when it comes to not curving the ball toward trouble. This particularly needs to be worked on at the range if you want to try and incorporate it in your game.

I think that anybody with a reasonable game can hit the ball low. It requires a little more skill and guts to hit the high shot in certain situations. Working the ball in different directions takes a lot more skill, time and effort to perfect. So, what are you supposed to do if you lack any of the three. Your game will have to be compromised but it does not mean that you cannot score to your full potential. Every golfer has a certain flight pattern to their normal shots. If your shot pattern is generally left to right, then you have to be more conservative when there is trouble on the right. You should never go flag hunting on pins that are on the left side of the green. If your game is off, you may need to swing a little harder than you normally would. It is the exact opposite for players who have a tendency to draw the ball. When your game is off you may need to swing a little easier. There is advantage in being able to work the ball but is not a game ender for those of you that don’t. For those of you that don’t work the ball the plan for every shot should be low, high, or normal. Always think low when the hole is tight and there is trouble on the right and the left. The final thought should be aggressive or conservative depending on how the hole sets up and where the pin is located. For players that work the ball the addition of right to left or left to right should be added. Playing the game of golf simply means playing to your strengths, avoiding problems until you reach the green or the green area. Once you are there the fun begins. It’s called putting. I will tackle it in the next blog.

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Golf: Playing The Game, Part 1

We take lessons, we watch videos, we get fitted for clubs, and we practice. After all that we go to the golf course and we have to play. Sometimes I believe all the things we do in preparation for playing is a subconscious way to avoid playing. More often than not after going through that process we seem to fail miserably on the golf course, and it is very difficult to improve. What is it about this game that seems to bring out the worst in our abilities? I admit I do not take lessons, and do not practice. I did get fitted for clubs, a set of irons once. I do watch instructional gold videos. Even though my game has not gotten any better I have not seen it decline either. If I could get a stroke for every time I have heard about how great somebody hit it on the range and now, they can’t hit the ball at all, I would break 70 at least 25% of the time. Today let’s look at some general things that go wrong when we get on the golf course and actually play the game.

The first problem is we are thinking about our swings rather than thinking about the purpose of the game and that is to get the ball into the hole. This immediately sets up a conflict between the body and mind. The body wants to perform a particular function, and the mind wants to get the ball in the hole. This leads to the basic problem of swinging too hard. There are other factors that lead to swinging too hard. We do not take the time to get a feel for our swing at the beginning of a round. Add to that the anxiety of trying to keep the ball in play and we get an overall tightness of the muscles which makes them harder to move and allow the club to flash through the hitting zone. On the 1st tee you must immediately get into play mode and think about where you want the ball to go. Whatever you were working on should just take over naturally. Start a round out slowly and conservatively until you get a feel for the round. Always take an extra club on the first hole. Allow your swing to have a mind of its own so to speak. It will gradually want to speed up as the round progresses and just let it do so. The main thing to remember is to stay in balance as much as you can.

When we start to play golf, we become way to conscious of our score whether it be good or bad. This mere fact of not knowing what your score is separates the men from the boys. First, we will look at the hot start. You play the first 6 holes much better than you usually do. You begin to put more emphasis on the results of each shot from that point on. You must get back in the mode that enabled you to get off to the good start in the first place. Part of that good start had to be related to making some nice putts. There is nothing from stopping you from making more. Conversely if you get off to a bad start over the first 6 holes you have to push through that and continue to think about how and where you want the ball to go. A lot of times bad starts can be related to poor or unlucky putting. Remember, all it takes is to make one putt to get the confidence back and make up some ground. You will never know when the big comeback is going to happen if you never give it a chance.

The final problem when playing the game is not adjusting to conditions and not being able to hit the shots that the conditions require. The shots themselves I will discuss in future blogs about playing. Most players think that not adjusting to conditions is only associated with conditions that are considered bad. Conditions that are considered ideal can get you into trouble if you are not paying attention. The types of conditions golfers play under are as varied as the weather. I have always been amazed at my own game when I shoot a really good score under way less than ideal conditions. It could be rain, cold or wind and I will sometimes shoot a round in the low 70’s. I often think that I don’t shoot that good a round when it is sunny, 80 degrees, and no wind. I think the reason for this is that when conditions are not that good, we start to think and plan better, and our expectations are low. When the conditions are ideal, we forget about how far a ball can roll into trouble when compared with very wet and soft conditions. Usually in the summer the greens can be faster, so it is more important to stay below the hole and avoid downhill putts. One of the toughest conditions to play in is when it is windy. All of these things add up to make the game more difficult to play, than practice. Playing the game can be very frustrating. Over the next 3 or 4 blogs I will cover certain aspects of playing the game. The main goal of any golfer should be to play to their maximum ability. It is a lot tougher than it sounds.

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Golf: Revisiting Grip Pressure, Overswinging, and Starting The Downswing.

I wrote these three articles about 2 to 3 years ago and they remain my most popular blogs, especially the one on grip pressure. The overswinging blog was titled You Cannot Overswing and the blog on starting the downswing was Maybe Sam Snead Was Right After All. Snead had a unique thought on how to start the downswing which was mostly criticized by other golf instructors. Over these last 3 years I haven’t really changed my mind, but I thought it might be time to clarify a few points in each area and even strengthen some points because there are still instructors out there that teach a different philosophy that in my view hurts the average golfer more than helps. All three subjects are what it takes to hit a golf ball consistently. A most important aspect of the address, the grip, how to make a backswing, and the first move in making the downswing. If you can do these things correctly then your chances of making solid contact with the ball increase dramatically. Unfortunately, golf instruction has some strange ideas on these subjects, especially the first two, which makes learning the game very difficult. They are not as far off on starting the downswing mainly because there are as many ways to start the downswing as there are body parts. What makes this difficult at times is that the methods used will work, it just boils down to finding what might work for you. This is different when it comes to the grip and backswing, because what most golf instruction teaches is wrong. So, let’s dive in.

There are way too many endorsers of the light grip. I saw a recent video aimed at senior golfers that said it is very important to start with a light grip. They say that your grip will tighten up automatically when you start to swing. What happen to constant grip pressure during the swing. Most of the older instruction books write about having a firm grip. The pressure points are the middle two fingers of the right hand and the last 3 fingers of the left hand. All of this light grip stuff started because some beginners take a death grip on the club. To put a number on it, let’s say that 1 is the lightest you can hold the club and 10 is the tightest you can squeeze the club. In order to grip the club with the correct firmness I would put a number around 7 to 8 depending on the shot. 8 for the driver and longer clubs and for hitting out of the rough no matter what the club. If you don’t want the club closing over out of the rough, you had better firm up those last 3 fingers of the left hand. For all short shots and short irons I would say it should be closer to a 7. It is perfectly fine to work your fingers and have some hand movement before the shot. Just before you start the swing you want to feel that the hands are firming up and ready to control the clubhead. Your hands are never going to be able to react to the movement of the swing, especially at the point of contact with club accelerating at full speed. You do not need to choke the life out of the club, no pun intended, but you do need to take full command of the club and the clubhead. There is no way you are doing this with a light grip. If you played these sports think of how you held a baseball bat or a tennis racket. Be the firm handshake, not the dead fish.

I still believe that you cannot overswing. However, you do have to do two things at the end of your backswing. Your weight should be solidly on the right foot, and you should feel that you are in balance. One of the biggest swing faults I see is that people take too short of a backswing. This short backswing is caused by anxiety in trying to hit the ball, and the odd feeling of turning away from your target. It does not help that most golf instruction talks about restricting the hip turn. This all started with what is known as the X factor. The X factor being the more you can turn your shoulders without turning your hips the farther you will hit the ball. The basic swing is a 45 degree hip turn and a 90-degree shoulder turn. This is a difference of 45 degrees. The goal of the X factor swing is to increase this 10 to 20 degrees. If you do this, you will hit the ball farther. Is this correct. Absolutely. Will you be able to play golf well into your 70’s with this method. Probably not. A big hip turn is essential if you are going to minimize the wear and tear on the body. I feel the hips should turn at least 45 degrees and you should try to turn them anywhere from 60 to 70 degrees. The great Bobby Jones had a huge hip turn. None other than Jack Nicklaus had a big hip turn. He even raised his heel off the ground to ensure that his hips were turning quite a bit. Once you start making a big hip turn you will really feel your swing loosening up and become more fluid. The only danger of making a big hip turn is that as you turn toward the 70 degree mark, there may be a tendency to throw the body toward the left side or on the left foot. Make sure you maintain the weight on the right foot at the top of the backswing, and you will be hitting the ball in an effortless way. You will not be stretching the left side of the body to its limits, causing damage to tendons and muscles. Try a big hip turn backswing and let the body heal from restricting those hips.

All right, we are at the top of the swing. Now it is time to start down and make contact with the ball. There are many correct ways to start the downswing. None of them are wrong. As a player you need to find the one that works for you. However, you don’t need to be a slave to any of them. If one of them does not seem to be working, then go to another one. Before we get to all the ways to start down, let’s look at what Sam Snead said. He said that the best way to start down was to think about pulling a rope down that was attached to a church bell. Snead was really panned for that idea because as golf instruction developed and video came into use, the lower body became king as the way to start down. The idea was to keep the hands out of the picture until the last minute when they would release for a powerful smash right at the ball, but not any sooner. What Snead did not emphasize when he wrote about this, is that the hands need to start straight down form the top. All of a sudden you see this being advocated under the heading of the gravity swing. When you get to the top drop the hands straight down. The difference is, Snead used the word pull, and now people are talking about letting the hands just drop. To me this indicates a more passive move to start the downswing, where Snead’s words of pulling the hands down is more aggressive. It is a matter of semantics but there is no question this is what Snead was telling people to do 65 years ago. There are other effective ways to start the downswing. I am going to briefly mention a number of them without any explanation. If you want to read more about them, you can look them up. They all can work. Straightening your left leg. Kicking your right knee toward the ball. Raising your left shoulder. It helps if you are thinking of lowering your left shoulder during the back swing. Bump your hips to the left before turning toward the target. Just shift you weight to the left foot before starting down. Falling into the lead foot. Unscrewing your backswing with the legs and then firing the shoulder away from the body. Moving the core forward then increasing the arm speed. Lots to choose from there and none of them are bad. However, none of them are going to give Snead’s method of starting the downswing a thumbs up. Believe me it is another effective and yet very simple way to start the downswing. It is a method you should definitely try.

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Golf: My 2024 Season

Yes, I am still playing and playing often. So far this year I have played 135 rounds of golf. Besides the Pirates taking up most of the blog space during the spring, summer and early fall, I really have not found anything knew or exciting about how to play the game. As usual, there have been times that I thought I found something that may be of benefit to my game as well as to others struggling at this game. Whatever it was, it was short lived to be filed in the trash bin like about 500 other things I thought might have some merit. Over the next month or two, golf will be the main topic of the blog as I will discuss some things I have talked about in the past. There are some ball striking views and how to play this game, I have tweaked over the years. I had a really up and down year as you will see with some of the same old problems rearing their ugly head.

The good news is that I shot my age, 74 or better, 18 times. The majority of those rounds were from the gold tees. The highlights were a 72 from the white tees at South Park. I hadn’t done that for about 2 to 3 years. I shot a 2 under 70 from gold for my low round of the year. On the other side of the coin, I had 42 rounds between 80 and 88 with the remaining 75 rounds between 75 and 79. My handicap index started the season at 5.7 reached a high of 7.1 in mid May when I had the most trouble with the yips but then took a steady decline until the end of October to 4.7 but jump up to the present 5.0. I have about 5 rounds to go in posting scores as the last day is November 14th. My driving continues to be the best part of my game by far. My iron game as been good to awful, but never great. By far the most erratic part of my game. The short game has not been bad when I do not yip. My putting has been the 2nd most erratic part of my game. Even when I do not yip I will have bad putting days. A lot of the issue is my green reading, which continues to deteriorate. During my age shooting rounds my putting was spot on. In my other rounds including rounds that I shot in the 70’s my putting kept me from having more age shooting rounds. That was the story of my year. A very inconsistent year with the yips rearing their ugly head way too many times. I will go into more depth on that in a later blog.

I consider the 72 from the whites the best round of the year. I had 5 birdies to offset a poor iron shot and chip yip double bogey on the 9th hole. I have proved the saying it’s not where your good shots go but where your bad shots go that is the key to scoring in golf. Some of my shots can be ranked up as horrid. What is amazing to me is that they can come up even in the middle of some of my best rounds of the year. I have tried a lot of stuff this year. I have not swung the same for more than 10 days tops. Our weather is looking good so the season is far from over and I will do a final post at the end of the year. As I stated before, the blog will be about golf for the next 3 months unless the Pirates do something unusual in the off season like acquire a major league player. I am going to revisit 3 of my most popular articles, grip pressure, you cannot overswing, and how to start the downswing in the next blog. I think all of those articles need a bit of an update. Stay tuned.

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Golf: The Putting Grips Of The Pros

Putting is by far the most individual aspect of the game of golf. There is more written about putting than any other aspect of the game. Despite the fact there are people that keep insisting that greens in regulation is the most important stat in the game, because they want ball striking to be more important, it really is putting. If Colin Morikawa had putted well in the fourth round of the first two majors he would have won both of them. He definitely struck the ball better than the law firm of Schauffele and Scheffler. How do the people that make a living at this game attach themselves to the putter. I divided them into four groups. The normal grip with the right hand below the left and any variation. The self explanatory left hand low grip. The yip fixing claw grip. Finally the long putter, including the one that is braced against the arm. This was far from what I would call a scientific study. I watched golf on Thursday and Friday for about 3 weeks. I included women pros, although most were men. The total number came to 108. What were the results and did I feel I learned anything.

There were 58 pros who used what I would call the conventional putting grip, basic reverse overlap. Thirty two used the left hand low. Nine used the claw grip and 9 used a unique putter. I was surprised by two things. The conventional putting grip is still the preferred method of gripping the putter by a wide margin. I was surprised at how few players use the claw. The most unique grip was by tour player Joe Highsmith. He is left handed and keeps his right hand low and claws, calling it the reverse claw. Even in the short time that I did the survey, there were some players that changed their grip method. What did I learn from this little survey? Not a whole hell of a lot, quite frankly other than something that I already knew. That putting is all in your head. The other thing, which I have advocated in the past, is do not become enslaved to one method of putting. Do it until it stops working but then move on to another method. I have what I feel are about 4 or 5 methods that I use to putt and will change them based on results. None of them involve making a major grip change. Putting is nothing more than confidence and guts.

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Golf: The Top 20 Golfers Of All Time

Anytime you make a list like this there is always going to be disagreement. I tried to make the process as objective as possible, with opinion thrown out the window. The criteria I used was wins and major championships. Winning is not emphasized enough in golf. There have been many golfers over the years that have made very good livings on the PGA touring with winning hardly any tournaments. The golfing media is into top 10 finishes and even scoring average to some degree. I gave a player one point for a win and 5 points for a major championship win. Since this is going all the way back to the 1900’s, the U. S. and British Amateurs are considered majors. I will go into this more as I go through the list but there still had to be some subjectivity when doing the process. Professional wins in some cases had to be weighted somewhat and some not included. I did not include any team events and no senior wins were included. The quality of play is very good, but it is not the quality that is on the regular tour. If it was, these guys would be playing the regular tour, because they would win about two to three times the amount of money. As much as I admire the longevity of players like Bernard Langer and Hale Irwin their senior careers were not included. The two surprises to me that just failed to make it were Lee Trevino, not enough regular wins, and Vijay Singh, not enough majors, both falling one point short of making the top 20. No active player on the PGA tour made it, with Rory coming the closest falling 10 points short. With no further ado, here is the list and since most of the surprises are from the middle on, I am going to go from no. 1 down to 20

No 1. Tiger Woods  95 wins  18 majors  185 points. No surprise here. Tiger’s record speaks for itself. The amazing thing here is that he has 38 European Tour wins to go along with his 3 British Opens which is third all time. He really is a winning machine. What is remarkable he did about 90% of this from 1997 to 2008. It was quite an 11 year stretch.

No. 2 Jack Nicklaus 64 wins  20 majors 164 points. Just not enough worldwide wins for Jack to catch Tiger. No question, major championship record 2nd to none, and with as many 2nd and 3rd place finishes he had, if the emphasis had not been placed on winning so much, he would have probably slipped just ahead of Tiger. Even though it is very hard to win in golf it still in my view the name of the game.

No. 3 Sam Snead  76 wins   7 majors 111 points. No question Tiger and Jack stand alone at the top. The next 5 are going to be separated by only 9 points. Sneads lack of a United States Open Championship is the big flaw in his record but even if he had won, he would not have challenged the top two. Other than the Open, it is clear that Snead knew how to close the deal.

No. 4 Gary Player  60 wins   9 majors  105 points. The first surprise for me on the list. I would not have ranked Gary that high. His worldwide wins put him in that position. Here is where I had to make some decision on the quality of wins and there were some, I gave no points for. The ones that I did give credit to were against good fields. You cannot argue about his record in the majors, he is tied for 5th all time.

No. 5 Ben Hogan  58 wins  9 majors  103 points. Many people rank Hogan 3rd on the all-time list. His horrible auto accident limited his activity. The odd thing about Hogan was his terrible playoff record of 8-12 and 1-3 in the majors. No question 1953 was his great year, playing in only 6 tournaments he won 5 including 3 majors.

No. 6 Walter Hagan  47 wins 11 majors  102 points.   Hagan was a match play king winning 4 PGA championships in a row when it was contested at match play. During much of Hagen’s career there were only 3 professional majors to win per year. Even with less opportunity he finished 4th all time in major championship wins.

No.7 Arnold Palmer 62 wins  7 majors.  102 points. Tied with Hagen but I used majors to break any ties. The king was by far the player that gave golf its first major boost in popularity. Just could not win the PGA and only came close a couple of times losing by one shot to Julius Boros in 1968. His go for broke style which won him many a tournament and was popular, also lost him a couple of majors at least.

No. 8 Peter Thomson  65 wins  5 majors  90 points. By far the biggest surprise on the list. The man who gets no respect. He won 5 British Opens 4 in the 50’s when there was not a lot of American participation. He did win one in 1965 when it was beginning to get a foothold on being a big tournament again, thanks to Palmer. He won eleven times on the Senior Tour so it showed he knew how to play against his peers. He dominated what was known as the Great Britain tour in the 1950’s. It is hard to judge the quality of the competition at that time so I gave him only a half a point for those wins. It was hard to judge this player but one thing is for sure he knew how to win and is a forgotten great champion.

No.9 Bobby Jones 21 wins  13 majors  86 points. The only amateur on the list and the greatest amateur of all time. Another player who did not play in that many tournaments but won most that he played in. He had one of the greatest years in golf when he won the 4 major championships at the time in one-year, 1930.

No. 10 Seve Ballesteros  57 wins  5 majors  82 points. Again another worldwide player who had a magnificent short game. He got the Ryder Cup to go European and turned it into a premier event. He was wild off the tee which contributed to him never winning a U.S. Open. He finished 3rd in 1987. He helped put European golf on the map

No. 11 Greg Norman  69 wins  2 majors  79 points Again another worldwide player getting his just do. Second least number of major wins in the group but contended many times and had two unbelievable losses, the Mize pitch in and the Tway bunker shot. During 86 and the first major of 87 he was tied or in the lead in 5 straight majors after the 3rd round, the only player to ever do it. Then he lost the 6-shot lead to Nick Faldo in the 1996 Masters. What is amazing is that he still managed to finish 2nd even though he shot 78. Of the 44 players who played on Sunday only 11 broke par and just 5 broke 70. Faldo’s 67 was probably one of the best final rounds in major championship history. Normans career will always be thought of as what might have been.

No. 12 Roberto De Vicenzo  74 wins  1 major 79 points. Another surprise on the list. De Vicenzo was another great worldwide player whose wins had to be evaluated. He may have had 2 majors if not for the scorecard mistake at the 1968 Masters which cost him a place in a playoff with Bob Goalby. He was truly a great player and obviously new how to win. He and Norman are the only players with fewer than 3 major wins in the top 20. De Vicenzo had a great senior career which again shows that he could play with his contemporaries.

No. 13 Tom Watson  37 wins  8 majors  77 points. Another on the list that could not win the PGA, but he loved the British Open winning it 5 times. A player, like so many, that ran into putting problems late in his career, or would have won much more. Made the big chip in on 17 at Pebble Beach to keep Nicklaus from winning his 5th U.S. Open in 1982

No. 14 Phil Mickelson  46 wins  6 majors 76 points. It took Phil awhile but once he broke through in the majors he went on a tear. He ended it in 2021 by becoming the oldest to win a major. Like Sam Snead he never could win the U.S. Open but finished 2nd six times. 2006 was the brutal one when he double bogied the last hole to not even get into a playoff. His course management has been questioned the most of anyone on this list. There are many out there that think he would have won much more if had not made so many dumb mistakes.

No. 15 Harry Vardon  41 wins  7 majors  76 points. I put Vardon below Mickelson because there was no question the competition was not as great in the early 1900’s as it was in the 2000’s. Vardon is credited with starting the modern game. He was the dominant player for the first 20 years of the 20th century. Another victim of the bulky putter late in his career.

No. 16 Billy Casper  59 wins  3 majors  74 points. Casper went on a transformation in the mid 1960’s going on a diet that included buffalo meat. He dropped 40 pounds and added two majors, a U.S Open in 1966 which saw him make up a 7 shot deficit on Arnold Palmer, and a green jacket in 1970. He was the best putter of his era with that wristy pop stroke. He wrote an instructional putting article for Sports Illustrated, that my Dad and I followed to a T.

No. 17 Byron Nelson  48 wins  5 majors  73. I am sure many would put Bryon higher on this list. He had one of the greatest years in professional golf winning 11 tournaments in a row. Nelson is probably the only player on this list that did not enjoy tournament golf. For him golf was a ways and a means to buy a ranch and become a rancher, which is exactly what he did. He probably would have won a lot more if his heart had been in it. No Open championship for Nelson.

No. 18 Gene Sarazen  38 wins  7 majors  73 points. Sarazen had one of the most famous shots in golf the double eagle at no. 15 at Augusta in 1935 that propelled him into a tie with Craig Wood and the next day won the 36 hole playoff. It is unlikely the Masters needed any help in establishing itself as a major but the double eagle shot solidified the deal. This allowed Sarazen to become one of only 5 players to win all of the majors.

No. 19 Ernie Els  47wins  4 majors  67 points. Els will be always known as the man that Tiger Woods kept from winning even more. If Tiger had not come on the scene when he did, Els probably would have won at least 3 more majors. Els had one of the worst cases of the yips when he 7 putted the first green in the 2016 Masters. Els had a great career, but it will be what “Wood” have happened if Tiger had not come along.

No. 20 Nick Faldo 36 wins  6 majors  66 points. Last but certainly not least Nick Faldo was the man that started all the swing change nonsense. He made a big swing change with coach David Leadbetter and turned his career around. He went from a journeyman player with the nickname of Nick Foldo, to becoming a 6 time major champion winner and no. 1 player in the world.

There you have it, the top 20 golfers of all time. Some would argue that there is too much emphasis on worldwide wins rather than concentrating on PGA tour wins. I tried to value the wins but in some cases I think I went overboard. I was really surprised by Peter Thomson’s record. His British Open wins, particularly the ones he won in the 50’s have always been tainted by so called weak fields. However, the last time the British team beat the US team in the Ryder Cup was in the mid 50’s. I just cannot go along with the premise that the best golf was only played in America. I think it is a good list driven by one thing, winning. Winning on the world stage and winning in national events no matter where they are played is still one of the most difficult things to do in golf. I feel there will be some current players that will crack this top 20, but we will see. For now, I will take any of the top 20 against any other 4 you want to have.

 

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Golf: Mystery No. 4, The Yips

I have done other articles on the yips, but this is going to be a more in depth look at this dreaded affliction. I will look at the yips from a more historical standpoint, by reviewing some of the big-name golfers that have been affected. What is amazing to me is that the yips have been around since the early 1900’s and there does not seem to be any remedy for them. It is not for lack of effort. None other than the Mayo Clinic has done a major study on the yips in the early 2000’s. They came to the conclusion that the yips may be more of a physical problem than a mental one. I disagree with this conclusion completely, but more on that later. There are many well-known players that have battled the yips, some with more success than others. Let us go back to the first known case, or at least to the first golfer who admitted that he had this problem.

The first well known player to describe the yips was Harry Vardon. They were not called the yips in the early 1900’s. Vardon described watching for this jump of his right hand. His gaze would be riveted on his right hand waiting to see what it would do. He wrote that if it did not happen on the first hole that he would be fine. One of his treatments for the affliction was to practice putt right around dusk or dawn. The lighting would be good enough to see the hole but not good enough to see the character of the green. Vardon had the affliction on putts of 4 feet or less. He blamed all of this on a lack of confidence or lost confidence when it came to making short putts. Vardon had many observations on putting but his best one was the finest way to putt is the way that gets the ball into the hole. Vardon would not be surprised about all the putting methods that are used today some 130 years later. Another wave of yippers, so to speak, came along in the 1920’s and Tommy Armour was given credit for naming the ailment the yips. In his instruction book ABC’s of Golf, the Y chapter is Yips. He does a great job in describing the yips and I feel there are many key words in his description. The yips are a BRAIN SPASM that impairs the short game. There comes that ghastly time when with the first movement of the putter, the golfer blacks out, loses sight of the ball, and hasn’t the remotest idea of what to do with the putter. Armour also states that everybody gets them. Even Bob Jones got the yips. He got rid of them by not lining putts up with the blade of the putter anymore. They would still come back occasionally in the heat of tournament action. The other key aspect of the chapter is that Armour talks about yipping putts in the hole. He writes about yipping a 2-foot putt on the 71st hole missing it in the British Open but then on the last hole needed a three-footer to win and wound up taking a different grip, different stance and somehow making the putt. Despite the changes he yipped but it went in for victory.

The next two golfing greats to be plagued by the yips were Sam Snead and Ben Hogan. Snead got rid of his yips with the croquet style of putting which the USGA quickly banned. There was another pro who had been putting with this croquet method for about a year and no one complained. When Snead did it and had great success, all of a sudden, the USGA had to step in. Snead got around the ban by going side saddle and but that did not give him as good a view of the putt but still accomplished the original goal of getting rid of the yips. Hogan, more of a golf traditionalist, really never got rid of the yips and this cost him many a championship over the years. Bernhard Langer has battled the yips throughout his career and has managed to solve them with various methods, to enable him to have one of the greatest professional careers ever, especially on the senior tour. Two of the best examples of what the yips can do, happened over the last 30 years. In a Shells Wonderful World of Golf match in the late 90’s between Johnny Miller and Jack Nicklaus, Miller had the yips very bad that day and missed short putt after short putt to be defeated by Nicklaus by a resounding 11 shots 70-81. Without a doubt the most graphic example of the yips was Ernie Els’s disastrous 7 putt on the 1st green on the first day of the Masters in 2016 for a 9. If you have the stomach for it, you can watch this on You Tube. What I think is lost in all of this is that he went on to play the next 8 holes in even par. He did run into trouble on the back and shot an 80 for the day. The next day he shot 73 but of course did not make the cut. You have to wonder how he was able to gather himself enough to shoot as well as he did the rest of the day. There have been other players of the recent past that have had the yips, but the above examples are the most graphic.

What can we surmise about the yips over the years from this historical perspective. Let’s get one thing off the table right now, and with all due respect to the Mayo Clinic, the yips are strictly a mental problem. The idea that yips can be brought on by overuse of muscles like in writers cramp or playing the violin too much, just is not true. The yips affect all types of golfers not just the pros and anybody that has a job cannot practice enough to cause the above problems. I wish that was the case, but it simply is not true. This is not an example of focal hand dystonia. As we look back, there are some key observations about the yips made by the professionals that have had to deal with them and instructors that are trying to help the afflicted. Tommy Armour statement that everybody gets the yips is very telling. I see people yip putts and chips every day I play. When a pro misses a huge putt down the stretch believe me, he has yipped it. People will not admit to the yips because I think they fear that if they use the word that the yips will get worse. I don’t blame them, but it does not change the facts. One reason there is the belief that the yips have some kind of physical cause is that many of the remedies involve making a physical change in the way you putt or chip. From the different grips to the long and belly putter, they have all been used to combat yippy strokes. Different techniques in chipping have been used to help with chipping yips ranging from left hand low to chipping one handed. Somehow changing the way you putt or chip, rewires the brain enough to make that part of your game functional again. Some method changes seem to last longer than others, and you will see pros go back and forth between methods. I have written about this before but the reason I think all these method changes work is because the yips are a symptom of a problem, not a disease in itself. The best analogy I have of this is a lack of red blood cells or anemia. If someone is anemic, it can be caused by many different things at many different levels. A person could be losing blood, not producing red cells, producing flawed red cells, or have red blood cells destroyed internally. The idea is to find the disease that is making a person anemic. The exact same thing can be said of the yips. The idea is to find the issue that is causing the yips. What could be causing the putting yips may not be causing the chipping yips. There is driving yips, and in my view shanking is nothing more than the iron yips. These can also have different causes than the putting or chipping yips.

At least for the moment, the best we can do is muddle through some of these temporary but effective solutions to keep the yips under control. From a personal note, it always amazes me how I am always surprised when I make the first yip of the day. I do not know why I have this reaction. I have it more so on putts, rather than on chips. I know I battle the chip yips more than the putting yips, but I still should not be surprised when I do either one. Stress over a particular putt or shot many times will precipitate a yip. I do not disagree with this statement. However, the yips seem to happen on the easier shots and putts, not on the more difficult ones. I know when a shot or putt is perceived as easy, this automatically puts our expectations higher on the result of the shot. I am not sure that this is enough in the thought process to cause a yip, but it is one of the frustrating things about the yips. One thing is for sure, there are no cures for the yips as of yet, despite what you see on internetville. Please do not give anybody any money that says they can cure your yips. It ain’t happening man. If I ever find a permanent solution to those darn things believe me, it will be free of charge.