I get a question every summer when I teach youth camps back home. Young kids will ask me something about golf that is almost impossible to explain in one sentence. “How do I get better at golf”.
It’s a good question, how do you get better at golf? There’s honestly no phrase that could encompass all of the things you need in order to improve but usually, for kids, a great place to start is simply practice.
Golfer’s mind via Steve Elkington
There’s a saying about golf that describes the game as being 10% physical and 90% mental. But what does this mean? Because after all, there are a wide range of mechanical skills that you have to perform in order to hit a variety of different shots. So could the key to golf really be so centered in your mind? Some of my most vivid childhood memories on the golf course centered around my struggle to control my mind and my emotions.
In the youth tournaments I played in, my dad would take off of work for the day and come caddie for me and to be honest it was the only way I could make it through some of these rounds. I was a hot head and expected an extremely high level of play from myself. I expected to play perfectly and to win always and when if I pulled the ball into the woods on an iron shot or missed a short putt these mistakes would consume my thoughts. My dad knew this and created an annoying method of reminding me to forget about the past hole. Say I tripled a hole before and was sulking as we walked towards the next tee. He would say come up behind me with a big smile on his face and exclaim “New Hole!”, to which my response somewhere around “I hate this stupid game” or “why do I even play this sport”. And these snappy remarks cracked him up to no end, and his contagious laughing eventually made me laugh, and by the time I had walked to the next tee I was over my mistakes and was ready to play golf again.
Now we can’t all have a caddie or a personal coach with us on the course as we play. And as I started high school this was a big problem for me. I would get in funks for a couple holes and it would completely ruin my round even though the rest of my scorecard was exceptional. It took me until late in my junior and senior year to finally learn how to limit the damage from one bad hole and keep it from carrying over to the rest of my game. Once I mastered this, I saw improvement like I had never seen before. There truly a limit to how much improvement you can make physically, after that, you need to start shaving strokes by sharpening your mind. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
People love the driver. It’s just that easy to explain. Who doesn’t love crushing the ball down the middle past all their buddies? And honestly, this is how I’ve been my entire life. As a kid, the driver was the only club in my bag that I really had any faith in. From my first driver which was part of a four club set, to youth tournaments playing with a passed down Nike Sasquatch (which I still use, even though it’s been refurbished a few times), I knew I could trust my drive and my tee shots. This sort of consistency was one of the biggest factors (besides my chipping) for my early competitive victories. While other golfers would hit their drives into hazards and waste strokes hundreds of yards from the green, I would very rarely join them in their misery ( instead I gave away strokes with my irons…). As I grew my consistency fluttered but my power surged. Throughout high school I was the biggest hitter on my team and frequently in my foursome. This advantage of the tee can be hard to quantify but eventually, hitting wedges instead of 7 irons starts to add up. And at the end of the day, you have to travel a set amount of distance on each hole, and hitting the ball further (as long as it’s straight) can only help you play better. Driving always has been one of my favorite parts of golf and I know that once you unlock your own potential off the tee, you’re going to fall in love with long, straight, drives just like I have.
I can still remember my eight-year-old self one early morning. At this point in my life golf was everything, and to be honest, all I really wanted was to ditch the 5 iron and the 9 iron from my Tiger Woods Golf Starter set and get my own, full set of clubs. This dream came true one morning when my dad presented me with a full set of Progression irons that one of his friends had given him. Already filled with groves and pits this set of thin, light, extensively used irons was in a less than pristine condition but I couldn’t care less. I was a real golfer now, or at least that’s how I saw it. Those irons saw everything throughout the next few years of my golf career. Every round, every tournament, every day spent practicing in my backyard, those irons would be with me. And while I eventually exchanged them for a more modern set of irons I will always think of those clubs as my first real set and I guess that is something special for every golfer.
Now that’s not to say that all of my memories with these irons were good ones. In fact, it was really a love-hate relationship with irons shots in general as a kid because honestly, I wasn’t very good with them. I was solid one the green, excellent within 50 yards, and straight and long off the tee, but I could never consistently count on my irons to do what I needed them to do and that bothered me. It bothered me so much that I would go out of my way to not use them. Eventually, this led me to play with almost as many woods as irons (I had a 7 wood and even a 9 wood for a little while) but shy away from irons only made the problem worse. It wasn’t until I entered high school that my ball striking and strength finally convinced me to give irons another chance. And thank God I did… Looking back at high school and the competitive rounds of golf I play now I couldn’t imagine my game without consistent, straight irons because they are absolutely necessary to hit greens in regulation and in turn, score well.
So let’s talk about irons…
As a child chipping was always my favorite part of golf. I would take a bucket of old range balls I received from a family friend and chip at a makeshift green my dad made in our backyard. Eventually, after I took hundreds of chips from each spot around our backyard green I ended up “designing” my very own golf course. A nice par 3 course where I got a chance to hit a variety of different shots. One around a tree, one over a bonfire pit, one up a hill, 50-yard pitches, 10 yard flop shots, I actually covered a lot of basic chips a golfer would have to hit. Eventually, after playing this course almost daily, my chipping got so good that I would never miss the green on my “tee shot” and I could even start to place the ball where I wanted it to land around the green. And now that I was really starting to golf frequently in my life, this improvement around the green slashed my scores in a way I had never seen before. What good chipping gave me was a safety net. Good chipping allowed me miss a green in regulation and still save par on a hole. Good chipping started to drastically decrease the number of putts I took in a round and good chipping keep me from throwing away needless strokes around the green. Chipping was my favorite part of golf at the time, and I would spend hours hitting all sorts of different chip shots just dreaming of new ways to have fun in my backyard.
The unfortunate thing about chipping and why I think it’s so hard for golfers to master is because there is no easy way to gauge how different variables will change each shot. Let me elaborate. If you use a 7 iron for a bump and run chip the ball will spend a very short amount of time in the air. That’s fine if you have room for the ball to roll out, or if you’re on the fairway. But what if you’re in the rough instead and you don’t have enough room on the green? Do you hit a flop shot? Well, what if there are trees in the way or gusty winds? Which wedge will you use for this shot? All of these variables; wind, green speed, obstacles, your lie, all affect your chip in a specific way each time, and that is what makes chipping so difficult to master.
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