Stroke Saver: Rare Back And Strike The Ball Like A Girl

Oh the power of a 330 yard drive and that 150 yard wedge. To bring that par 5 to its knees and birdie it every time. It’s what every guy dreams that their golf game looked like, but very few can actually measure up to it. Sure, Dustin Johnson can do it. Rory? Tiger? Yes, some of the top 200 golfers in the world can pull that off quite easily, but that same 480 yard hole is reaching par 4 status on tour now, so let’s not be so quick to put our own game up against theirs. Of course, when you start to break things down, a good amateur male’s game doesn’t look like that of the tour professionals listed above, but more like the following: Klatten, Thompson, Kim and Henderson. Yes, we spend so much time trying to be like Tiger that we forget about being like Brooke.

Now, some of the ego’s in the room have already checked out. Others, may start to see their way to believing me here in a few comparisons. For example, Brooke Henderson blasts the ball off the tee an average of 266 yards. She hits over 72% of her greens, and takes just 1.7 putts per hole that she reaches. Now if I were to tell you that this weekend, you could go out and average 265 yards a drive, only miss 5 greens and have 32 putts for your round, would you take it? The fact of the matter is, that is our game. We aren’t male tour professionals that spend hours at the gym, then hours at the range, then hours on the course before hitting the range again to cool down before doing it all again the next day. It takes more work than the average person can put in to get to that level, but for an amateur to get good enough to reach the level of a top female golfer? Now that is something that is possible with quite a bit of work.

First things first, working on your driving accuracy should be the number one priority. Mo Martin led the LPGA in fairways hit this year at 86% That basically means two missed fairways a round. She still managed 72% of her greens and only 1.82 putts per hole. That means she was only making about 33 putts a round if she reached every green in regulation. Her 70.87 scoring average landed her the number 21 ranking on tour. Ultimately, I can’t imagine an amateur playing any better than this on a regular basis. To make it more even more astounding, she was able to score about 30% of her rounds in the 60’s. Surely we are looking at the wrong role models for our games, right?

The first problem that we have on the tee box is accuracy. We need to get the ball in the fairway. If we miss it, we immediately get into more trouble by trying to hit a ‘fairway’ shot from somewhere we shouldn’t. This isn’t because we try to do to much with the ball, but that we don’t hit it from the rough enough to know what it does to the ball. Twice in the last few rounds, I’ve hit what the tour stars refer to as “a flyer” or a shot that came out of the rough much hotter than a typical shot. The first was a 163 yard pitching wedge and the second was a 165 yard, uphill, 9 iron. Both were conservative plays, that if the ball would have been in the fairway, would have resulted in a solid shot into the green. Instead, both balls flew the green by some 20-30 yards and a bogey came into play.

Next up, being realistic about our real life distances is a must. If you think you can hit a 176 yard 8 iron, that’s great, but you probably hit a 5 or a hybrid from that distance in reality. Being real about your distances doesn’t make you less of a golfer, it makes you a more accurate one that will score lower. Notice that Martin only averages 238 yards off the tee, yet she still manages to hit 3 out of 4 greens in regulation and 2 putts the majority of those greens. Think about going out and dropping your ball 240 yards out from the tee in the middle of the fairway. If you did that, how good would your card look?

The long and the short of it is that most amateur golfers should set their goals to be inline with those of the LPGA Tour players, not trying to become one of the longest hitters on the PGA tour. Over and over, I watch as guys flail away at the ball with a driver hoping to reach that magical 300 yard mark, only to see them fall short again and again. What they fail to realize is that that 250 yard shot that they can hit right down the middle is the perfect drive for almost every course. If more of us took the stance of playing like the ladies do, many of our scores will drop to even par in no time at all.