For members only. Golf Smarter number three hundred and fifty eight, published on November twenty, twenty twelve.
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If you're playing the right teas for your skill level, in your distance, you're going to hit seventy eight to seventy five percent of your shots inside nine iron range. Do you give that seventy five percent of your practice time? If not, that's one part of your problem now. Nineteen forty nine, Ben Hogan in his books at the maximum distance of a sandwich is forty yards. I was with a group of golfers last night that reached from seven to eighteen handicap, and the average person there said they
hit their sandwich routinely eighty and eight five yards. I said, really, well, then you must be twice as good as Ben Hogan using it is over forty What we have in our bag that we call wedges our very short range golf clubs twenty to twenty five yard golf clubs, but we use them in a full swing environment today, So the fact that you have distance control issues may not really be your fault. It may be the tools is sus
bag because you're a new golfer. There's also some technique and probably some time is used there, but the third element of that is the tools. And if you don't have the right tools in your bag, you're not going to have good distance control.
More Score Zone Short Game Academy with Terry Kaylor. This is Golf Smarter.
Each week we tap the best minds in golf to help lower your scores with tips, drills, insights and advice in conversation with course pros, architects, authors, players, teaching gurus and coaches. Is here's your host, Fred Green.
Welcome to Golf Smarter for members only.
Terry, Well, good evening.
It is a good evening, indeed, So here's the deal. Usually Terry Taylor joins us for about ten minutes on the regular Golf Smarter episodes. But I thought it would be fun because we're getting so many questions in that we can't answer all the time. I thought it'd be fun to spend an entire members only episode with Terry answering more of these questions. So here's the deal. Usually on the Short Game Academy Score Zone Short Game Academy, if we use your question, you're eligible to win a
free scoring club from score Golf. But because this is outside of the normal range, our normal realm. Here, here's the way we're going to play this one out. You are still eligible if we use your question in this episode, you are eligible to get a free scoring club from score Golf. But there are two caveats to that one. If we use your question, you have to email me
and said Fred, I heard my question. So the way to do it is click on the Heyfred button at golfsmarter dot com and say I heard my question on the members only episode. The other element that we have to we have to throw in a curveball here is you're going to have to pay for the shipping. But that's all you're going to have to pay for. You're
going to get one of these amazing clubs. You'll get one, You'll pay for the shipping, and then you're going to want to use your golf Smarter for members only discount you're fifteen percent with the coupon code golf Smarter fifteen to get discount and buy the whole set because it's just going to change your game and you're going to enjoy yourself so much more. Terry, is that fair? Is that an okay way to do?
All?
Right? Well, then then it works. Okay. So We've got four really interesting questions that I'd like to cover today. See if we can do this, and we have as much time as we want to do it, So I'm going to go start right here. Let's do this one math.
Thank you.
Edter of Durham, North Carolina right and says, what is the recommended approach for handling flyer lies around the green? Great question? In my area, we have a lot of Bermuda grasses and when cut high, there can be a lot of space between the ball and the ground. Should you still try to hit down on the ball to impart spin? It seems to me, at least to him to Matthew, that there's no way you're going to compress
the ball when it's sitting up so much. But trying to scoop the ball with the ascending blow doesn't seem like the right approach. Either, So what are the alternatives? What are your suggestions?
Well, we played the Bermuda rough down here in Texas too, so I'm very familiar with that. First of all, a flyer lie, there's nothing you can do about that. The ball is going to fly out of that lie. Its sitting up in the Bermuda. You're going to get grasped between the club face and the ball, which is going to fill grooves on the club with grass, which is going to make the club. It's kind of like your
car hydroplaning. That ball is going to hydroplane, so to speak, off the face of that golf club because the grooves are going to fill with grass.
Could you I'm sorry for interrupting, but can you explain flyer lie? Because you know some of this inside baseball stuff. Not everybody knows every term.
Okay, So, a flyer lies when the ball is sitting kind of halfway up in the stems or blades of the grass and the ball the bottom of the ball is not really on the ground. The bottom of the ball is above the ground and there's a grass around the ball, so it's nestled in this grass. What happens with the flyer lye what we call a flyer lie is you cannot make crisp impact on the golf ball
because this grass around it. So when you hit that, when you make impact at that fraction of a second, this grass between the ball and the club face is going to press into the grooves of the club fase, so it creates an effect similar to when your car hydroplanes on the highway. There is a loss of friction there because this grass is between the club face and the golf ball and the grooves i e. The tread of the tires is now filled with material, so there
is not a coefficient of friction happening. So the ball rockets off of the club face with a minimum of spin, and you see one of two things happen. Either the ball, which is kind of a quasi knuckleball, it either just flies forever, or in a windy condition, you'll quite often see the ball jump up in the air and then just look like it's being thrown back to the ground because it doesn't have underspin back spin to keep it airborne.
So you'll see one of those two impacts. In other words, the effect of this is you don't know how far that ball is going to go. How it's going to stay airborne. There are some and a flyer lies is the penalty of being in the rough. This is what the whole USGA groove rule was about, is to penalize you for hitting it in the rough. And with the old hard edged square grooves, you could cut through that material and still impart backsmen to the ball from a
flyer lie. And what the USGA watch I'm kind of diverting here, but kind of what happened is the USGA saw that there was a deteriorating relationship between hitting the ball in the fairway and scoring because guys could hit these square groove wedges as good out of the rough as they could out of the fairway, and that took away the premium of hitting the ball in the fairway. So back to your flyer line, what happens is you're going to get material between the club face and the ball.
You cannot pinch the ball into the turf. You can't trap the ball or however you want to express that, because the ball isn't sitting down on the turf, suspended up in the stems and leaves of the grass. What you have to allow for iss no matter how skilled you are. This ball is going to jump on you a little bit. This ball is not going to have
the spin that you would normally effect to have. So if you've got this flyer lie and a close cut pin, if there is trouble right behind the pin, your best shot may be to play right or left of that flag. Your best shot may be to allow for that ball
to hit short of the green and run on. One of my favorite approaches to a flyer lie is to take a lower lofted golf club and nine are and even a pitching wedge where you have less loft, so not as much of the club is going to go under the ball, and play that ball to kind of jump out of there with the minimum of spin and bump and run it into the green. Even if it's an eighty or ninety or one hundred and twenty yard shot, play that ball with the lower lofted club, a softer swing,
and play that ball to release into the green. If that green is protected by water or a big bunker, this is a hole, maybe you need to consider, hey, I'm not going to get this shot to stop, and if there's trouble behind the green and trouble shark, maybe this is a hole that I lay it up short of the trouble into the fairway where I can then nip a wedge in make sure I don't make worse than bogie on the sole. No, not every hole is a par hole. Not every hole as a birdie hole.
Some holes aren't even a bogie hole. This is where reading your lie and knowing what you can expect to be able to do out of that lie determine the way you play the rest of that hole. Sometimes you have to take your medicine in this game and go, you know, I hit it over here in trouble, I'm going to have to play this sole for no worse than a bogie and still give myself a chance at par Instead of saying I think I can pull this
shot off. I've never done it before in my life, but I think I can pull it off this time, and then you end up with a six or seven or eight.
Practice. Don't try it for the first time when you're on the course.
Practice Well, you know, it's like that holiday in commercial and the guys you a surgeon. He goes, no, but I did stay at a holiday in the press last night. I think they're down here in the South. There's a saying about the famous last words of a redneck, and that's hole my beer and watch this.
Okay, I don't even know what happens afterwards. All right, Well that was good. That was really interesting. It made me think about on the last score Short Game Academy that we did, and you were talking about keeping your hands in front of on the short ones, keep your hands, making sure that you keep your hands out in front of the club. And I actually went out and played today. I had so much fun. It's been so long since I've had a chance to play a great five mile walk.
Just loved it. Anyway, So I went out in the practice green before the round and I was working on that shot I was working on. I was so excited because I remembered what you said. I was working on get my hands out in front of me, not gripping too tight. And it all worked until I got on the golf course and then I just wee right across the top of the.
Green from the driving race to the golf course. That's the longest trip in golf.
Well, let's work our way from the green backwards. Here's the next question. This one comes from Matt McElroy. He lives in Brentwood, New Hampshire and is a longtime Golf Smarter listener. So I'm happy to ask your question, Matt. And again, if we use it, you hear it, send me an email saying you heard us, use it and we'll put you in touch with the folks that score golf. You can get your club and you just have to pay for the shipping. So he wants to know how
do we know which scoring clubs? See that he even put scoring club? This is how well he listens. That's pretty good. How do we go, yo, Matt? How do we know which scoring club to use? From the sand? Are different types of sand a factor?
Well, you have two things when you're in a bunker, Matt. There's two things you need to consider, and the first thing is the texture of the sand, and the second thing is how far do you want this ball to fly and how do you want it to roll out? So you know, it's the same thing the decision you make in the fairway, whether you're going to chip the ball to release and run or whether you're going to try to throw it all the way back to the
flag with your lob wedge. Let's take the bunker texture first, the softer the texture of the sand, the higher bounce club you want to use. So if you're carrying three or four scoring clubs, and in our world we have this patented vesol that combines a high and a low bounce into each club, but you still have some variances on how much bounce it has. So know your golf clubs, Matt.
First thing, know your golf clubs, and if you're in a very soft, fluffy bunker, take a club that you can put more bounce into that you can lay the club open. It increases the bounce and helps the club reject out of that sand. If you're in a firm bunker, maybe a rain last night or the sprinklers were running and or just that particular golf course has tighter firm or sand, then go with your lower bounce golf club. There's really nothing wrong with hitting bunker shots with gap wedges,
even with your pitching wedge you're a nine iron. These clubs have low bounce and you can lay the club open still and get a little more bounce out of it. But if you have a long seventy eighty ninety foot bunker shot, don't grab your lob wedge and walk in there and try to make a big, old hard swing to fly it all the way back to that hole.
If you've got a lot of green to work with, which typically you would on a long bunker shot, go ahead and take that nine iron or pitching wedge and lay the club open and make a softer swing where if you catch it a little thin, you're not quite so penalized. If you catch it a little heavy, you're not quite so penalized. I'm a big believer that we're all trying to play this game for a number and
look at your risk reward on any shot. And I was just joking about the hole my beer and watch this, but a lot of golfers play the game that way. You know. I don't know if I can pull this off, but I saw it in a cartoon once, or I saw it on tour once. But you know, play within your skill set. So firm sand go to your lower
lofted club. Longer shots, go to your lower lofted club and give yourself the maximum margin of error and the way to gauge the sand when you walk into the bunk or feel it in your feet, you know, when you set into a shot, if you feel like this is pretty crusty, tight sand, and you step in there and wiggle your feet a little bit and find that, hey, there's a little crust, but it's real soft underneath. Don't be afraid to go back out and get a different golf club, you know, get a club with a little
high bounce. Uh. Soft fluffy bunkers are the hardest bunkers to play. That's why you never see them on the PGA Tour. If you look at a PGA Tour, those guys never get fried eggs, they never get buried lies. They play firm, wet bunkers. Because you can spin the ball, you can make the ball do a lot of stuff out of that. Uh, most of us play much harder bunkers than the PGA Tour players play. So don't expect to hit bunker shots like they do.
Are you kidding me?
No? Absolutely. The PGA Tour has the standard for sand texture, and that's why when we see on the PGA Tour of the ball always flies into the bunker, his splashes then releases over and they're they're firm, wet sand. And that's the easiest bunker shot there is is firm wet sand, you can spin the ball, you make it do all kinds of things out of that, because that's about the TV audience they want. They want to see these guys, you know, knock the flags down.
Well, and I remember I've heard numerous times where they're the announcers saying, well, he's going to try to hit the bunker on this one, so it doesn't go hit the green and bounce over right from it from a far distance that they prefer to hit in the bunker.
Well, I know exactly what they're going to get. We just talked about the flyer line, right. You don't get flyer lives out of a bunker, right, And and these tour players, I mean, and granted these guys have phenomenal skills. They spend hours and hours and hours in bunkers, but think of how good your bunker play would bleat be if every bunker you ever went into from now on was exactly the same m that's what they get. Yeah, but they are the best player in the world.
Yeah, well of course can you And hey, here's blatant plug for your your product line, but can you explain more about VSOL technology because someone's I was showing off the clubs today, as I do every time I'm on the golf course, going oh, you got to check these out, and we appreciate that absolutely, and I can get you a discount and so and so it's someone says, well, what's the uh, you know, what's the bounce on this? And I was like, VS Soul patent did, I'm really what?
So can you help us that? Explain that? Again?
Well, in conventional wedges before we created the v SOL, you have high bounce and low bounce wedges, and the big manufacturers talk about high bounce is good for fluffy lives and soft bunkers and low bounce is good for
tide lines and firm bunkers. Well, what we just talked about is, you know, there's not a listener out here has a clue what the next bunker lie is going to look like, absolutely, and or what the next fairway or roughly, so, I don't know what I'm going to have for my next webshot, but I do know that the wedge I have in my bag better be able
to handle it. And so we created this thing called the v SOL And what it does is it takes a low bounce in the main part of the soul and compliments that with a very high bound in the first quarter inch of the soul. So we essentially combine a high bounce and a low bounce into each club so that you never find a lie your club doesn't like. One of our customers many years ago put it better than I could ever put it, which kind of made
me mad because I'm a copywriter. But he said, it lets me dial in exactly the bounce I need for whatever line my ball finds, and that's really what you need to do. You need to be able to dial in the bounce our club like any other club. If you lay it open, you increase the bounce. If you square it up, you decrease the bounce. But within that framework, we give you a wider range. So you can take your fifty seven or fifty nine or fifty five degree score and you can make it a low bounce wedge,
you can make it a high bounce wedge. You can make it do what you want it to do. And one of the other comments I always loved from a customers, he said, my wedge just knows what it needs to be.
So I bet you like that comment, I mean, and.
That's the feedback we get. It's a different soul, it's patented, it's different than anything you'll find in the store on anybody else's wedge. I encourage all of your readers to try it. If you don't like it, send it back to us. That's always our guarantee. And I like that. A shameless plug. No no, no, no to pay better go.
Now you're allowed to make shameless plugs, and the guarantee is a huge one. Give me another five seconds on that.
Well, I mean, our whole thing is, we sell a lot of clubs online. We're a young company. We don't have a lot of distribution. You can find them in most of the ED and watch stores now, but your club probably doesn't have it yet. We haven't gotten out there. So if you go online read about our golf club and decide you like, you know, hey, this looks pretty interesting to me, then buy one. Go play it by a full set, Go play them, because what we've taken is a full set approach to the short game. We're
not about sandwiches and lob wedges and gap wedges. We're about the systemized approach to the short end of your set, and we want you to be better inside nine iron range, and we have built a set of golf clubs. That's
all we do is nine inron on In. We've been doing and this is kind of an aside, but we've been doing a very deep dive into PGA Tour statistics and what we really are finding is is the difference between the haves and the have nots on the PGA Tour is not their long range performance, it's their short range performance. It's a very interesting study that we'll be publishing probably later this year or early next.
Well, I think that that's a really good lead into our next question, and this one comes from Ron hampl who's in Portland, Oregon. And let me say before I read the question. Ron, listen, I've been playing golf now well for about fifteen years, and I still consider myself a new golfer. I learned stuff from these interviews that I'm like that are epiphanies for me that I'm like York. I never knew that, you know. So when you say I'm fairly new to golf, having taken the game up
eighteen months ago, you're an infant. You know. There's just so much to It's true, there's so much to learn, and some of the stuff that you hear, but it takes years before you even get it. And that's the thing that I find so fascinating about this game is that I'm like, you know, I've heard it over and over and then I'm finally, Oh, that's what they meant, you know, that kind of stuff. So, anyway, this is
Ron's question. He said, my play from tea to about one hundred and twenty yards or so is really coming along about seventy to seventy five percent driving accuracy. That's pretty impressive.
That's what better anybody on tour.
Yeah, so you know what, I hate to break this to you, Ron, but if you make it, if your ball is not in the fairway and it's in the first cut, then you're not really you're driving.
Practicing your driver. You're as good as you're going to get game. Right.
So, he says, here's what's holding back my scoring back is what happens from inside one hundred and twenty yards. My short game distance control is all over the place. Why we'll adding a wedge or two to my sett at that end of my set make my distances any more accurate. In other words, he says, is my lack of consistency due to the skills of being a new golfer or incorrect club gaps. Yes, thank you.
Next question, so Ron, we're here to offer absolution tonight. It's not your fault. What happens is that the scoring range performance inside nine iron range inside eight iron range. I've created this little thing. I call it the scoring triangle. And on one side of the triangle is technique, and you have to learn a good technique for hitting short
range shots. The cool thing about that is that if you learn a good technique for hitting short range shots, that same technique will help you hit mid range shots and long range shots. But the one side of the triangle is technique. Second side of the triangle is time. This is the bulk of your shots on the golf course. If you take your drives and your putts out, you're
gonna hit seven. If you're playing the right teas for your skill level in your distance, you're gonna hit seventy to seventy five percent of your shots inside nine iron range. Do you give that seventy five percent of your practice time? If not, that's one part of your problem. The third side of the triangles you have technique, you have time The third side of the triangle is tools, and you
have to have the right tools. And what we have in our bags today, I say we, I should say you guys have in your bags today because I've got score forty one sixty ones in my bag. So does spread? Yes, I do, and at about ten thousand other people, congratulations, thank you. But what you have in your bag and you can I can prove this to you photographically. I can prove this to you technically. You have these things that you've called wedges that have not changed in the
waiting distribution and the basic design sixty years. I have in my collection of nineteen fifty vintage Vaulding tournament model that if I rechromed it and put slip graphics on it, you would swear it's the coolest new thing in wedge. It's got some really neat, nuanced grinds on it. But the essence of a wedge is that it has all the weight on the bottom of the soul and a very thin upper three fourths of the face, and that produces great disparity of ball performance off of the face
of that golf club. So your distance control issues very well might be sixty percent technique seventy percent technique, but they may only be thirty percent technique because your new brand A brand, B, brand C. And I'm not gonna slam anybody looks just like your old brand, A brand, B, brand C, because they look like this nineteen fifty spaulting tournament model now nineteen forty nine. Ben Hogan and his book said the maximum distance of a sandwich is forty yards.
I was with a group of golfers last night that ranged from seven to eighteen handicap, and the average person there said they hit their sandwich routinely eighty and eighty five yards. I said, really, well, then you must be twice as good as Ben Hogan hit his over forty. So the tool is not designed. What we have in our bag that we call wedges are very short range golf clubs, twenty to twenty five yard golf clubs, but
we use them in a full swing environment today. So the fact that you have distance control issues may not really be your fault. It may be the tools. I suspect because you're a new golfer. There's also some technique and probably some time issues there, but the third element of that is the tools. And if you don't have the right tools in your bag, you're not going to have good distance control. And what we see happening in golf is the companies are strengthening the losts of our irons.
You know, a pea club, as I call it, has gone from when I was in my twenties forty nine or fifty degrees to in my thirties forty seven or forty eight degrees. Now I'm sixty, and I see companies making peak clubs of forty three and forty four degrees. We're compressing the set by strengthening these short clubs, but we're not giving you better tools to fill in those gaps. So, and I'll go back to this tool question. I had. A guy told me the day he got a new
set of XYZ irons, and he said, they're unbelievable. He said, I used to not be able to hit a pitching wedge, but one point fifteen and I'm hitting my pitching wage one twenty five now. And I said, really, well, what do you hit when you're one hundred and fifteen yards from the hole then, because you still need.
That shot, Yeah, you really do.
They took that away from you. But what they did is they didn't give you an extra ten yards with your foreign, but they did give you an extra ten yards with your peak club, so they compressed your set. The other thing I look at is I look at the guys on the PGA tour and carrying four or five clubs that go over two hundred yards, some of
them six, not counting the driver. Well, outside of two hundred yards, the difference between average distance to the hole for the best guy on tour and the worst guy on tour is nine feet. The best guy on tour averages forty two feet proximity to the hole from outside two hundred yards. The number one twenty five guys fifty feet. Well, you know, you don't make a lot more forty two footers than fifty footers, So they're really kind of equal
out there. So the whole tour is essentially equal outside two hundred yards, But if you go to the one hundred to one twenty five range, the best guy is thirteen feet and the number one twenty five guys twenty one feet. Well, you're going to make a lot more thirteen footers than twenty one.
Footers, especially in the tour.
Yeah, I mean especially, but any of us we're going to make more putts from thirteen feet than twenty one feet. So doesn't it make sense that that guy is not going to get any better with a five iron from two fifteen or to twenty. But he could spend a lot more time and get better equipment inside one twenty five and he could start closing that gap to that thirteen yard guy, I mean thirteen foot guy, and he's
going to move up the money list pretty quick. What would one more birdy a week be worth to an average tour player? I did this calculation many years ago that one more birdy a week would be worth something like one hundred and ninety thousand dollars a year. That was when the leading money winner was making a million. Eighty moneyminner is making eight million. I mean, I would like to I need to get my college student. It
does market research for us. I need to get her to go in and find out what would happen if you took the number one hundred and twenty guy on the money list and gave him one more birdy a week for his twenty five or twenty eight tournaments? What would that have done for him? One stroke a week?
Well, actually, I'm booking right now a PGA Tour player, and I'm going to ask.
Him that, ask him that what would you have done last year if you'd have made one more birdy a week? And do you think you're going to do that with your four, five and six iron? Are you more likely to do that with your nine and your wedges?
I'm writing that done. I'm going to ask that.
Question all about the tools in your bag. The average gown tour today carries three clubs maybe four that he plays the golf course inside of one fifty with. Ben Hogan had seven clubs in his bag to play the inside one fifty shots. So if you're going to try to be as good as he was inside one fifty and he has seven tools and you have one, or I mean you have three, you're not gonna be as good as that guy. Just can't. You can't practice enough.
It's kind of like if you go to in your auto mechanic and you look at his toolbox and he's got a Crescent ranch and Philip screw driving a pair of Ivice scripts. He's probably not going to be that good at fixing your car.
You're probably not gonna charge your top dollar either.
Yeah, but he's not gonna do a very good job because the other guy's got, you know, three toolboxes full of snap on tools, and he's got every tool possible. So it's about having the right tools in your bag, your distance control. What I would do is go out
and go back to this question. We're kind of rambling here, I'm sorry, but if you go out and take your short game clubs, your high loft golf clubs, and get your laser range finder or stepping off if you have to, and go find out how far you hit each of these.
Yeah, I I So Matt every Is is on the tour now and he's going to be on the show. I'm going to be interviewing him in the next week. So if you're hearing this episode the week it's published, then I'm coming up next probably is going to be this guy, Matt every And I'm real curious if you have questions that you'd like to ask this new young PGA tour player. I've already got a couple here from Terry.
Send him in to me. I'm curious, Terry, do you have any questions if you got a chance to ask a PGA tour player, a young, upcoming, young stud who was highly decorated in his college career. I'm curious about his distances as.
Well, so ask I would ask him, do you know your statistics, Matt of how many shots you hit from outside two hundred yards and how many clubs you have to do it versus how many shots you hit from inside one point fifty and how many clubs you have to do it? And is your set makeup really matched to the way you play the game today.
I'm taking notes.
Good.
Yeah, no, that's great, thank you. I'm curious when you asked that the guy you were playing with and you said that he seems so excited about getting these new clubs that he was getting ten more yards on his nine iron, and you said, yeah, what do you do for that one fifteen now that you don't have anymore? What was a look on his face when you asked.
Him that it was incredulous? He he was like a deer in the headlights. Yeah, sure, what do you mean? What do you mean? Is it good that I hit everything further? Because you know every ad I read says if I hit it further, I'm going to be better. And I will offer your readers and or your listeners. I would like to offer everybody a challenge, and I invite you all to go do this and then sendpread
your email. Go play eighteen holes of golf some afternoon, just a recreational round, and every every hole, take your drive and walk it fifteen yards further on the line it was going on, not further down toward the hole. But if it's going right, walking right, it's going left, walking left, if it's in the middle of fairway, walk it down the middle of fairway and add fifteen yards
to every drive. Just walk it fifteen steps, put it down and play the hole out and tell us what you shoot, and I will guarantee you that fifteen more yards will not lower your handicap PA stroke.
That's an awesome challenge.
Now challenge all of you. But then I'm going to offer you the other challenge, and go write your score down, and every time you're inside nine ron range, no more than three strokes. If you're inside nine nine range, you average three strokes, regardless whether you're a sixteen or a six handicap, and just add that up. Going, okay, I played eighteen holes, and every time I got inside nine iron range, I gave whether it took me three or
four shots to get there. But when I got inside nine iron range, I wrote I added three to that and that was my score on the hole. But then I played it out and see how many strokes you beat your real score by if you were really decent inside nine iron range.
Yeah, turning three shots into two, right.
No, just I mean turning three shots into three instead of turning three shots into five. That's what the average golfer. Yeah, it gets down there. He's one hundred and thirty five yards, got a nine iron in his hand, and he hits it long short, you know, and then it makes a bad chip. Next thing you know, he's put a five or six on the card. It's like I was. And then you know what happens. You walk off the hole and your body's go, hey, nice drive, Fred, you know you know.
And that actually happened to me today. I had a with my three wood. I had a great drive right up the center and it went a very good distance. And now I am I am nine iron in and I just collapsed and four putted. It was awful.
It was so bad because what happened when you hit a bad shot. Now you're pressing your putt and you know, all that kind of thing, you know.
And it also reminds me of one of the shows that you and I did a while back, and that was and it's a challenge that I that I talk about on the course a lot, and is I'd rather have ten feet closer than ten yards farther any day of the week.
Oh, it'll change your scores dramatically. Ten yards longer does not make that big a difference in your scoring.
Interesting.
I mean, all of us are way longer than we were, say twenty years ago. Sure, but us handicaps haven't changed. Yeah. Yeah, playing it shorter than we were, playing it into the green with a shorter club than we ever have, and handicaps haven't changed.
And the obsession with distance, even on golf course design just out of control.
Yeah, exactly. So you know what's interesting. And I was talking about tour statistics while ago, from one hundred and seventy five to two hundred yard approaches, the number one guy on tour and the number one twenty five guy on tour are five feet four inches apart. Okay, But if I go to one hundred to one hundred and twenty five yards, the number one guy to the number
twenty five guy are five feet four inches apart. So if you look and then you go to seventy five to one hundred yards, the number one guy to the number one twenty five guy is six feet apart. So there is more separation the closer you get to the green from the best and the worst on tour. So I'm not going to pick on anybody, but Jim Furick is number one on tour. From seventy five to one hundred yards, he averages eighteen feet from the hole. Number one guy on tour is Bo van Pelt at twelve
feet one. He's a third closer to the hole on average inside one hundred yards. Well, who's going to make more birdies? The guy that puts from twelve feet on average, a guy that puts from eighteen feet on average. You know. And so if you go back and you go to this one seventy five to two hundred range, Robert Gerrigis is number one on tour at twenty nine and a half feet. Kyle Reefers is number one twenty five at
thirty four to ten. Well, you know you're not going to make a lot more twenty nine footers than thirty four footers, but you are going to make a lot more twelve footers than nineteen footers, a lot more. So, where are you going to cut the strokes on your score? You're going to cut them with your high loft clubs. You're going to cut them with your nine iron to wedges.
And if you give, if your guys would all go, give eighty percent of your practice time to your high loft golf clubs for a month, your handicap will come down guaranteed. Has to fascinating.
All right, last question for this one, and again thanks for taking so many of these questions and for offering the clubs to these people. And if I've used your question, make sure you send me an email saying you heard it. And then you will get a chance to get a customized score forty one sixty one, but you have to pay for the shipping. And this could be an interesting one because Martin Baker is from Pereghian Beach Parod. I
don't even know how to pronounce it, but it's in Queensland, Australia. Sorry, Marty. So actually interesting Martin Baker and we'll call him Marty. He uses the old idol on wedges and he's been listening to the podcast for a long time, and he was really intrigued about you talking a while ago about the grip, and he sent you a photo of his glove. Now, he said, from the so we may be able to work out whether I'm holding the club too much in my hand instead of my fingers as you have talked about.
He was also intrigued by your comments about keeping the grip light on the club. I think this would naturally relax the forearms and therefore give a more relaxed looking swing like the professionals. Is that true? So yes, let's you've seen the picture of his glove, uh huh, and describe it for us please, and then you're.
The picture he sent in had a wear spot right on the heel of the hand, and that's the most common wear spot you see on golf gloves. There's a couple of reasons for that. One reason is because golf I.
Just want to confirm the heel is the base of the hand opposite your thumb.
Right the heel pad. Yeah, at the heel.
Pad, got it, okay.
And the reason golfers wear their gloves out there is there's a couple of reason. One is, as he mentioned, you need to have the club in your left hand, really in your fingers, and you roll your fingers up so that the club is below that heel pad. That's first thing. Second thing is that the butt end of the golf club has to be outside that heel pad. And when you think of gripping down on a club, you know what we want to do is we want to grip just enough to wear that the grip cap
is not up in our glove. We have to get our Think about it. You've got your smallest finger on your hand gripping the biggest part of the grip. You would be amazed. And I invite all of you to do it, to watch what happens to your distances in your ball flight if you will go out and just hit shots with every one of your golf clubs and grip them down a full inch to where you get
down into a narrower part of that grip. But the other reason is, and I think it was the last week or week before last show or the show before that, we talked about the proper release of the club and the club. Your hands cannot hinge. They have to rotate to release the golf club. And you want to grip the club with the upper three fingers of your left hand, so the club cannot move around in your hand, it
cannot slide. And what causes that wear spot on the heel of your glove is because that club is sliding up and down across that heelpad and the grip has got a friction of surface, and so it's wearing away at that leather. But a really good player doesn't let that happen. A really good player has a firm grip on the club with the last three fingers of the left hand, and they're not hinging through impact, they're rotating
through impact. So that club stays down in those fingers, and if it's not moving, it can't wear your glove out. The only way a grip can wear your glove out is if it's moving in your hand. And if you're regripping the golf club orth the club is sliding around, obviously, you're losing a lot of control of that golf club. So move the club further down in the fingers than you ever thought possible and maintain a firm grip on it with your last three fingers your left hand, not
your pincher fingers and your thumb. But those last three fingers your left hand. That's where you want to control the golf club. You want to feel throughout the golf swing that you have total control of the golf club with those last three fingers of your left hand.
And you are talking about right handed golfers, right.
Excuse me, yeah for the lead hand, let's put the upper hand.
Yeah yeah, okay, awesome. Well that was phenomenal and I really appreciate you giving us the time to be able to answer a bunch of questions at once. But on our next episode of Golf Smarter, you will come back and it will be a full score zone, short game academy where we will answer one more question. So, Terry, thanks so much again and we'll talk to you soon.
Okay, sounds great, but I'd look forward to the next one. H