The Secret of Scoring from Our Short Game Academy with Terry "The Wedge Guy" Koehler

release we call it. And when that hand releases that way, look at what happened. The hand move laterally from six or eight inches behind the ball to six or eight inches in front of the ball, but the clubhead moved from three and a half feet behind the ball to three and a half feet ahead of the ball. So there's a tremendous magnification of power in that rotational move

of the hand through impact. That's why tour players can hit it so far and look like they're not swinging hard at all, because the only thing moving fast is that rotational move of the hand, and that's where they're getting this tremendous magnification of power. It's the proper release, and you can go learn that by hitting pitch shots and rotating and releasing that because you're doing it in slow motion, and once you get the feel of that is the biggest epiphany, eye opener you will ever have

in golf. You learn how to properly rotate your left arm through impact so that you get that magnification of power. I personally think that was Hogan's secret.

or one of his staff will answer it. But I want to pick up from where we left off on the last episode, and that you were talking about technique in short game and bringing up the names of different tour players. I want to just let you riff on that. I want to pick it up from there.

and thirty yard drives like the tour players do. You're not going to learn how to hit one hundred ninety five yard five irons and six irons, and you don't want to. It's not the game you play. You're not teeing it up on these seventy five seventy six hundred yard golf courses that these guys are playing. But what you can do is to learn a sound fundamental technique.

It's all technique that lets you hit really solid, accurate short iron shots and scoring shots to get the ball close to the hole when you're inside nine iron range

or eight iron range. And so you know you're going to play the golf course if you think about your round of golf, and I alluded to this in the last interview an episode, if you're playing the right set of t's, you're going to play the golf course from you know, five six iron, seven iron range for half of the approaches and one or two three approaches at most are going to be you know, in the long club range and the bulk and the other approaches are going to be in the in the under nine iron

range in nine iron eight iron are under and those are the holes that you should be able to take it to the golf course, whether that is breaking ninety or whether that's shooting par or breaking eighty or getting a career round. If you can learn a good, solid technique for getting the ball on the right trajectory so that it flies the right distance, making solid contact and hitting the ball on the green and closer and closer

to the hole. When you have one of these short clubs in your hand, then your handicap will go down. It's inevitable. It has to go down if you're giving yourself par in birdie putts when you put that nine nine or less in your hand. It's just crucially important to enjoying the game and shooting better numbers.

make a living back then. And we had a pro that loved teaching kids, but mainly we were taught to get out there and just go play. And they didn't mess with our swings much until we were in our you know, early teens and getting a little more power. And I look at juniors and I kind of get off on this of you know, trying to grind on these four and five, six and eight year olds on techniques and fundamentals. It's like, just let them go have fun.

Let them smack the golf ball. I mean, when you're six years old, the club can't get too far away from where it's supposed to be anyway. Just let that kid go have fun. I mean a friend of mine was telling me his ten year old daughter. The golf pro is trying to teach her how to trap the golf ball. This is a I mean granddaughter. This is a ten year old that's just taking up the game and the god pro is trying to teach her how

to trap an iron shot. It's like, really really, I mean, I'm not picking on this golf bro, but you know, let this kid just go smack it and have some fun. And they don't need to be digging divots at that age anyway, because they don't have the strength to get the club out of the dirt. Just smack the gop ball and make it go that way. And I think that, you know, I watched the high school kids in our town, and I think they hit too many rangeballs. They don't

play enough golf. And you know, we were kids. I mean we slung the bag over our shoulder and with our four, six, eight ten clubs as we you know, we put more clubs in our bag as we graduated. And I think you put that little kid out there and give them a three wood and a five iron and a pitching wedge and a putter and let them go and then they can add some other irons as their gaps get a little bigger. But you know, let them go learn how to make the golf ball do

what they want to do. They'll figure it out. Kids are very resourceful.

three games and he gets three at bats. It is not the action that keeps them in baseball, So what is it. It's the team aspect. I think they've got

to be part of something bigger than themselves. And I mean, I'm getting off of our short game thing, but I think golf could take a tip from that and get these kids playing scrambles where they're part of a team and everybody hits every shot and they cheer each other on, and and you're you know, you're you're glad that you got the best player in the league on your team. And if Susie can't quite hit it as far as everybody else will, then come on, Susie, you can do this.

You can do this, and kids cheer each other on. And I meanway, but we're talking about the short game. We're trying to talk about your listeners. And probably not a lot of seven year olds listening out there, but if there are you kids, forget the rains, just go play golf and learn.

But get that hard part out of the way and kids, kids can get putting so much better than trying to hit the ball off a tee or off the grass. Get it in the air.

move from there to chipping in there to pitching. And I really believe if you're going to try to teach somebody to play golf and you're trying to teach them a full swing before you've taught them how to chip you or spinning your wheels, you cannot learn this game from the tee forward. You've got to learn this game from the hole backward to learn This is where the fundamentals is short game, And we're going to talk about the fundamentals day if we ever get around to it.

That the fundamentals are that if you mean take driver's in, you don't teach a kid to drive by pulling out onto the freeway and say let's go mag rump that thing up to seventy and let's get after it. You teach him to drive in a Walmart parking lot. You teach him to how that car handles, how it feels in a turn, how it feels in a breaking, how it feels in an acceleration. And that's really the way

we need to teach golf. We need to teach you how this feels when you're hitting a little shot that's going to fly ten yards or that's going to roll ten feet to start with. And then we're going to teach you how it feels to fly that ball ten yards. And then we're going to teach you how it feels to fly that ball, you know, fifty yards, and then we're going to teach you how it feels to make

a full swing. But if you don't know how to make a golf swing from you know, hands going back wastehimeh to hands going through waste time, that's exactly what's happening in a full swing. Well, if you can't get it right from waste time to waste time, you've got no chance of getting it right from behind your head

to behind your head. And so the beauty of the short game is if you work on your short irons, and you work on your wedge play and your scoring club play, and your pitches and your chips, the release through impact is exactly like is happening with the driver, but it's happening slower. It's happening that you can learn that. You can feel that because you're moving your hands and your clubhead through the ball at fifteen miles an hour, twenty miles an hour instead of eighty or ninety or

one hundred. You know, it's just like in a car when you get out on a freeway, things are happening fast, and that car can get away from you in a hurry. Well, the same thing with the driver. That driver can get away from you in a hurry. Little errors at one hundred miles an hour become very big errors, but a little error at fifteen miles an hour doesn't put anybody in the morgue. And I mean and from the golf

is the same way. If you will learn how the club releases through impact, how your bodycore and the club engage together, how your weight shifts, if you will learn that on these little short shots where it's all happening in slow motion, you can learn that you can process, that you can you can act and react, and then

you can work to get your speed up. And that's what I'm a big believer that what is happening at that magic moment of the club a foot before impact to a foot after impact, the same thing happens in a pit shot that's going twenty yards, that happens in the drive that's going two fifty exact same thing is happening through the impact none. It's the moment of truth and it's the exact same thing. Learn it in slow

motion your whole game. You will do more for your driving by learning how to hit good nine irons than anything else you can do.

pattern of mind when I'm doing it. And there's a difference between a practice session and a pre round warm up. When you're going into pre round warm up, you're getting the feel of the ball off the club, you get the feel of your tempo, getting the feel of what the ball is doing today. You're just getting ready for the first tea. You're not trying to learn anything out there. You're just seeing who came with you today, which swing came along today, and how are you to hit it.

But what I always encourage people to do is, you know, work in your pre round warm up. You know, hit a few half wedges, hit a few, you know, three quarter wedges, it's some short irons, hit a few, seven irons, hit a few five irons, Hit a couple of hybrids, a couple of fairry woods. You know, beat three or four or five drivers. Do you get a couple that's like, Man,

that's where I really want it to be. And then save those four or five golf balls and go back and hit those last four or five balls before you go to the putting green or to the first tee. Hit five, four or five little different little pitch shots and chip shots, because in the first or second hole you're going to have a pitcher chip shot and you don't want it to be boy, I don't remember the

last time I hit one of these. That's the whole idea of a pre round warm up is is re experience all the different kinds of shots you might have to hit that day, at least the basics, you know, middle iron, short irons, hybrids, fairy woods, drivers, and some chips and pitches. You know, get the feel of those,

so they're refreshed in your memory bank. You've hit a million of them, you know how, but refresh that before you go to the ta, so you don't get to that first chip shot of the day and go, oh wow, I don't remember the last time I hit one of these. Yeah right, you know, yeah, I just hit it. I just hit a couple of these really solid on the on the practice s green twenty minutes ago or the practice range.

Well the last time you were in when you're hitting it good, And you know, I think that's also a good thing, is if you have very little time to warm up, go hit a few bunker shots, because good slow tempo really works in the bunkers and it will infect into the rest of your game. And nobody swings a golf club too slow.

and and all your your listeners. I always tell people, every golfer has three yardages with every club, and that's how far you think you hit it, how far you wish you hit it, and how far you really hit it. And you know most golfers are you know, well, I hit a nine or one hundred and fifty five one time, so therefore that's my nine iron range. Well, you know, I talked about Ben Hogan last week about his his yardages and he had twenty yards in reserve with every iron.

Now that was Ben Hogan and that was then. But I think it would be a good exercise for most golfers is to go out on a on a hole on the course where that you know, if you can get out there late in the afternoon and hit you know, go to a place that you know, hey, this is a textbook niner. And for me to that green and you know, one forty one, twenty eight, whatever your number is, go shoot it with your that flag that you think is your textbook nine iron range, and hit five nine

iron shots and see where they go. See if they're all around that flag or if they're all over the lot. And then take five more balls and hit that nine iron to the front of the green, fit ten to twelve yards short of that flag, and just troddle back to hit those five next five balls to the front of the green right online with the flag, but the front of the green, and you will probably find that those five are grouped better than the first five you hit.

And you will probably find that the first five you hit that let's say you're nine iron range is one thirty five and that's what you think it is. You will probably find that the first five you hit are pretty widely scattered, and four of the five of them are not pen high, They're not that far. And you know, it's be realistic, guys, And like I said last week, it doesn't matter how far you hit a nine iron,

but can you hit one that far every time? And if you're nine ron again that hits a nine iron one twenty seven and knows how to hit it, one twenty seven will smoke you when you're nine iron and goes anywhere from one thirty five to one forty five. He will kill you when short range because he knows one twenty seven is my number and that's a nine iron. Nobody would give me extra bonus points if I did that with a pitching wedge. Nobody's going to take away

points if I did that with an eight iron. The fact is I'm here in the middle of the fairway, it's one twenty seven to the flag, and all that matters is do I know how to hit a shot one hundred and twenty seven yards every time with reliability? That is the only question. Now what I do it with?

But can I do that? I'm one hundred and sixty five from the flag, I'm one hundred and twelve from the flag, I'm one hundred and nine, whatever the number is, the only thing that mounts is do you have a club and a swing that you can put together that will make the ball go that far reliably and consistently. And that's how golf has played. I mean, Luke Donald is like one hundred and eighty fifth and driving distance and he's you know, just right back and forth number

one in the world. Okay, he doesn't hit it as far as those guys, but when he's one fifty two, he knows how to hit it one fifty two and he's not going to hit it one sixty five this time and one forty one the next time. He doesn't do that. So the way you do that is you simplify and you take away moving parts. And you know, everybody got enamored with Sergio Garcia and this big lag

that he had. Whatever, But to me, if your listeners, and I mean, he's endorsed by another company, but go on YouTube and watch video after video after video of Steve Stricker. He's got the most simple swing move. It looks like there's one moving part and that's his body core. He's not hinging his hands, he's not flopping the club around.

He is back and through with his body core. And as you watch these these videos of Steve Stricker, watch the relationship between his hands and the front of his sternum, and his club rotates back and his whole body rotates

back in one piece. And when his when his sternum his face away from the target, his hands are out in front of him, and when he comes through, his hands are in front of him, and when he rotates through impact and this sternam is facing the target, his hands right in front of him, and the relationship between his hands and his sternam does not change dramatically. It's a very simple, one piece move. And I will tell you why this is so important. The closer we get.

If you think about your posture and your stance and the golf swing. Your feet are planted on the ground, so they can't move. They can't move closer and further from the ball. They can't move up and down. They're planting on the ground, so they are the most stable thing in your golf swing. But you can stand in one spot and you can make your hands go in a six foot circle. You can put your hands anywhere you want to put them. Right. Are you following me here?

I'm with you, okay. So then you move up to

your hips. Your hips can rotate back and through, but they can't move very far off of that stable base that you have with your feet, or you will lose your balance if you go up from your his to your And I would ask everyone of you guys, get out of your chairs and stand up and get in this kind of basic golf posture, bent overlook at the hips, your knees flexed, and put your finger right on your sternum, right on your button on your shirt, and push backwards

and then push against your finger forward. You cannot move the center of your body more than a half an inch before you can feel yourself out of balance. So what if you could connect your hands with your sternum consistently, then you could not move impact more than a half an inch. You couldn't hit one in the hostle, you couldn't hit one out on the toe, you couldn't hit one high or low on the clubhed because your sternum cannot move more than half an inch without you falling

out of balance. So if you think about controlling your golfswing from that body core, and you learn to just rotate your body core, and I'm one drill I love is to stand up and get in golf posture and just cross your arms over your chest and put a hand in the front of each shoulder and just rotate where your sternum face is backward, and rotate where your sternum faces forward and your weight's over your left foot, and you will find you can do that over and

over and over without losing your balance. It's a great drill to learn how to rotate your body core. That's so, that's a fundamental. If you control the gosswing of your body core, it can't get very far out of whack.

and now you have a core driven golf swing. Fundamental number one, you've got to control the gosswing with the body core. Okay. Fundamental number two you have to have a proper grip on the golf club. And you can go read excerpts of Ben Hogan's book. And the grip is not a personal thing. The grip is a sound fundamental. It's just like you know, some people like to drive the car from the passenger seat. Some people like to

drive the car from the back seat. Some people like to drive their car from the roof of the This is not a personal thing. You drive the car from the driver's seat with your hands properly on the wheel. That's the way you drive. And there is one technically sound way to hold a golf club. Now you can choose the interlock grip, or the overlap grip, or the

full finger grip. Not baseball, but the club runs under the pad of the left hand left heel, the heel of the left hand and way into the fingers under the pad at the base of the fingers. Nine golfers have the club way too much up in the palm.

the club with your right hand, you were pushing a chain. Okay, go push a chain. See how far you can push a chain. Pull a chain to make a chain move right, like pushing a rope. Go in your yard and get you a ten feet piece of rope. See how far you can push it. You can't push a rope. You got to pull a rope. And this hinging connection between the clubhead and your body is a flexible connection. It has to be pulled. And what happens when you pull

a rope or a chain. You look behind you and it's dead straight, and if you turn, it makes a turn and it's dead straight again. And that's what happens in the golfswing. If you learn how to pull the club through with the muscles of your lead side, your left side. For a right handed player, that club has got to go and you have a nice relaxed grip on it where it can hinge naturally. That club has got to go in like that rope. It's got to

go pretty much in the same place every time. But if you're trying to hit it with your right hand, if you're trying to dominate the clubhead with your right hand, which is the natural thing to do. We're all right handed. We got this little striking implement three feet from our hand. We got this little golf ball. We got to make that golf ball move with that striking surface. That's why people can't break one hundred or ninety, because you can't do that. And if you want an illustration of that,

this is another illustration. Take your golf club and tape a sharpie to the end of your golf club. Now take another sharpie and go over to a wall or a flip chart and sign your name with a sharpie. And then step away and pick up that golf club with the sharpy tape to the end, and try to sign your name from that thirty inches away that your

hand now is from that sharpie. That thirty inches is an error magnifier, and you will sign your name that looked like you did when you were seven, because that's an error magnifier. I mean, it's a great illustration of you cannot get the club face on the ball with your right hand. It is physically impossible to do that with any consistency. And those that try the hardest shoot nineties and hundreds. Those that are willing to learn how to pull the golf club through impact. I mean, don't

get me wrong, guys, it's still a difficult game. But it's difficult enough if you're trying to learn how to do it right. It's just really impossible if you're trying to learn how to do it wrong. I mean, how many people are out there listening, And how many people do you know that have played golf their whole life? One in two days a week. They practiced like crazy, and they're still shooting in the nineties.

we've had. You got to accelerate through the ball. You got to accelerate through the ball. You decelerated, well, most people didn't really decelerate. You just really don't. If you clocked the clubhead speed at the beginning of the backswing, it's all. It would be pretty physically impossible to have more club hits bet at the start of the backswing than it impact. What you did is you changed your rate of acceleration. You jumped at it too hard from

the backswing. If you have a car moving four miles an hour and you give it a little gas and it speads up to five, it's still accelerating. Correct. It doesn't have to go from four to forty to be acceleration. Four to five is acceleration. So what this accelerate through the ball. If you go out and watch your friends and watch the average amateur golfer. He's taking a short backswing and he's really jabbing hard at the ball to

try to get enough clubheadspeed to make it go. Well, there's not enough swing there to have a nice leisurely acceleration, and so therefore you get these short jabby strokes. But if you will will just go out and hit pitch shots little you know, take your gap wedge or your sandwich. Go out and hit little pitch shots and just practice seeing how slow you can really move the golf club and still make the ball go right. It's really pretty amazing.

I mean just I mean, you can go into essentially slow motion back and slow motion through and the ball will still come off the clubhead with some zip. It's pretty amazing actually, but you know, gets slower with it. One of the things I like to do is I use the analogy of house painting and playing a golf hole and around a golf is like painting a house.

So you have your power tools. The painter has the sprayer and he comes in man, he gets the sprayer or the power roller and he is just laying the paint down on those big wall areas, just laying the paint down, and then the other guy over here is using a three to six inch trim brush or cut in brush, and he's cutting in windows and doors. He works slower than that guy. He's the middle iron player, okay.

And then the guy that comes in at the end is the trim guy, and he works with a little one and a half two inch trim brush, little angle trim brush, and he works meticulously slow. And you know what, his work determines whether or not that paint job looks worth a dam or not. It doesn't really matter how good a job the spray guy did, or even the cut in guy, because the trim guy can ruin a round of golf, I mean a house painting job. Okay.

So you go hit a decent drive down there. Okay, it got a little bit in the rough, but it really had any trouble. And you got a six iron to the green. You hit a six iron, You pulled it a little bit, but it's off the left side of the green. It's on the safe side. And then you chunk a chip, skull a chip in three punchs and you got a seven and you go, how the hell did I do that? Because your trim brushes you

were working too fast and not particulous enough. Your trim brushes are your scoring clubs, and that they determine what your round of golf looks like when you're through.

right in front of you now. But you know he tried to get cute or whatever, and he just said, you know, anywhere on the green, I'm going to tuput for a bogie. I'm going to be in a playoff at worst. I am not going to get cute with this. I Am not going to lose god urnament by trying to get cute. But he did, and and you know

that happens to all of us. I mean, how often you guys, know, all you listeners out there, and you know you get you hit a decent driving a decent secord shot, and then you just chop the hole up with your short clubs. I mean it's just maddening. It's like, you know, Okay, I hit a two hundred and thirty yard drive within fifteen yards of where I wanted it, and I can't hit a thirty foot pitch shot within fifteen yards of where I want it. I mean really,

I mean think about that. So that's where that practice comes in. The good technique, you know, you know, get your your body core in control, learn how to grip the club lighter, keep it in your And one of the secret I call it the secret fundamentals is I

never read anything about it. When you look at the golf magazines and when you watch golf on TV, when they have a camera angle where you're looking straight at the guy from his target or straight at the target from behind the guy and he's hitting a short club. Look at his hand position. Look how close his hands are. His arms are hanging straight in hers, hanging straight from the shoulders down right off of the thighs. They look

almost crowded over the ball. But when they rotate back and through those hands go exactly back through that same position, and the clubhead goes back through the same position. They make good crisp contact and the ball goes where it's supposed to go. There's not a straight line between the left arm and the clubhead and the golf swing. There's an angle farm there because the way you're holding the golf club under the heel pad of your left hand, you can't get the shaft in your arm in a

straight line. When you're looking from behind and there's a rotation, the hands are not unhinging through impact, they're rotating. If you're looking at swing sequence photos and you're looking straight on, pay close attention to the to look at the back of the left hand and the last frame before impact, and the back of the left hand is facing straight to the camera, and the club is pointed straight backwards,

maybe even a little upward, okay. And then a frame or two later, the hand is only moved latterly toward the target about fifteen inches. But now the underside of the left wrist is facing toward the camera. So there's been a full hundred and eighty degree rotation of that left hand through impact. The release we call it. And when that hand releases that way, look at what happened. The hand moved laterally from six or eight inches behind the ball to six or eight inches in front the ball,

but the club head moved. You know, let's say a thirty six inch golf club. Let's take a forty inch club. The club has moved from three and a half feet behind the ball to three and a half feet ahead of the ball. So there's a tremendous magnification of power

in that rotational move of the hand through impact. That's why tour players can hit it so far and look like they're not swinging hard at all, because the only thing moving fast is that rotational move of the hand, and that's where they're getting this tremendous magnification of power. It's a proper release, and you can go learn that by hitting pitch shots and rotating and releasing that because

you're doing it in slow motion. And once you get the feel of that is the biggest epiphany, eye opener you will ever have in golf if you learn how to properly rotate your left side, your left arm through impact so that you get that magnification of power. I personally think that was Hogan's secret.

you're trying to get. That's just a resulting move caused by a centrifugal force.

are so critically important. So thank you for that. And I find it absolutely fascinating that you are not, as far as I know you're not a PGA certified instructor, yet you are a passionate golf professional who manufactures scoring clubs.

we sell scoring clubs. But my answer and was no, I built scoring clubs because I talk about the short game all the time, and because I'm so focused on scoring. Because I'm five seven and I was in high school at one hundred and twenty pounds and I was not going to hit it with the big guys, and I was going to My dad was five nine, little guy, and he was the best amateur golf in our town.

And you know, he was hitting seven irons in the greens and all the big hitters were hitting wedges and he was just killing them because between that his old putter called Mandrake, he would just he would, you know, he made pars and birdies because he didn't hit it in trouble. And I learned that if you're going to score, you're gonna have to do it with your short gloves because I'm not going to be chipping on par fives.

I'm going to be hitting you know, full swing wedges and nine irons on par fives on my third shot, and I'm not going to be And I learned how to strike the ball solid, and I learned how to get it up and down because that's the way I was going to compete with guys that could hit it

twenty thirty forty yards past me. I still play with guys that can hit it, you know, because most of the guys I play with are you know, young guys from their thirties to forties and their big guys, and you know, we had out there, and I'm respectfully long from my size, but I'm not a long hitter like

some of these guys. Well, you know, if I've got a guy and I'm playing a par five and this guy's going to be hitting foreign to that green on his second shot, and I know I'm going to be hitting six iron to left up to wedge range, then you know, I better be really good with that with that scoring club. I better be really good from eighty two yards and seventy eight yards one hundred and five yards, and I am. And it's about technique and it's about

learned skills, and you do not. I think one of the things that's great is just to be, you know, always have a ball upon the green. When that long hitter gets to his shot and he's got that wedge in hand, he goes, This guy is just killing me with these six and seven and five urns into the green.

He's twenty and twenty five feet fifteen feet all day long, and you'll kill that guy because you know he's he's always looking at a ball on the green, and you know, whether you're playing and most club golf and amateur golf, most of us play match play golf, and we keep our scores for a handicap, but we play match play. But you can learn good solid technique that will keep your short arms and your approach shots and your scoring club shots you know, around the hole and around the green,

keep you out of trouble. Learn how to chip you know, and practice your putting, and you're a match for anybody. I don't care how far they hit it. I mean, Luke Donald used him. He was a perfect example, you know. I mean Zach Johnson. I wrote a blog post about Zak Johnson when he won the Masters, and was that two thousand and seven or eight, And Zack Johnson, short not a long hitter, went into Augusta with the game plan of he was not going to go for any par five and two and go back, and you read

that in the archives. But he made a decision going in, and he practiced his wedge play, and he made a decision he was not going to go for a par five and two. And everybody bombited at the par fives and two is one of the fun things about Augusta, right on things we like watching the Masters. He scored the par fives better than anybody in the field that week. Better than anybody, never hit even tried to go for one and two, never left himself even a chip shot

or a short pitch. He left himself good full swing, blob wedges and sand wedges into those greens, and he dialed it in and he played the sixteen par fives fourteen under or thirteen under.

close to the hole. Because to me, again, it's all about turning three shots into two, right, right, And.

the shast different. You know what the whole concept behind score forty one sixty one is, you have this synchronized set of scoring tools that are four degree gaps or three degree gaps or five degree gaps, whatever's right for you, but that you know inside, you know that first scoring club in your case, that's you're forty two. With me, I actually, I believe it or not. I actually have some that are little tweaked, and I have a forty one that I reground a bottom and I tweaked it

down to thirty nine. So I carry six scoring clubs at thirty nine, forty three, forty seven, fifty one, fifty five, and fifty eight. And I know that inside that that forty one degree gop club with that forty one, which is really thirty nine, that's my that's my one thirty eight club. At a normal full swing, it's one thirty eight.

And that I know from one thirty eight all the way down to seventy, that I can take a metered full swing with my hands in a certain position on a grip, and I feel like And I'm an amateur player, guys, I mean, I'm a two three anticapper and at best, and as I don't get to play as much, and I'm older than I used to be, but I know, at least I feel like I know inside one point thirty eight I can, and even further out, even all

out in the six iron range. My game is all about I know how to hit it that far, however far that is. And if I if I lay up and this is one oh three, I've got a one oh five shot that's only six feet behind the hole. That'll work. If I hit it to ninety seven, I got a ninety five shot that's only six feet short

of the hole, and that'll work. And I know in my in my head, in my heart, I believe that I can dial it into two to three yard increments anywhere from seventy all the way out to one fifty one to fifty five, and then I let the increments get bigger, because I mean, as I mentioned last week, thirty feet longer, short, with that five iron is a great shot. I mean sure, I love to, you know, swing those five irons from one seventy one to seventy

two and knock them in two feet. And I do it occasionally, but I'm not expecting that thirty fe longer start from one seventy five. You know, I'll take it all day long. And so with every tour player, how.

You know, good players can hit those driving nine iron and wedge shots and they know how, and they have a good, good knee action and thing, but they're fighting the golf club. If you think about the design of a wedge and I talked about Hogan last week. Wedges haven't changed and in the way they look in fifty sixty years, they have all the weight along the soul of the golf club. Hogan said that a maximum sand

wedge was forty yards. That's because he knew with all of that weight low, that's what made it a good bunker club and a good club for pitching the ball. But that made it horrible full swing golf club because you know, it loads the shaft too much. It's going to launch ball higher if you think about it. We put the weight low in our five and six iron cavity backs, so the ball will go up in the air. Well, when I get to that nine and pitch, I've got forty two to forty five degrees loft, it's going in

the air. I don't need all the weight low. So what I know works, and it's indisputable. A thicker face makes the ball go more consistently on the same path in the same distance. A higher center of gravity makes the ball drive off the club lower. So you know people talk about, you know, a low launch driver, will they get the weight up high on that driver, Well, you know, you don't really need a low launch driver.

We're trying to get the ball in the air. But I want that nine at pitch and gap and sand, the fifty one to fifty three, whatever you carry out there. I want those balls to fly on a consistent trajectory because the only way you know how far the ball is going is if it leaves the club the same way every time. Hogan was a big stickler for that. If you don't know the trajectory the ball's going to leave on, then you really don't know how far it's

going to go. And I would tell your listeners every one of you has hit that shot and it's like, ooh, I'm gonna have to get on this gap wedge a little bit. So you swing a little extra hard at that gap wedge. The ball goes higher and it comes up on the front of the green. You're going, God, I thought I caught that really solid. Well you did, But the increased clubhead speed with that low centegravity makes

the ball go higher, not further. And if you want to hit that club further, actually come back off of it a little bit, keep their trajectory down, and the ball is expending more energy going forward than it is going upward. I mean, if you have ball speed of one hundred miles an hour off the golf club, Okay, if that ball is going straight up, it's not going to go as far as if it's going out at a thirty degree angle. I mean, it's got one hundred mile hour balls, But where is the speed going. It's

going up, not out. And so you know, if you want to get really consistent with your short clubs, you have to have better trajectories. And yet we're dealing with clubs that are given to us that have all the weight low, which makes it go too high. They have a real stiff shaft that we can't load. That gives us no feel. The club is not designed for what we're trying to do. And I said, you know, why

the hell is that? Why have we been sitting here looking at the exact same wedge designs for fifty years when drivers and irons and t's and shoes and balls and fairways and hybrids that don't look anything like they did fifty years ago. But I mean, and I'll pick on, I'll use a brand name, Cleveland Golf, the number one wedge company out there. They talk about their big deal for twenty twelve was the five eighty eight forged that was the fifth wedge Roger Cleveland design who was introduced

in nineteen eighty eight. And all you're going to do is forge that club and you're going to tell me this is new. I mean, Cleveland's I hear is not doing well. I don't want to pick on them. Their lawyers are probably all call me for saying this, but the fact that.

years ago. But you know, if you treat your scoring clubs, I mean, here's the other thing. I'm on a roll. Sorry, you got a nine in a pitch that were designed to look like a six iron, and they got the stiffest chaft in the set and these are your feel irons. That doesn't make any sense. Then you take a break and you go to this this wedge, your first wedge, which was picked out because you've always played a fifty

two to fifty six to sixty so you have one. Well, when you got that, you were playing a forty eight degree pitching wedge. Your new peak club has got forty five degrees. You got a big, massive gap there, and you got a Cleveland gap wedge and a bokey sand wedge and a and a callaway lobweed somebody gave you got this total mish mash right in the middle of money range. Why why would you go buy a sandwich? You don't go buy a seven iron. Why would you buy a mismatch and a mish mash of golf clubs

to try to dissect the golf course? Why wouldn't you want.

I think wedges are old hat. I mean hybrids are new hat. Nobody wants to a two iron or a three iron in their bag anymore, even the tour player reg rarely carry them because this thing called a hybrid is just stupid easy to hit, because it was designed to optimize ball flight off of an eighteen twenty twenty four degree golf club. That's what hybrids came from. They didn't say, if this works that good on here, why

don't we make a driver look like a hybrid. No, we know this big four hundred and sixty c seat thing with a deep face that works better at nine to ten and eleven degrees loft, and then this other club called a fairway metal. It looks it works better when the lofts get into the thirteen to seventeen eighteen

degree range. And then this thing called a hybrid It works better when lofts are you know, eighteen nineteen up to about twenty four degrees, maybe even twenty five or six for some players who have trouble getting the ball airborne. And then this thing called a cavity back iron design. It works better from the mid twenties to the mid thirties or a high thirty degree loft. But this thing called wedges does not work that well in a high loft golf club. When because we use wedges as full

swing clubs now, they didn't. They weren't used that way when they were invented. And yet we change the way we use them, and we didn't, and we didn't change the way they were built. Look at putters, Okay, putters were always little blades that were pretty light. Because we were putting on greens that were slow and bumping. You had to wrap the golf ball and used a risty stroke. But as greens became faster, the technique became more of an arms and shoulders technique, and we moved the shaft

to the center of the putter. The ping answer more copies of that and probably every golf from of planet. Is that a ping answer or look alike. And then we found this thing called face balancing with the zebra and some of these the center shaft that's came out. Now you look at the most common putters out there, these big branding iron looking things, because greens are still faster putting strokes are still more arms and shoulders driven,

and so the equipment is adapting. And yet these thing called wedges are the same exact things we've been carrying for forty fifty years. It's absurd. It's just in a technologically driven industry. I think it's absurd awesome. I'm sorry, I'll get a little on myself.

created a process called score fit. It's a little exercise you go through on our website. You load your irons in the database and it comes out with your prescription of losts of what's going to give you consistent distance gapping based on the irons you play. And my contention is if you're five through eight iron are probably fine, you know. I mean, if you unless you just hate those irons and you and they're pretty new, they're probably fine. What you're trying for is you're trying to get the

ball closer to the hole. And so what we do is we blend the right lofts to mesh into those middle irons. We put the right shaft in there to give you is what I call a seamless transition and weight and flex so that you have a similar feel throughout your set. And then but our shafts are designed specifically for the scoring end of the set. You can go through our score fit process. It's a lot of fun.

You can call and talk to us. We have some great short game specialists that can counsel you right through what ought to happen, how you ought to be carrying it. And we're not trying to sell more clubs than you need. I mean, if you've got a short hitter, you can probably get away with five degree gaps. Four degree gaps work for most people. The key is to have those gaps consistent so that and then what we did is we built the in our twenty one degree range of lofts,

there are seven distinctly different head designs. So the head actually morphs a little bit, if you will, as loss increase or decrease, so that the weight management is optimized

for that narrow three degree range of loss. So the head design that's on the forty one, two and three is a little different than the one that's on the forty four, five and six, and that's a little different than the forty seven, eight and nine, and it morph says it goes up to the high loft globe, so that we actually dissected those and created seven head designs to optimize ballflight with each club in the set, rather than say they all have to look alike.

fill in the rest of your set. If you don't like it, you send it back, or you can say you know, I know I'm going to like these, and we can build a set of two or three, or four or five for you, and if you don't like them, you send them back and we'll go buy you anything else in the market you think you'd like better.

stock golf clubs. Every order we do is a custom order. Wow, even if you want standard standard, last standard, lost standard grip, you're going to still get it built custom, right next to the guy that wanted, you know, a half inch long, two degrees flat, and two raps on the under the grip. They're all built custom. That's why I think golf clubs ought to be built. We take great pride in what we do is and great craftsmen in there building them and like the product. So you know, it's just a

it's a passion, it's a love of mind. We have no delusions of slaying any giants. But what we do have great dreams of helping people build better golf games. And we get emails and phone calls every day that we're doing that, and that's that's the gratifying thing.