Golf Smarter number three hundred and seventy one, published on February nineteen, twenty thirteen, and on today's score Zone Short Game Academy, The Wedge Guy is going to answer two questions focused on setting goals for your short game.
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We don't play honors here, we never have. We play hit when ready. If you're ready to hit, gall we'll go over how much she said Fred Go ahead, j d Bo.
You get on the green.
We line our pods up, We put and we try to put out if we can. We're not on someone's line, we try to go ahead and haul it.
It saves way more time.
All the marking and stuff takes a lot longer to do as well.
You know, shoot the r each foum and go drop it off.
You go to your ball, he.
Hits, he walks up, you're hit and he's up. To the cart ready to go again. Those things are huge. The other thing is we.
Don't ever mark the car until we get to the next hole.
Whoever's gonna be off last will mark the scores bright times.
He's done marking them, it's his turn to hit.
We ask people, what do you think your thing is that you do that makes you play faster?
And then came up with a lot of pece.
That's where we got a lot of them.
Where the pros go to practice the Palms Golf Club with Dsburger.
This is Golf.
Smarter, sharing tips and insights from golfers and golf professionals to help lower your score. It's worked for your host, Fred Green.
Welcome to the Golf Smarter Podcast.
JD Well, Thanks Fred, it's a real honor to be here on your show. Thank you very much.
Well, it's a greater honor to be at your golf course.
And it's interesting that I say your golf course, because it really is.
The poems is really your golf course, isn't it? How did this?
I mean, this has got an amazing story, and there's a one hundred stories that we have to tell in this place.
Let's start with the starting of.
It, Well, I've been in the golf business my entire life, so I've probably worked every facet of the business from daily feed, very exclusive, private to you know, Monic Kay one of the top three resorts in the world, to be a VP at PGUS and La Keith the Resort Club, and I just felt like I'd done all these things for everybody else. It'd be kind of nice to do something on my own and then I could do everything that I always wanted to do that you get turned down periodically.
So the Palms came.
Into existence through and it was kind of a long shot. Fouled a piece of property, went to the landowners and said, you know, I have this great plan and you'll make a lot of money, but I can't pay you, you know, till the back end of the project. And I just kind of said, check my my reputation, not you'll find him a man of my word, et cetera. But anyhow,
long story short, that's kind of how it started. And I got with Saft Freddy Couples, and I said to Freddie, had I really need a favor, you know, helped you when he played his first tournament, his putter broke and I gave them one. They didn't make those anymore specific pink putter, and I had one, so I gave it to him and he won like three million dollars playing it.
So I said, I need a little help from you, Freddie, And so I said, I need you to be part of this design team, and you know, I need you to cut me a break, which he did and anyhow ended up turned out great for him. He did real well and we did extremely well.
And how did you know fred Couples ahead of that.
I met him when he first turned pro at the Queen Mary Open. He was playing a practice round. We played a practice round together, Freddie and Larry Benson, who was the club pro there, was one of my best friends. And this kid shows up, you know, out of the University of Houston and wants to play golf and he says, how can I play in this tournament? We said, well, this is you know, for pros only.
You'd have to be a pro.
And he said, well then I guess I'll turn pro.
And he turned pro and a couple of weeks later he went to Q School and went all the way through Q school, got his card and the.
Rest is history.
So you wanted him to be part of your design team or just lend his name.
No, I want him to be part of the whole design team.
And you know, plus naturally his name was terrific because I mean you look at it and there's only certain names that you can use that have any.
Possess to them, and uh, his his, he was one.
And the fact that you know I had I knew him and had a friendship there, and his agent in Roach was a wonderful person and easy to work.
With, and that added to everything.
So and Brian Curley was the true architect, and he and Freddie then collaborated together and uh, you know they were willing to, you know, do what I was looking to do. And then everybody had their input in it. That's what's kind of unique and different when you say everybody, Brian Curley, Freddie Couples.
And myself I thought on the design. Yeah, I wanted an.
Old style, back East type of golf course where you could play the ball on the ground. Freddie wanted to have some riviera, some Augusta places that he loved to play in there. And Brian Curley, you know, being a Northern Kelp guy, hey really wanted to have a little of that Monterey Peninsula.
So you just played the chorus. Fifteen's a short three par and sixteens.
Along three par fifteen sixteen, you know, the cypress thing. So we all put our little feedback in those first five holes in the Mesquite. We when Freddy went to play the President's cop, I said, Freddie, you know you could do some pictures and we can make those first five holes like Royal Melbourne and flashed those you know, bunkers right up into the Mesquite. And that's how that
kind of came about. And Freddie wanted everybody to be able to hit a driver on every hole if you so desired, so that was another thing that kind of came into it. Brian wanted the George Thomas style bunkering that he loved, and so he had that. The only thing I asked was that they would be a flat bottom. So no matter how high the lip is, if you have a flat bottom, it's relatively easy to get out, not necessarily get closed, but relatively easy to get out
of the green complexes. You know, Brian did a magnificent job there in what he did with that. Those green surrounds are as good as you'll see anywhere. I mean there's shades of August, the Oakmont, Pinehurst, you name it, they're there. And so when you miss a green, the tour players, a lot of tour players will come in. They say, it's one of the few places you have like five different options.
You know, you can put it, you.
Can use a rescue, you can chip and run it, you can pitch it, or you can flop it. So it gives you a lot of options. The average player probably the eighteen handicappers, so he probably puts.
Almost every one of them up the hill.
From there handicap and take you well, even though we have such a low handicap, you know, we have two hundred and seventy eight single digit players here.
Wow, and is that like versus one of the lowest in the in the country naturally, And how many members do you have? We have four hundred and fifteen, four one five and two hundred and seventy eight of them are single digit players, single digit players. And at one time, at the peak when they were they were rating the top players clubs in the country. You know, fifty one of our players were pluses. Well, so we're all getting older now, So I mean that's faded a little bit.
We're still number one players club in California, but we're probably still top five in the country. I mean, at one time we were at number one.
But that was never a goal I wanted to have.
You said, that wasn't a goal to be the number one players club or anything like that. The thing was is I wanted to have good players, you know, and I wanted a good players club that exceeded my expectation.
But I really built it as much.
I wanted a place where myself and all of my friends we could all grow old together.
You want, but not a boys club.
You wanted just a place to go hang out in the bar, but not a not an exclusive boys.
Club, and we have we have fifty two women members, and so it's kind of like a men's club with women.
Right now.
No, I want to backtrack, just to touch but I want to get back into this part of it. But that's not even what we're going to talk about. And I want to talk about pace of play, because this is remarkable, this course. But you said you had a business plan that you took to the landowner, and what was specifically.
What did you pitch them on?
What was your idea on why this golf course was going to be unique and special.
Well, first I thought I was on crazy. There was already one hundred some golf courses here. But I said, I'm a niche type of person, you know, having worked for Lawrence Rockefeller, he was big on niches. He used to always say when I was at Monique, just remember JD.
We're for the fortunate few. We're not for everybody.
So that was my thought. I'm not going to be for everybody, but I'm going to be for the fortunate few that this is what they want. So I told them we're going to be an old style golf club, no tea times, fast play, where walking is embraced, so teas and greens will be close together.
Okay, we're not going.
To be about, you know, the parties and all that kind of stuff. It's going to be an open tee so you're never blocked out. We're going to have two tournaments only it's gonna be a stroke playing a match play, and you still can play in the afternoons on those days, so you never blocked out. So when you show up at the club, you can play and you know there's going to be fast play because the teas and greens
are close together. So what I did to ensure the face of play the first year or two, I would put right on on the card if a person was taking a card, if they were teeing off at eight o'clock, I'd write eight o'clock, nine to fifty, right, and then eleven fifty. And that meant that you're teed off at eight, you need to be at the turn at nine to fifty because the front nine takes like an iron fifty minutes to play max, and the back nine's longer, so it'll take two hours to play. And so three hours
and fifty minutes became the max that you were allowed. Okay, And then we ended up with the average rounds being about foursomes that were like three hours and thirty to three hours and thirty two minutes, okay, threesomes or three hours or less. Club Championship Okay, we played threesomes or twosomes and the rounds are three and a half hours or less every round. Now, guys, the first time they played in our Club Championship, when they get in, they say can.
I use your office, They get on the phone, they call their.
Buddy, and now say, you're not going to believe this, you know, unlike our place where we played in five hours plus in the club, I just played a club championship and I played in three hours, three hours and thirty minutes, and you're putting everything out the whole bit, you know it was it was pretty awesome. So once everybody knew that you met business and you were for
real on it, it really worked. Plus, you know, one in seven or is a split te so we know that you need to be and at iron fifteen minutes, you need to be t and off of number seven. So when they come off of six, we'll just walk over and say, you know, you need to pick up the pace a little bit, mister Jones, and in a way you go with it.
Right.
It's very nice of you not to say, mister Green, I have to worry about that you were in good shape.
But that's kind of the way that came about Fred and so then it became a culture. Now this is one of the cute stories. I'm playing on a Saturday and Lee Trevino, George Archer and myself and Johnny Pott. We're teeing off of number one and four ladies go out with the push carts in front of us, and Lee looks at me and says, j D, what are you doing to us?
I said, Lee, we won't catch him. I can promise you that. Oh come on, j D, I can't go Leah's right, So.
You know, they tee off and we go, and within three holes they got in their walking stride. We finished around in three hours and thirty minutes and we never caught them. Well after that, Lee became my biggest spokesperson because.
One he said, this golf.
Course is phenomenal because you can grow old on it. And I said, well, what do you mean by that lead He said, well, you can play your ball on the ground. You can bump and run it in if you want. You can run it up on five pars, going for it in two.
He says.
You know, as you get older, you don't hit the ball as high, so with your greens down on the ground all school and openings, you can bump and run it in there. But he said, the surrounds, you know, the green complexes, create all the resistance of scoring you'd ever want. He says, at the same time, all the pros said you could play a major here, You could play the open whatever if it wasn't that you're in a desert where it'd be one hundred and ten degrees.
At that time.
And then he's over at the hotel and working out in the gym, and he's telling everybody, you can't believe it. I just played the pumps and these four ladies went out in front of us, and we played in three hours and thirty minutes and we.
Never caught them.
So it became like, you know, you can't believe how fast as ladies play at the pumps. So it became a thing where it's the only club I know that the guys will actually tell the ladies, you know, if you want to go ahead and tee it up and go, because they know that they're going to walk and go and get it done. So that's telling you that our lady members are serious type golfers and serious type players.
So it's been kind of fun to happen.
Then, oh yeah, I'm a big believer.
I'm a big, big believer Fred that this slow play is hurting the game more than anything else.
So you know.
Everybody talks about we need six hole courses all this, well we have that first six holes comes right back to the clubhouse right.
Well, after the guys played that game of ours.
The nine handicap or lesque game, they settle their bets and they redraw teams and they go play what they call the East Six, and then they all gather behind six and they heckle each other, coming in the last all right, and all balls, kind of the.
Last hall, and the winning team takes all well.
I have a lot of young guys at work that come right after work just to play the East Six Monday through Friday, and so they get some golfing. So you know, we've been very very lucky that way. I mean, average age is forty seven, so you know we're still have a pretty young group.
I'm really curious about your rules for pay to play. This is a This is a I don't want to say that it's an exclusive club because PGA West is right around the corner, and that's incredibly exclusive. Expensive to live there, expensive to play there. You have private equity club memberships here, but it's not outrageously priced for what's going on.
In private clubs today. But you don't have social things.
You don't have a swimming pool or a tennis court, so or parties and things this is a golf club.
Part of your initial idea.
Correct, Fred, It's you know, being.
A single member membership club.
You know, we play about eighteen thousand rounds a year, eighteen and change, and you know that creates a nice ambience to the course. So we have no tea time, so you can put your name in and you're out in thirty minutes or less. And you know, you experienced it today with your friends and that's just the right amount of time to warm up and get ready to go.
And so it's worked well.
I'm in.
Our initiation fee currently is twenty thousand dollars. We've always been in the thirties as a big believer that we didn't We wanted us to be truly an additional club for most people. There's probably one hundred of our members it's their primary club, but the rest of them belong to other places. And you know, I felt like that initiation fee, if you kept it reasonable in the wholl bit, it made it a.
Lot easier to be that additional club.
And the other thing is, I mean what happens is it really fed my niche because it's kind of like the higher the price to higher the handicap to higher the age normally. Okay, so by having a lower price the initiation fee. You know, our low was forty two years old was the average age, excuse me.
And then.
Our handicap six point nine was our average index was our lowest and our highest is probably right around nine that we've ever been. So you know, our average indexes has been pretty low. So we've attracted good players. The pace of play has met a lot. The good practice facilities big.
They hit a.
Lot of balls.
When you leave tonight, it'll be dark and you'll hear guys hitting balls in the dark.
I mean, they're that fanatical about their game.
So guys and women and even the fifty you have, these are very serious players. And because it's not like there's a husband and wife on a Saturday afternoon, you know, the people, if you're going.
To join, you're in into it. And even the women they're like, I want to get out there.
So this morning they were there. They all walked and you know, they were done in no time. And they have their little games that they do, and we're known for games.
We have a lot of games.
It's very easy access into the games, and I think that's a unique thing about the place. So many places I get clickie shit, and so there's nothing wrong with any of that. That's why there's all the different opportunities in different type clubs that there are out there. We happen to be this one little niche. I like to think that this niche.
Of ours is very small. But it's not shrinking.
Oh that's good, that's well. The other is shrinking.
You have this These are your place mats for your for your bar, and it talks about some of the members without giving names here, but I'm just going to run through a couple and this is the kind of people that are staying that that belonged to the poems.
And it was.
Because of what you led me up to this before we played, and you were telling me and you were showing me some of your trophy cases. And you've got amazing memorabilia that your members just say here, put this up in here, memori of our members.
Yeah, of your members.
You have six Master's titles, a US Open title, British two British Open titles, UH one hundred and twenty one PGA Tour victories, twenty four LPGA Tour wins, four Presidents, Cup captains, a writer, Cup Captain, and he just goes on and on and on the type of people that play here.
One of the unique things fred is right behind me is a picture of Holli Stacy and my wife and my daughter and myself from last May when she got inducted into World Golf Hall of Fame, and Freddie's going in this May, so that'll be that'll make four of our members that are in the World Golf Hall.
Of Fame, the World Golf Hall of Fame.
And congratulations you just were recently inducted into the Southern California PGA Hall of Fame. Yeah, correct, congratulations, that's really impressive.
And we have Theme Beam and Arnold Palmer, Freddy Couples and Holli Stacy. So it's as pretty unique and special in its own rights.
So yeah, you're right, it's pretty fun. It really is.
But so when we get back to the conversation of pace of play, hopefully there are other course designers, course managers, you know, companies that are coming to you saying how do.
You do it?
Because the pace of play really is an issue for so many people, especially who play public courses weekend golf. It's so difficult to get around it seems like in under five hours, it's impossible.
But you have.
A sheet here and that you simple ways to quicken your pace of play. And I guess this is something that you get to every member, and it's like every new member and is like you probably give them tests and have them committed to memory.
Well no, not really, I don't go that's strong one, but you know, we do give that to them. And I have taken a few people off periodically it seemed that they might have struggled with the pace of play, and then all of a sudden they realize, God, I never am ready to play, is what it is.
You know.
I never have my glove on, I never have my yard. I can get all those things before it's my turn to go, you know, and.
Just little things.
Yeah.
Really, And it's amazing because I played with two friends today and when none of us played very well today. We were all struggling because we're all working on swing mechanics right now, but we're all struggling. But we came in and we all barely broke a hundred. But we came in at three hours and fifty minutes. I was I was just shocked because I felt like we were, you know, holding people up, you know, but we didn't spend a lot of time looking for balls. I didn't
lose a single ball today. Actually went on eighteen. I put one in the creek, but it was in right there. It was three inches deep, so that I even reminded my friends who were in a cart.
I didn't see anybody walking today, Well they walked in the morning I had. I had.
Six guys walk today and uh seven ladies. So I had fifteen people walk today.
Out of how many rounds today. Because do most people just take the cards? Well you have you think you promote the walking.
Our plays walking. Yeah, it's not. It's not a hilly course.
I mean, easy to walk. It's just that the convenience, you know, the carts are included in your douce.
Yeah, guys will take the card as well, you know, but it just depends if you have If you're the only one walking, then it doesn't work. If there's if there's more than one walking in your group, then they walk.
That's what you find.
So what you'll see is that all of a sudden someone will say I'm going to take a card today and then the other guys said, well, there I'm going to ride to.
I'm not going to walk.
Yeah, you probably.
We probably average you know, about fifteen to sixteen walkers per day twenty max.
Let's go over a couple of these rules, because I think that everybody should know them, you know, whether they're playing here or not. They should really make this part of their round of golf and it would help everybody.
And my friends were in one cart and I was in the other, and I kept reminding them of the one that you had was don't sit here waiting for your friend to hit the ball and then go to your ball, drop him off, and even if you're not driving the cart, drop him off at his ball, and then drive up to your ball and play ready golf. I mean, bottom line, play ready golf. It don't have to worry about honors, You don't have to worry. Everyone's
going to get to play. So let's talk about some of the rules that you have and some of the reminders that you want to share with everybody about about how to pick up their pace of play.
And they're enjoyment without rushing. I never felt rushed.
Well, you know, they riding a cart properly is huge. We don't play honors here. We never have we play hit when ready. If you're ready to hit, Gala look over her emotions said, Fred, you care if I go go go ahead, JD Boom, I'll.
Hit you get on the green. You know.
We line our pots up, we put we try to put out. If we can't, if we're not on someone's line, we try to go ahead and hould it. It saves, we know, way more time when you do that. All the marking and stuff takes a lot longer to do as.
Well, you know.
And like you said that dropping the person off and having the clubs, you know, shoot the yardage for him and go drop it off. You go to your ball, he hits, he walks up, you're hitting, he's up to the cart ready to go again.
And I mean those.
Things are huge. The other thing is, you know, marking the scorecard. That's why hitting, you know, we don't ever mark the car until we get to the next hole. You know, the next hole, whoever is, whoever's gonna bee off last, will mark the scores. Everybody else hits. Then by the time he's done marking them, it's his turn to hit. So we do a lot of little things like that.
That's just a few of them.
I mean you could pick some more off of there that might be of interest to you.
Specifically.
But what we tried to do was get players and say what we asked people what was, what do you think your thing is that you do that makes you play faster?
And that came up with a lot of these. That's where we got a lot of them.
Wasn't just you know me, It was you know, gathering info from your people that play fast. So, hey, what do you do well? I don't do this, you know, I don't mark my score. What's the guy's putting the score down? Get off the green so the other guy can hit, you know, mark the score the next tea box.
I mean little things that eventually think and you know that's why walking, you know, you even play quicker because you can do your talking and telling your stories while you're walking down the fairway, as opposed to you know, the guys will a lot of times you'll see them on the T box I want to tell a story or whatever.
That it just slows.
Everything down right right.
And I've always noticed that when when you're in a cart, you really focused on hit the ball, drive the ball, hit the ball, drive the ball. And with a course like this that is so beautiful, I could I would love to come back and walk it because you just want to absorb every step.
And it's not like it's flat. I mean you don't have a lot of flat lies, a lot of movement, but no severe up and downhill zone. Right, it's kind of gradual. If you look at it and.
Did you do that in the design of the course, you you gave it all that. This this course to me was a phenomen I mean it was fair, it was tough, but it's a phenomenal test of the short game.
Yeah, if you have a good short game, you know you can play and be competitive here always, and it's going to expose your weakness this golf course. If you have a weakness, you won't be able to hide it too long.
It'll expose it.
And most players say that their short games get better here and when they leave here and play elsewhere, it's almost like shooting ducks and a barrel because you go they're almost like catchers midst the greens everywhere else here they're like inverted saucers. You know, you have that two or three foot area to land your ball.
If you go long. Of that, it goes long. If you go short, it could come back to you.
So that's why I said, the average player will pot the ball up the hill most.
Of the time and just take the bogie and go to the next fall.
We're part of a couple screens. Wow, And the greens are.
Large, Yeah, they're they're actually they're small by today's standards, but they average about fifty one hundred and chaine square feet, which by today's standards are small, but they're still big in their own right.
The other thing I thought was very interesting is that you're.
Your yardage markers on the course at the front ende are to the front edge, and then in the car it tells you you know how far green? Yeah, up to the pin from the front edge. Why that I've never seen that before. Well, if you play tour events.
People that play tour events, okay, you're always are getting the yardage at the front edge of the green, and you want to know the front edge of the green, you know, because the green's usually firm, so you know, okay,
there's the front depends on twenty. I want to land five yards under the green, so you add five to that front yard each and then you have the depth of the back of the green, because you know, if the pin is towards the back, you want to know how much green you have left behind that pin.
So that's the reason we did it like that.
We wanted our players to experience what they I call the pro experience, so our amateurs experience what the pros.
Play under all the time.
So you have the depth of the green, you have a pin sheet every day it gives how far the pin is on the green. And then you have a front yard each as well. So if you want to play a front yard each, you can. If you want to play a middle yard each, you know it.
It's for the guys who really can do pinpoint accuracy, hunt and where.
And even if you're bouncing your ball in you want to know. Okay, you know, when I was first playing, a couple of times, I used to play a lot of tournament golf with Bob Win, who's now the cease was I on both tours and Bob was a member here, and one time we're sitting on this five par and I'm like, God, I can't can't reach it.
He's what do you mean you can't reach it?
I said, Wow, it's too sixty eight or whatever that a pin, he says, But look at the front yardage. Front yards is only two thirty nine, he says. You can get the ball, scoot it up on the front, let it run in there. And then that started me thinking front yardages. And that's when I realized, Wow, these guys really think about that front yard each and if you watch them on TV, they're always say, well, it's one fifteen to the front, one twenty two to the pin.
You know that crest is one thirty one. You can spin it back off of there, you know what I mean.
So they have that and if you noticed our greens, there's a lot of movement in our greens. So like you know when you saw Tiger's shot go in on sixteen where the ball hesitated and it fell in, Well, we have a lot of that kind of action on our greens. You could play away from the hole and it'll come all the way back. So it's kind of the more you play it, the more you understand, you know, the option you have for it.
I got to ask you about the name of the course, the Palms. There's spectacular views everywhere, and I've played courses that have a lot of trees, but this course has is just lined with palm trees. Were those planted or were those? Are those natural? And they were here?
It's a combination.
Fred there was the far eastern end of the property was a date orchard, so we left those date palms there, and as we cut the fairways between those date palms, we then moved those date palms to other.
Areas of the course.
The middle area of the course was a farm they grew egg plant things like that, and then the far western part was ranch so and then the very back was all that mosquite where they go dove hunting. So I saved the as as much mosquite as I could transplanted to palm trees.
We ended up with.
Two thousand fully grown palms of forty to sixty feet. I don't know how much mosquites in that mosquite area. Then we added another three hundred indigenous trees of mosquites, California peppers, jack Aranda's things like that.
It's what I found fascinating is like, you know, I've played courses in the low hanging you got to get under the tree and things like that. But these palms they're just you know, they're just straight tall with a little bush up on top of it. It looks like but it's almost like you're hitting through a hair brush, you know. I mean, you've got rows and rows of them, and if you get caught behind or in the middle of.
This, it's not easy to get through.
And it's this course can be very intimidating, especially when you look at all the memories are and stuff. But you get into places like that and it's a real challenge to your head too. I mean, the metal game here is just as important as your short game.
It seems like, well, yeah, I mean, it's one of those places that once it's say you had some problems chipping even and all of a sudden, that'll like stay in your mind for a while, you know, and and then you know, once you three put a hole then
and that's like in your mind. Now you're a nervous wreck about it because you know you got so much up and down it goes extremely fast, and and you know it's the greens are usually about eleven, but you know, downhill can be fourteen, you know what I mean, and then uphill is probably ten or something. Right, So you got that you have a four foot change between uphill and downhill.
And you said every fifteen.
Feet, every fifteenth footer when they blue lined it, they said it was a double break.
And this is now.
This was Mark Sweeney of any Point Golf, who's recently on Golf Smarter.
Well, Mark was here. We had a great time. He did a clinic for the members, and he actually it was kind of funny because I wanted this to be like a poor man's Oakmont because I'm from Pittsburgh and it's my favorite course in the world, Oakmon. So he said to me, not knowing that, he said to me, these were the hardest greens I ever blue lined out of than.
Oakmont in Pittsburgh.
So it was kind of funny. So it kind of felt like a mission accomplished.
Well, congratulations, mission accomplished big time.
It's a it's a beautiful track.
And boy, if you ever get a chance, if you know somebody and you get a chance to get an invitation to come out and play, don't miss the opportunity.
Unity.
There's a lot of golf in the Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Rancho, Mirage, Laquinta area again with PGA West just around the corner with six golf courses, but this is a very very special place. Congratulations and thanks so much for today and for your time.
Well, thank you, Fred.
It's just a real pleasure to be with you, and I appreciate the opportunity.
Well, we go from an amazing golf course to playing on the golf course. And the thing that was so interesting about the Palms it's you got to have a short game, and you've got to.
Be able to work your short game.
Well, we want you to work on your short game too, and that's why we have the wedge guy, Terry Taylor, CEO of Score Golf here for our Score Golf Short Game Academy.
Hello Terry, Hi Fred, how are you.
I'm doing well. How has the buzz been after the PGA show.
Oh, we got a tiger by the tail. We have really.
Shaken up the whole short end of the set with this approach we're making with Score and we just finished some robotic testing on ironbron which was really pretty fascinating on quantifying what happens off of various golf clubs in the high loft area end of the set, and we found out we've got a distinct competitive advantage with the way we design these golf clubs, so kind of tease up that part of the of the of the listeners that are wondering about how do I score the golf course better?
We're going to have some good stuff for you.
Awesome well, and this person of the show, if you're new to what we're doing here, Terry wants to answer your questions about your short game because he's been playing his entire life, he's been designing clubs for longer than that, and he's got a phenomenal product now in the Score forty one sixty one scoring. And so if you send in your question, if you go to golfsmarter dot com and click on the score Zone Short Game Academy button,
you'll be able to submit a question. And if Terry answers your question on this podcast, you will receive a customized free score forty one sixty one wedge. It'll be customized to your game, to your set, to how you play the game. It's incredible how they do it. And the first question that we have actually we're gonna I
think we're gonna try to do two questions today. But Anthony Coletto of Mount Prospect, Illinois, Congratulations, We're gonna ask your question, and you are going to get a chance to start playing with a score forty one sixty one wedge of your choice. But I promise you once you start playing with it, you're gonna want to put the other four in your bag. So Anthony's question, Terry, is
I struggle with distance. He talks about other things about his friends making fun of him and losing bets, but he says, I struggle with distance and direction with anything less than a nine nine.
Well, Anthony, welcome to the club, because about two thirds of the guy on the tour have the same problem. Believe it or not, We've been doing a real deep analysis of PGA tour statistics and what we found is Anthony, and hopefully this will help you feel better about it. But then we're going to fix your issues. But the PGA Tour on approach shots outside of nine iron range that's one fifty and out are very very close to
each other. The difference for example, in eight and nine iron seven iron range for the best guy on tour to the number one seventy five guys only eight feet further from the hole on average. These guys are also good with the full swings, but like your problem that you're expressing. When they start getting down under one fifty and these guys are starting to manipulate nine irons and wedges, they start the differences I call it between the haves
and have nots begins to get very wide. And I think that there's several reasons for that, Anthony, And one of those is is that we've all been groomed into a modern power game. And I was just out on the driving range this afternoon watching a couple of our high school kids out there who can't break ninety, just seeing how hard they could hit five irons and drivers.
And I was kind of kiddling with them, and I'm off on a little tangent here, but there was a sophomore girl that was over there next to them, who's probably the best junior player in our town. And I said, you guys ought to be ashamed of yourselves, because that sixteen year old girl and this sixty one year old man can both beat you like a drum while y'all are heading at fifty yards by us.
Yea cold man, it is cold, but anyway.
So but the point I'm making, Anthony, is we've turned everything into this power game, and everybody's swinging everything so hard, and the manufacturers are cranking the iron lost down. Most of the new game improvement irons on the market or this year or another degree or too stronger than they were last year because everybody's so power crazy, and the high loft golf clubs do not respond well to a
hard golf swing. And the reason your distance and your direction are off is partly due to the fact that you've learned to hit these longer clubs so hard, and these high loft golf clubs don't respond well. So my first advice to you is go out to the range. If this is the part of your game. Never go to the driving range again with anything more than a
nine iron until you get this right. Practice this part of your game and learn how to hit a nice control swing with your short clubs you're nine in pitch, so that you can get that direction down and make a good consistent impact. And a couple of tips on short iron play. Golfers tend to crowd the golf ball too much. You still need to swing this golf club
around your bodies. And I'm assuming maybe that you hit everything else pretty acceptably, but you're struggling with this, but the golf club still has to go around your body. It's still a circular motion. It's somewhat horizontal, and golfers tend to pick the club straight up and go straight down, So work on getting your swing around your body. These clubs are also very short, and work on making sure
you keep the width in your golf swing. Make sure you get a nice extension from your left side, get an extension going away from the ball, get an extension going through the ball, so you flatten your swing arc out through the bottom of the golf swing. Those are two very basic fundamentals. The third one I'm going to add in there is when it's more important than these than any other club in your bag, is to really feel like you're pulling the club through the ball with
your left side. Let your right side be pretty passive and feel like you're pulling the ball through with your left side. Those are your swing tips. But what Fred didn't mention, and I'm looking at your question. Your last point was could it be equipment? And I'm going to tell you, yes, it very well could be your equipment.
And I don't know what you play, but probability is you're playing the cavvyback set of golf clubs that you're nine in your p club look like your six iron, and the six iron is designed with all the weight low in the club and a thin face to get that twenty eight to twenty nine degree golf club up in the air. When you get to your nine in your pitch, you've already got a lot of loft that club is going in the air. But the iron manufacturers continue to insist that the nine in the pitch should
look like a six iron. We've learned with Hybridge that the three in the four shouldn't look like a six iron anymore. It makes no sense that the nine in the pitch should look like a six iron. I'm going to ask you to do something, Anthony. Go to one of your friends who plays a blade. Go to one of your assistant pros who plays a blade. Put their nine in their pitch in your bag and play around or two even if the shaft doesn't fit, even if it's not the right specs, and watch what happens to
your distance and direction. I think you're going to see an improvement. So the equipment to be part of the issue. You're swinging too hard. Probably that's part of the issue. You're crowding the ball and swinging too upright could be a part of the issue. But I'm also going to share one other thing with you and everybody else listening. Wedge design that we have in this decade looks very similar to what we had sixty years ago.
And it's just a.
Phenomenal thing that that one club is not changed in what golfers of all strength profiles and all skilled profiles fight our ballooning trajectories and inconsistent distance. And we just finished some robotic testing of the top two selling wedges in the market and ours, and we found with conventional wedges that moving the point of impact up and down the face even a quarter or two and a half an inch, can result in a fifteen to twenty five foot distance loss.
It's not your fault, it's the golf club's fault.
Wow.
And this is a story we're telling out there. And I'm going to put a shameless plug in here, but our score forty one sixty one wedges and short terns were designed to bring trajectories down and improved distance control. What we found is we have improved this distance loss from thirty to thirty five feet to less than fifteen just by the design of the golf club head. And I'm going to relate that back over to the hybrid.
We designed cavity back long irons with the two and the three on the bottom of them for forty years and never found a way to make one that people could hit.
Yep, but lo and behold.
Ten years ago, somebody had the bright idea of squishing down a metalwood and making that eighteen to twenty to twenty four degree golf club looked like a little squished up metalwood. And now everybody can hit those low loft golf clubs up in the air.
And you're seeing more noise.
Design a low loft golf club.
Yeah, and you're seeing more and more of those on the tour too.
A lot of players to use the hybrid.
These hybrids are like cheating. They're so easy to hit. Likewise, when you get into the high loft golf clubs, that shouldn't look like a six iron meter and that shouldn't look like a wedge that's looked the same since nineteen fifties.
And something to think.
About, Anthony, and I don't know how far you try to hit a sandwich or a gap wedge. But Ben Hogan said the maximum distance for a sandwich was forty yards, and he played a sandwich that's almost identical in weight distribution to anything that's in the wedge racking the stores today. And Hogan wouldn't hit it over forty yards. You have no buiness trying to hit it over forty yards either.
Yeah, And then you hear guys like, oh, this is a part three and you're watching the tour on TV. This is a part three. It's one hundred and eighty two yards, and he's got a pitching wedge in his hand.
It's like what And these guys all go at it so hard, And like I said, it would surprise you
if you want to entertain yourself on a snowy. You live in Illinois, so you're not in golf whether yet, Anthony, go into the PGA tour dot com website, go to statistics and look at that proximity to the hole on approach shots and look how wide the difference gets from one tour player to another inside ninine range one twenty five to one fifty five versus how tight these guys are in proximity the whole between one fifty and two fifty do.
You mind if the second question really leads into what you were just discussing. John Pappas of Santa Rosa, California, says that he's a twelve handicap and he's trying to set some realistic goals for his pitching, chipping and sand shots. He says, so, how close on average should I be hitting my pitching, chipping and sand shots from thirty yards?
And in now, I don't know how to answer a question how close on average you want to get when you're at thirty yards and then you want to get everything inside of tap in range?
I guess, well, but that's not a realist. You have to be a realist with your expectation.
And if you look at let's look at the tour stats and say that that, let's go where the tour guys are from fifty to seventy five yards. These are the best guys in the world. And this is kind of related. I'm gonna throw this in there, but if what's really interesting is to look at how many shots on average these guys had from fifty to seventy five yards, and the average guy on tour for all of twenty twelve had less than twenty shots from fifty to seventy
five yards. The marrawl of that story is these guys don't lay up to that range because it's a really hard range. They're smarter than that. But when you're around the greens, here's the rule of thumb that I would say. If you're inside thirty yards, and that goes all the way from the fringe out to thirty yards, those shots are going to be divided into two categories. One is very difficult. You got a flop shot over a bunker to a close cut pen. Two pretty routine. You've got
a twenty yard pitch shot. Greens wide open. It's not overly undulating. If you play to a fifteen handicaper higher, I think that your goal should be fifteen to twenty feet on average. That may sound wide to you, but basically that's a range that you never three put from and you'll make a handful of them. Now, the closer you get, the closer. But it is not realistic to expect tap ends from around the greens unless you do this for a living. I mean, watch the guys on tour.
They chipped the tap in range. They chipped a five and six feet a lot, so tap in range is not realistic. Wait, realistic is the lower your handicap, the fewer bogies and more pars you should make. Holding one out is a stroke of luck unless you're a tour player and practice this relentlessly.
And I tell people all the time.
If you're an amateur golfer, you should never expect a hole of shot from off the green. Those are just big old surprises. But you should always have the expectation. If you're a ten or twelve or below, you should have the expectation of giving yourself a decent par put, decent tap in something under fifteen feet. If you're fifteen and above, your goal should be do not chunk it,
do not play it. Hit a solid chip twelve to fifteen feet, you save your bogie and you go on down the road and you'll get a few of them, and you'll make a few of those eight or ten footers. But one of the biggest and as I mentioned early, we did a research of our owners and we ask, on average, how far do you think you leave the ball from the hole.
At one hundred yards, the.
Average that our owners said would have made every one of them the best player on the PGA Tour. So they don't average that. They're good ones average that. But when the best guy on tour from fifty to seventy five yards, if you can get it inside ten feet, you are one of the five best players on tour. Okay, So be realistic in your expectations. If you've missed the green, this is now a bogie hole. It's a bogie hole. Save a bogie go to the next hole.
Right.
Actually, you know what I would I would kind of inject here is that if you have a lot of shots from thirty yards and end, you may be take it. You may want to take a look at your approach shot and and kind of club up a little bit more because you're not reaching it and you're picking the wrong club to for your approach.
I think that's excellent advice.
And what we have a little book that's available for download on our website called the Score Method, and the score Method is about being bringing precision to your short to your approach shots, particularly to short range pro shots. And every golfer is kind of off the subject, maybe, but every golfer has three distances with every club and that's how far they hit it, how far they wish
they hit it and how far they think they hit it. Unfortunately, golfers play the game based on how far they think they hit it or they wish they hit it, and that's why golfers continually come up short. And I would tell you, if you want to improve your scoring, go play around the golf and take one more club for every approach shot you have, and just put a nice smooth wing on it, and you will probably shoot the best round.
Of your life. Yeah.
Yeah, And the other thing.
And I see this so often, and if you're a golf smarter listener, then you've got to get this concept. But especially like on a par five, just because you're in the middle of the fairway, thank goodness, off the tee, that doesn't mean if you've got two hundred and fifty yards to go to the green, that you need to pull out your three wood and hit it two hundred and ten yards, because then you're in a very difficult position when you're in that thirty to forty yard I mean,
I hate those kind of shots. I would much rather have a shot at one hundred and ten yards than at thirty yards because I'm so much more confident with my score forty one sixty one forty two degree from one hundred and ten yards that I feel I can get it, you know, like in one putt range with that club. So you know, golf smarter folks don't hit it as hard as you can hit it to where you feel you have the best shot of getting close to the pin.
And again back to the tour statistic, I'm looking at twenty twelve statistics, and the best ten or fifteen or twenty or thirty players on tour do not hit it fifty to seventy five yards from the hole because they know that's a very difficult shot. And I would advise every listener, whether you're a two handicap or whether you're a twenty.
Two is to go out.
To the range and groove a nice, comfortable, full swim pitching your gap web shot. It's got enough loft to get the ball nice in every morning, give you spin.
It's doesn to have so much loft that you're liable to slide it under the ball and create you a money shot, whether it's ninety yards or one hundred and five yards or eighty five yards, whatever that number is, and groove you a money shot that you know you can count on and when you're playing a far five, you shoot the laser or look at the yards markers, and you lay up as close to that money range as you can. You will begin to score par fives dramatically better.
Well, thank you for taking that second question. This is a long show today, but we've got such great content who cares. Thank you Terry for the advice, and congratulations to both John Pappus and Anthony Coteletto. Terry, thanks again for these phenomenal answers.
Well, it's always fun and look forward to the next show.