Welcome to Play Smart, a regular GOLF.com game-improvement column that will help you play smarter, better golf.
Bryson DeChambeau made some history Sunday.
At LIV Golf Greenbrier — the 10th event on the 2023 schedule — the former U.S. Open champ nabbed his first win on the upstart tour, and in head-turning fashion.
In the final round of the 54-hole event, DeChambeau fired the lowest score in LIV history — a 13-birdie 58 at The Greenbrier.
A round of this caliber has been in the works for quite some time. Although DeChambeau had largely dropped out of the news cycle since defecting to LIV, his game has actually been in solid form for much of this summer. According to Data Golf, the 29-year-old has been the eighth-best American in strokes gained over the past three months.
“It’s beyond words,” DeChambeau said. “I’ve been working so hard for a long time, and I knew something special was going to come at some point; I just didn’t know when.”
Shooting low scores is nothing new for DeChambeau. Just two years ago, he shot a scorching 12-under 60 at the BMW Championship, narrowly missing out on his first-career sub-60 round as a professional.
“Really proud of the way I handled myself,” he said at the time. “It was great to feel some pressure.”
DeChambeau’s secret to going low
Pressure is a difficult thing to manufacture during your practice, but it’s paramount if you want to be successful under the gun. Without getting comfortable with the stresses that come with shooting low scores, you’ll never be able to perform at your best in competition.
DeChambeau had to get creative in his junior career to simulate this pressure. And the method he found that worked best was to play rounds from the forward tees.
5 reasons why you should play from the forward tees (you’ll thank us later)
“For any junior golfers out there, it’s probably the best thing you can do when trying to learn how to score,” DeChambeau said. “You go up to the red tees and try and shoot sub-60 rounds, for a good aspiring junior golfer that’s trying to be a professional golfer.”
By playing from the forward tees — where birdies and eagles are easier to attain — DeChambeau got comfortable getting deep into red numbers.
“If you can do that and you consistently are able to do that every single round you play, get in that comfortable mind of, ‘Okay, I’m 10, 11, 12 under, let’s keep going, pedal to the metal’ — that gets you in a great mindset,” DeChambeau said.
By teeing it forward, DeChambeau got comfortable with being double digits under par. And when the time came to shoot those kinds of scores from the back tees, he was in familiar territory.
“That tremendously helped today,” he said. “Being able to say, ‘Okay, I’m 10 under; well, I can’t stop. I’ve got to keep going.'”
If you want to shoot lower scores (whatever that term means to you, be it in the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s), try taking a page out of DeChambeau’s book and tee it forward. If you can get used to shooting low scores from the forward tees, it’ll be that much easier to post a low number when you move back a box or two.