There may not be a better shot-shaper in golf than Bubba Watson.
GOLF.com
Bubba Watson had no choice but to agree with me. I was offering him a compliment — declaring him perhaps the best player in the world at working the ball to extravagant measures — and he paused for one second to take it in.
“Do you agree with that?” I asked.
“…yessss,” he said.
And it’s true, isn’t it? It would feel wrong to say any other pro has established a reputation for curving the golf ball as much as Watson has over his career. The most iconic moment of your career will do that.
The whole idea for complimenting Watson was to introduce our assignment for the day: can we use the workability intel of one of the game’s most imaginative players to help little ol’ ME work the ball as much as I could, too? Could a talented Pro teach this Joe how to do what he does best?
The short answer? Yes.
The long answer? You can read below and check out our video of the action.
My first question for Watson was simple: where do you start?
Before we had turned the cameras on, he had already explained how the longer the club, the more curve you can create. At first, this felt counter-intuitive. The trajectory of a shorter club — like pitching wedge — means more time in the air and theoretically more time to curve, right? Watson agreed with that concept, but said the longer the club, the more speed you can enact on it and the more spin you can create.
So the first answer to the question “where do you start” is another question: How much curve do you need? After that, Watson asked me to focus less on my hands and more about my feet. How your feet are positioned impacts your body’s ability to rotate, freeing you to exaggerate whichever direction you are hoping to start the ball. A closed stance — with your lead foot pushed a little forward and your rear foot pulled slightly back — allows you to play more of a draw, and inhibits a fade. The inverse — an open stance — allows your body to rotate through contact to create more of a cut.
Before diving deep into his process, Watson wanted me to first prove I could work the ball in any direction, period. So we got my feet aligned properly, and then he had me crank on the clubhead slightly, turning it a couple degrees left in order to hit a big, roping hook. In Bubba Talk, this is called hooding the club, turning the face downward slightly. (It should be obvious, but in case it isn’t: without manipulating the clubface at impact, the work of curving the ball otherwise falls entirely on swing path. Think of the clubface as the curving vehicle and the swing path as its fuel.)
My first swing? A topped duff 30 yards forward.
My second swing? A hard hooking shot that started straight and immediately exited left. A success! Yes, but only a minor one because we wanted to see the ball start right before turning back left. I was still swinging across that closed stance rather than along it, limiting the distance and height of my strikes.
With the ball just inside of my lead foot, I was doing a bit too much reaching for the ball. It felt awkward to try and turn my hands over with a 7-iron at a ball position more aligned with my driver swing. Bubba stepped in and moved the ball back to the center of my swing just to make sure I was more comfortable attacking the ball with a down-and-outward swing. And even though Watson admitted that placing the ball further back in my stance should lead to lower trajectory, the angle of the club did plenty of work, launching the ball high and drawing.
Now, there’s a reason we’re doing this on a driving range. Because for Watson, hitting a draw is easy. He knows where the center of the clubface is at all times. He can implement changes to his game at any time. For me, I tell him, to swing along my feet on that outward path makes me feel like I’m going to introduce the hosel to the ball and create a shank.
“That is the beauty between amateur golf and pro golf,” he chides, unfortunately very correct.
But that’s step 3, or step 4, depending on who’s counting. We’d manipulated my stance, we’d figured out a comfortable ball placement and we got me turning the clubhead in the impact zone. The major missing piece was altering my swing path.
Swing path is often the hardest part of this equation for amateurs to understand. An exaggerated swing path might just be a few inches of hand position from the norm, and for Watson, that comes down to a certain feel. When he visits PING Headquarters in Scottsdale, “they’re checking the numbers, and I’m looking at visual,” he told me. He prefers to see trees, flags or bunkers as elements that he can work off on the course rather than what a spin rate would tell you via a Trackman.
As we flipped the setup on everything, hoping to produce a major cut/slice, he offered some simple advice to dial in the proper swing path: the first few inches of your takeaway should just be the opposite movement of how you intend to come down and strike the ball. In other words, if you intend to hit a cut, and cut across the ball through the impact zone — for righties, creating a left-to-right spin — start by taking the club away to the right of the ball during your backswing.
Ultimately, you’re just paving a backward path you will ultimately try to mimic on the way down when you turn back to the ball. The final question of the day, though, is … how much?
Watson watched intently as I hit soft cuts high in the air. I had created a cut-leaning path, but not a slice-leaning one. “You’re trying to hit my club out here,” he said, placing the head of his club a few inches back in my takeaway and at least three inches in his direction. That checkpoint was uncomfortably far from my body, I told him, and made me think of Jim Furyk’s loopy takeaway. But as is often the case in golf instruction, feel is not real. Movements are always going to feel much bigger than they are in reality.
And that’s mostly the point, Bubba said. You want to over-cook a cut into a slice? You have to overemphasize the path. As you can see in the video, I had just two words for my teacher when I finally sent one, high in the air and slicing with 64 feet of curve:
“Wow, Bubba.”
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Sean Zak is a senior writer and author of Searching in St. Andrews, which followed his travels in Scotland during the most pivotal summer in the game’s history.
