A rolling stone gathers no moss, right?
That has long been a mantra of mine and with the wintery December weather slowing golf lessons down. I’ve been trying to help with this by publishing daily “Advent Golf Tips” on my “On the Mark” PGA TOUR podcast, which I’d love for you to check out.
It has been fun to rack my brain for quick, helpful nuggets, organize my thoughts and then verbalize them in a way that our listeners can comprehend the tips and parlay them into improved golf scores.
This daily endeavor has been enlightening in a way as my research of all of my lesson notes and experiences have uncovered insights that have long been “forgotten”.
In itself, that is a lesson and it reminds me of a quote by Bobby Jones: “One reason golf is such an exasperating game is that a thing we learned is so easily forgotten, and we find ourselves struggling year after year with faults we had discovered and corrected time and again.”
All too often, we learn something simple, that has a tremendous impact on our game, and then that thing gets forgotten and replaced by the newest shiny thing. It is a golfing roundabout that everybody, at every level of the game, spends too much time on, and it really shouldn’t be the case.
Anyhow, more about that at another time. How about I share some of my Advent “gifts” for those of you that haven’t caught the podcasts?
1. Focus on the front dimple
This was a tip I learned from Gary Player, and it is guaranteed to shore up contact off adverse lies like hardpans, fairway bunkers, or a tight lies in the fairway.
It is as simple as training your field of vision on a dimple on the front side (target side) of the golf ball and keeping it there throughout the backswing and downswing.
This move will help to land the club a little later in the swing, essentially promoting ball-first contact. The reason being that with your eyes fixed on the front of the ball, your pivot is likely to be more centralized and that knocks on to a base of the swing arc that tends more toward the front side of your stance. It sounds trite, but try it. To this day I still use it out of fairway bunkers.
2. Change shot shape with your grip pressure
This used to be a secret I shared with very few of my lessons. It’s not so secret anymore now, but the world needs to know it, because it is an unreal way to eliminate one side of the target.
Basically, you can slow, or accelerate, the toe of the golf club through impact by just accentuating, or reducing, the pressure in your fingers on the handle of the club. Slowing the toe will keep the face in a more “open” attitude and accelerating the toe will “close” the face more through impact.
Right-handers (Lefties do the opposite), to eliminate the left-side of the target, grip more tightly with the last three fingers on your Left Hand, i.e., the Pinkie, the Ring Finger and the Middle finger. Then soften the pressure in the two middle fingers on your Right Hand, those being the Middle Finger and the Ring Finger. Retain those pressure relationships from address through the finish of your swing and you will sense that the face is slower to close through impact. Fiddle with the pressure amounts too – if you really want to eliminate the left side, grip super tightly with those last three fingers.
Conversely, to make it harder for the ball to go to the right, grip tightly with your Right Hand and lightly with your Left Hand.
I know it sounds too good to be true, but try it… indeed, I have been hit up on Social Media by a bunch of folks who heard this tip and have been shocked (positively) at the results.
Happy Advent Season!