Jack Nicklaus breaks down his keys to becoming a dominant wind player

Wind golf is a game of “usuallys.” It doesn’t matter how far you usually hit the ball, what your ball flight usually looks like, or what you usually score, it matters what you actually do. But of course, what you actually do doesn’t stop any of the “usuallys” from becoming your favorite talking point on the course.

In this week’s Flashback Jack, Nicklaus shares a different kind of “usually”—how to get yourself back to the game you usually have, even when you’re dealing with blustering winds.

“Playing into the wind is a very, very difficult situation. The natural tendency is to hit them all harder.” But, Nicklaus says, “the harder you hit it, the more spin you put on it. The more spin you put on it the more the wind is going to affect the ball.”

As the Golden Bear points out, your natural tendency to beat the gusts can actually make it harder to play through the wind. Rather, Nicklaus feels you should focus on using the clubs you have differently, and that doesn’t necessarily mean clubbing up.

“I’m sitting here at 180 yards away from the hole. Most people will try to take a 5-iron, quite often I’ll go down to a 3-iron or even a 2-iron,” he says. “Choke it down to make it maybe a 7-iron length with a 3-iron loft, then I’m going to get about a 5-iron distance.”

By choking down, you’re not just improving the trajectory of the shot you’re hitting, you’re also increasing the likelihood of consistent contact. Your swings, beyond having a higher percentage chance of knifing through the wind, should move through the air with significantly less spin. Similar to a knuckleball pitcher, you’ll have to adjust how you approach playing certain shots for the lack of spin, but the result should be a golf game that’s much more dependable in different conditions.

“I’m just going to take a normal swing, a normal golf shot, to move the ball through the wind without spin. If you don’t have any spin the ball will just go through the wind, hit with very little force on it, and just run. It’s a very useful shot when you’re playing in windy conditions.”

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