The post Plug marks in the fairway? Here’s how (and when) to repair them appeared first on Golf.

The post Plug marks in the fairway? Here’s how (and when) to repair them appeared first on Golf.

There was no joy in Mudville. Mighty Casey was bummed out.

As in Paul Casey, whose drive on the 16th hole during Monday’s final round of the Players Championship split the fairway, only to draw an awful lie.

TPC Sawgrass wasn’t Mudville at this juncture; high winds had helped dry it out. But the course was soft in places, and Casey’s shot settled in a plug mark created by another player’s drive.

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Talk about unlucky.

And unlikely.

A ball landing in a divot is not uncommon.

But nestling in a plug mark? That almost never happens.

And it never should.

If your ball leaves a crater in the fairway, etiquette calls upon you to fix it.

Doing so is no more labor-intensive than repairing a pitch mark on the green.

In fact, it’s even easier, says David Phipps, a former longtime superintendent who now serves as Northwest regional representative for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America.

You can do the job with a tee or a divot-repair device.

“But you can also simply step on that plug mark gently and flatten it out with your foot,” Phipps says.

Instruction

Just this word of warning: If your ball is lying directly behind the pitch mark, or anywhere near it, for that matter, it’s best to repair the mark until after you’ve struck your next shot. If you repair it prior to hitting, and you could be violating the Rules of Golf, which forbid players from improving conditions affecting the stroke, including lie of the ball, intended stance, swing or line of play. Did you gain an advantage? This is a judgment call.

The penalty is loss of hole in match play, and two strokes in stroke play.

That’s just FYI, relevant only in tournament golf and serious matches.

In a casual round, no one in your group is likely going to care when you repair a pitch mark in the fairway.

Because they care so much about etiquette, they’ll just be impressed that you repaired at all.

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The post ‘I have never seen that’: Players contender gets impossibly bad break in big moment appeared first on Golf.

The post ‘I have never seen that’: Players contender gets impossibly bad break in big moment appeared first on Golf.

The Players Championship has been strange all week long, and on Monday, it got even weirder.

Playing alongside leader Cameron Smith, Paul Casey stepped up to his tee shot on the par-5 16th with a window of opportunity. Yes, the Englishman found himself two shots off Smith’s pace, but he’d just watched as the Aussie snap hooked his drive into trouble. If Casey could make a few good swings coming down the stretch, the biggest victory of his career was within reach. But first, he’d need to put his drive in the fairway.

Casey made the kind of swing under pressure that most can only dream of. His ball rocketed off the face, screaming through the thick Florida air on a collision course with the center of the fairway. From there, he’d have a great chance to reach the green in two.

As Casey’s Pro V1 rolled down the fairway, it dodged divots and stray sod, and the commentators remarked what a great position he was in.

“That’s exactly what he was looking for,” David Feherty said.

Then, calamity struck.

With the ball slowing to a stop, it banked to the right at just the last moment — and it finished embedded in another player’s pitch mark.

“Oh you’re not serious,” Feherty said. “I have never seen that.”

It was the kind of break that gives pro golfer’s nightmares. In contention, coming down the stretch, and your ball finds trouble in the unlikeliest of places. Horrifying.

“That is a ball mark,” Feherty said. “And if that ball is lying in its own impression, then yes, you’d get relief, but that might be hard to make that argument.”

As Feherty alluded to, the Rules of Golf do provide relief for an embedded ball. However, that is only if your ball embeds in its own pitch mark. “Your ball is embedded only if it is in its own pitch-mark made as a result of your previous stroke,” states Rule 16.3a. Since Casey’s ball embedded in another player’s pitch mark, he had to play it as it lies.

Casey was in disbelief when he reached his ball. After making one of the best under-pressure swings of his career, he was rewarded with one of the worst breaks imaginable. All he could do was shake his head.

With no hope of generating clean enough contact to chase the ball onto the green, Casey instead opted to lay up. The golf gods showed no mercy on his approach. His ball pitched on the green with far too much spin, zipped off the front and ended with a drain in between his ball and the hole. From there, he could only manage par.

Sometimes, it’s just not your day.

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The post This tiny adjustment (literally) is paying big dividends for Paul Casey at Players Championship appeared first on Golf.

The post This tiny adjustment (literally) is paying big dividends for Paul Casey at Players Championship appeared first on Golf.

It’s the little things in golf that sometimes make the biggest differences.

Literally, in the case of Paul Casey, who through three rounds at this Players Championship, is just one off the lead, well positioned to secure the biggest title of his career.   

Casey’s fine play at TPC Sawgrass has been powered, in part, by his putter, which is not a club that been kind to him of late. In the 2021-22 season, Casey ranks 160th in Strokes Gained: Putting, losing an average of -.225 strokes to the field on the greens. There’s no obvious bugaboo: from nearly every distance, Casey’s putting stats are rough.

Instruction

This week, though, has been a different story (perhaps you caught Casey’s 34-foot birdie bomb on the 17th hole Monday morning). Through 54 holes, he has picked up a whopping 3.402 strokes against the field with his flatstick. He has the same stroke and the same putter — a Scotty Cameron 009M prototype — but he did make one tiny adjustment: adding a dot to the top of his blade.  

“It’s alignment,” Casey said of his putting woes. “I put the dot on top purely to get the ball position. I’ve been lining up with the ball on the toe. Just been videoing it and seeing that the ball position has been off the toe, so just to get the strike better.

“Nothing else has changed, but it feels like I’m swinging the putter a little bit better, keeping the head down better. That’s it.”

Of course, never does putting get tested like it does down the stretch on Sunday — well, Monday — afternoon. Casey, who has played as steadily as any player this week (70-69-69), said his general approach to this devilish course will not change in the final round.   

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“The greens are very receptive so you can certainly be aggressive with those approach shots if you’ve got a right number, but you’ll get bitten if you’re not careful,” he said after completing his third round. “My game plan after making triple on Thursday was actually just play sensible golf and get it in — honestly if that happens, you can’t be overly aggressive because you’ll almost dig yourself a deeper hole.

“Just a minute ago I still hit 3-wood off 18, but it only leaves a 7-iron for me. I don’t feel the need to force the driver maybe two clubs less, and I don’t feel like it’s going to change this afternoon. You pick your battles.”

Just as you do your putting lines.

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The post European Ryder Cup team lets fate decide their practice-round partners appeared first on Golf.

The post European Ryder Cup team lets fate decide their practice-round partners appeared first on Golf.

HAVEN, Wis. — When Paul Casey, Lee Westwood, Rory McIlroy and Ian Poulter convened on the 1st tee of the Straits course Wednesday, they prefaced their practice round at this 43rd Ryder Cup with all the casualness of a Saturday-morning match at the club: by tossing balls in the air to determine their playing partners.

“I think we’ve confused a few people on the first tee,” Casey said of the fans peering down from the arena-style grandstand. “Nobody knows what’s going on on the outside, which is part of the fun that we have.”

When the balls came to rest, it was determined that Westwood and Casey would square off against McIlroy and Poulter.

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Randomly selecting playing partners in a practice round might not sound like a big deal, but it is noteworthy at a Ryder Cup, where seemingly every last decision is weighed by a team of captains, statistical whizzes and assorted other experts, advisors and focus groups. That the Europeans were willing to let fate decide their practice-round teammates tells you something about their comfort level with one another and the less rigid approach they take to this week compared to their American counterparts.

That’s not to say the Europeans don’t lean heavily on analytics, because they do, but as Casey said, “It’s like why overthink it on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday?”

Why, indeed — leave the overthinking for Friday, Saturday and Sunday!

Conditions were blustery Wednesday, with gusts of up to 20 mph blowing off Lake Michigan, so the Europeans decided to play alternate-shot. “I struggled in the wind a little bit, and so foursomes was just the thing to do,” Casey said. “Plus, just being a long day, it sped things up a little bit.”

Casey didn’t say who won the match but it didn’t lack for fireworks. “We explored the property greatly,” Casey said. “Lots of birdies. Poulter and Rory throwing in eagles, as well. Just trying stuff out.”

Poulter — shocker — was the star, playing the front side in three under.

Casey stressed that his group’s intent with the first-tee ball-tossing was not to protect any state secrets. Quite the opposite.

“It’s not trying to throw smokescreens or throw a dummy or a fake-out there. Not at all,” he said. “I know my pairings, possible pairings. It’s up to Paddy to what he decides to do. [The pairings] are not in the envelope or however it works yet, but I’ll still be throwing a ball up on the first tee later today.”

He won’t be the only one.

“I still don’t know,” Jon Rahm, the Spaniard, told the media Thursday when asked who he’ll be playing with when the matches start in earnest. “You tell me. I think you guys think we know a lot more than you guys know. I have an idea of what players I might be playing with. Didn’t you guys see us throwing balls on the tee yesterday? Well, there you go. That’s how we do things, leave it up to chance.”

The formula has been working.

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The post Why Paul Casey ‘banned’ himself from a driving range after his first round appeared first on Golf.

The post Why Paul Casey ‘banned’ himself from a driving range after his first round appeared first on Golf.

So you’ve had a bad day on the golf course. Don’t worry, we get it. But you’re determined to put it right, so what do you do next?

You head to the range and start hitting ball after ball after ball after ball. The secret is in the dirt, after all, so what better time to dig it out than now.

But as much as all that makes sense, you could be doing more harm than good. At least in Paul Casey’s mind.

Casey finished day one at the 2021 Masters at one over, which on a difficult scoring day at Augusta, was a round many players would’ve been pleased with. But Casey couldn’t help but feel disappointed.

“I felt like I left a few out there,” he said. “It was up and then it was down.  It was a rubbish roller coaster.  You wouldn’t pay for it.”

Casey’s biggest issues came off the tee — “The driver was leaking right all day,” he said — and he wanted to head to the range to put it right. But at his caddie’s behest, he didn’t.

Why?

“The wind is going to be off the left and I’ll only stand there and probably try to hit hooks and it will just get worse and worse,” Casey says.

It’s a throwaway comment but nevertheless an interesting one, because it strikes me as a detail pros think a lot about that amateurs hardly think about it all. But it makes sense.

Think about it: If Casey is hitting the ball slightly too much from left-to-right, and he goes to the range where the wind is moving from left-to-right, it’s going to make that small problem look worse than it actually is. But because he’s intent on trying to solve the problem, he’s going to try to hit big draws so it looks like he’s hitting the ball straight. In reality the wind is shielding the fact that he’s over-correcting, and if he spends an hour or two practicing nothing but “hooks,” as he says, he’ll probably start missing the ball to the left by the time he hits the course the next day.

All of which is to say, it’s important to realize when practicing may be doing more harm than good. As it relates to your own game, the key is understanding the underlying cause of your misses and practice counteracting those instead. In short, the goal is to practice smart.

If you’re missing too much to the right, like Casey was at the Masters on Thursday, there’s a good chance you’re falling into one of the various traps that our partners at GOLFTEC have outlined here. No number of golf balls you hit will help you solve that if you don’t know where you’re going wrong in the first place. All you’ll be doing is ingraining bad habits, or if you’re lucky, overcorrect.

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That’s why my humble advice would be to follow Casey’s do the opposite: To know when to step away, book a lesson and make sure you’re practicing the right things. Our partners at GOFLTEC are offering a deal for first-timers, which you can check out right here. But above all else, be careful about the various ways you may be engraining bad habits, and avoid them at all costs.

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The post Paul Casey’s numbers with a persimmon driver are mind-blowingly good appeared first on Golf.

The post Paul Casey’s numbers with a persimmon driver are mind-blowingly good appeared first on Golf.

The USGA and R&A’s latest Distance Insights Report has led many to wonder what an equipment rollback would look like in the professional ranks.

Do you reduce the spring-like effect of the face to curb distance? Decrease the overall size of the head? Cap shaft length? Make adjustments to the composition of the modern-day golf ball?

All of the above have been bandied about in the last month. For the moment, technology (and shaft length) isn’t changing — but that doesn’t mean we can’t ponder a Tour-level gear rollback.

One idea that was proposed by GOLF.com Senior Equipment Editor Andrew Tursky is a yearly tournament where players are required to play with persimmon woods.

At roughly 190cc, a persimmon driver is 270cc’s smaller than a modern-day driver. Reducing the size of the head should place a premium on accuracy and reduce distance numbers across the board. It would no doubt make for an interesting tournament.

Would the premium on accuracy also come with reduced distance numbers? One would think so, but after watching Paul Casey pummel a modern golf ball with a custom persimmon driver made by former Tour pro Todd Demsey, the numbers wouldn’t look all that different on shots hit out the middle. Seriously.

Working with the driver on the TPC Sawgrass range ahead of the Players Championship, Casey managed to carry all three shots over 293 yards, with the last ball crossing the 300-yard carry threshold.

To put those numbers into perspective, Casey is averaging 303.4 yards this season — and that number includes rollout. The roughly 2000 RPMs of spin (while on the low side) and 12.9-degree launch would also work for most tour players.

In other words, there’s not much Casey would need to do to throw this club in the bag right now. There’s a zero percent chance it makes the cut this week, but it’s still fun to see Casey take the old-school driver for a spin.

Want to overhaul your own bag for 2021? Visit the expert fitters at our sister company, True Spec Golf. For more on the latest gear news, check out our latest Fully Equipped podcast below.

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The post In abrupt about-face, Paul Casey commits to Saudi International appeared first on Golf.

The post In abrupt about-face, Paul Casey commits to Saudi International appeared first on Golf.

The 2021 Saudi International field will showcase quite a few big names: Masters champion Dustin Johnson, winner of the inaugural staging in 2019 and runner-up this year, will be there. So will U.S. Open champ Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Ian Poulter, Justin Rose, Sergio Garcia, Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton, Henrik Stenson, and Patrick Reed, to name a few. In short, the February tournament, which will be played the same week at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, looks like it will be a veritable who’s who of the world’s top players.

And next year, there will be one more notable Top 25 player among them: Englishman Paul Casey, who was vocal about his reasons for not playing when the tournament was first announced.

“There are a lot of places in the world that I have played and continue to go, which you could question … some human rights violations that governments have committed,” Casey, a UNICEF ambassador, said last year. “I thought I’d sit this one out.”

Casey, who re-joined the European Tour in 2018 in a bid to make the Ryder Cup team, apparently had a drastic change of heart.

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“This is not a decision I’ve taken lightly. I wasn’t comfortable going in the past, but I have always been open minded and willing to learn,” Casey said in a statement reported by Golf Channel. “I believe sport has the power to affect change. I’ve listened to the Saudi’s commitment to this and their vision for the future. It is always better to include rather than exclude when eliciting change, thus I hope my participation will make a difference and I am looking forward to seeing these changes in person.”

The Saudi International is a part of the European Tour’s roster of tournaments, and in 2020 was the final leg of a three-week Middle Eastern swing that included stops Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Its spot on the schedule has been controversial from the outset. The first edition of the event was staged just months after the October killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and journalist who had spoken out against Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Washington Post columns. Both Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy reportedly turned down millions in appearance fees by opting not to play.

Whether Casey’s change of heart has an effect on other player decisions like Woods’ and McIlroy’s remains to be seen, but with a spot on the 2021 Ryder Cup team still up for grabs, Casey could certainly use a boost — he’s currently No. 47 on the European team’s points ranking.

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The post Why is Augusta National playing so easy? Paul Casey has a theory — and it’s not just the rain appeared first on Golf.

The post Why is Augusta National playing so easy? Paul Casey has a theory — and it’s not just the rain appeared first on Golf.

Augusta National was extremely gettable during the opening round on Thursday. Overnight showers drenched the course and an early three-hour delay only made conditions softer. Coming into the event, players knew that the course would play differently than it normally does in April, but it’d be hard to believe they expected it to be this different.

Early in the day, balls plugged in their pitch marks on the greens. As the day progressed, balls were spinning like they do at a mid-summer Tour event, not a major championship. Although there was a mud ball or two, these soft conditions allowed players to fire at flagsticks without fear. Hardly the Augusta National we’re accustomed to seeing.

Paul Casey set the early lead with a seven-under 65 — a full 16 strokes better than his opening-round 81 last April. He (obviously) played much better this time around, but the conditions had a bit to do with it as well.

While many golfers will not finish their rounds this evening, there are already 12 players that have posted in the 60s during Round 1. For some perspective, the most rounds in the 60s during any Masters round is 20. We could well see that number surpassed as players finish their rounds tomorrow.

And while it’s easy to point to the rain-softened course as the sole reason for lower scores, Casey had another explanation — lingering Bermuda grass.

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“It’s not just the softness of the greens,” he said. “There’s a little bit of Bermuda still in there.  So, the Bermuda has a twofold effect.  One, the greens are very receptive coming in …  And obviously the putts are not as quick as well.”

Casey pointed to his 6-iron approach into a left hole location on the par-5 2nd. Today, he took dead aim at the flagstick and stopped the ball on the green for an eagle look. In April, that ball would likely bound over the green and leave him with a dicey pitch from the patrons.

“It’s not just the rain. It’s the Bermuda … I haven’t quite figured it out yet,” Casey continued. “Do we have to read a bit more grain than normal? It’s just different. Just a different challenge.”

He also mused that for players who are here for the first time — such as Jason Kokrak — they will be in for a rude awakening for how much different the course plays in April. In a year when nothing has been normal, it’s only fitting that Augusta National breaks the standard norms as well.

“It’s still very much the Masters and Augusta National,” Casey said. “But just a little different.”

Such is life in 2020.

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The post Tour veterans thought Collin Morikawa was ‘the one’ even before he won the PGA appeared first on Golf.

The post Tour veterans thought Collin Morikawa was ‘the one’ even before he won the PGA appeared first on Golf.

If anyone knows how to properly contextualize Collin Morikawa’s first major championship victory at only 23 years old, it’s Paul Casey. More than 20 years into his professional career, Casey has a top-10 finish in every major, and no wins.

On Sunday, the 43-year-old watched hopelessly as his stellar final-round 66 was leaderboard leap-frogged by a 64 from a player two decades his junior. When the dust settled, Casey finished tied for second at 11 under, two strokes back of Morikawa.

The script practically wrote itself: another year, and another deserving effort that fell just short. But after his round, Casey told reporters he’ll have no trouble sleeping at night.

“I just shot 66, and Collin shot 64 (shrugging shoulders),” he said. ” I had two bogeys and one double this week. There’s not a lot else I would change.”

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In Casey’s mind, the real story was the young man who’d beaten him. Morikawa might only be 23, but it’s clear that he’s built differently.

“Instant maturity was probably the one thing that stood out,” Casey said. “I mean, you know, those — you’ve heard him talk. Very mature in the words he chooses, the way he speaks, the way he plays golf.”

Morikawa turned pro just over a year ago as one-third of a trio of young stars that included Matthew Wolff and Viktor Hovland. And while the latter two earned the lion’s share of media attention out of the gate, it was the west coast kid who caught the eye of more than a few Tour pros.

“There’s always a bunch of guys that rock up on the scene, and he didn’t necessarily get the most publicity out of the group he was in, but you know, I can consider myself veteran; I’ve been around the block, so I know talent when I see it,” Casey said. “Talent’s — you know something good. We could just tell.”

Morikawa might not yet have left the prologue of his professional career, but that hasn’t stopped Casey from making up his mind. The kid who beat him — and everyone — on Sunday at the PGA Championship has something special.

“Those of us who knew, knew that … he’s the one,” he said. “Even if the media weren’t talking — they were talking about him, but that’s where we were focusing our attention, and we weren’t wrong.”

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The post Tour Stop: Paul Casey’s success at the Travelers Championship appeared first on Golf.

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Paul Casey on why he has benefitted from his trips to TPC River Highlands.

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