The Lazy Golfer’s Companion

Your ideal grip thickness is next assessed, which is not necessarily thicker for larger hands, by measuring how comfortably the club sits when you hold it. Grip size can affect performance and slicers could benefit from thinner grips than they normally use. This tends to make them hold the club more in the fingers, which leads to faster hand action. Conversely, the few golfers who are happy hookers should try grips thicker than their norm. They would find the club sits more in the palm, which slows down the speed the club face closes. You should try this when you next get your grips replaced by your club pro – which you should do at least every two years. Shiny, slippery grips don’t help your game and as most golfers are too lazy to wash their grips regularly (let alone sandpaper or scrape them) they have a limited effective life.

We’re talking about spending money. It’s common sense once you have spent money to look after your equipment and unfortunately golfers are very bad at that. They’ll buy a new £150 suit of waterproof clothes, and get them wet. When the sun comes out after about 12 holes, they take their waterproofs off and then, while the material’s still wet, stuff it in the golf bag, forget all about it and leave it in the back of the car. Then, of course, when they play the next week, the gear’s either got mildew on or it’s damaged in some way and they will then complain that they bought a faulty garment which need not necessarily be the case.

Finally, at the centre, you are measured up on a length and lie gauge to find the right angle for your clubs when you are in a comfortable address position. You then move to the driving range, where computers, linked to high-speed cameras, record the results of hitting a number of balls with a selection of carefully-chosen clubs. Typically, a 5-iron is used as a standard club and after a few warm-up shots (hitting balls off a mat into a net five yards away) the computer-camera machine is calibrated.

You then hit four balls, taking your time, with your old 5-iron. Each shot is displayed on a screen showing, by computer enhanced graphics, how far (and with what spin) the ball would have travelled down a fairway. The computer also measures the club speed at impact, ball carry, angle of the club face, swing path, impact point on the club – and tempo of each swing from start to impact.

Warming to the task, you then repeat the four ball series of swings with five different 5-irons, selected by the centre’s pro, and varying in flex and swingweight from D0 to C9, C6, C3 to flyweight. Then, perhaps a little impatient to see how you’ve performed, you return to reception for analysis and detailed explanation.

From the computer print-out of all your shots, the pro shows you that your old 5-iron has generated an average clubhead speed of 76 mph, giving a carry of 170 yards (which makes you feel like Ian Woosnam), a clubhead closed at impact by one degree (which, with your in to out swing, explains the hook) and an impact point in the centre of the club (well at least you’re doing something right). The C3 5-iron, with a graphite shaft, has a higher average clubhead speed of 79 mph, but its carry was less at 168 yards and the ball was generally struck near the heel. The featherweight club, strangely enough, only generated an average 75 mph speed and you didn’t really like its feel anyway.

One 5-iron in the series really does stand out. It’s a perimeter weighted club with a C9 swing weight, an ‘R’ flex steel shaft and a one degree flat lie. Giving a consistent impact in the centre of the club face, this is clearly the club for you.

So do you immediately reach for the cheque book and order a matched set? Well, there is no hard sell pressure to buy, curiously enough. Custom club suppliers generally like to sell their wares through your club pro – and prefer him to attend the fitting out sessions, if possible. What they do give the golfer is, above all, a feeling of confidence that his clubs really suit him and that if he does need a ‘Mulligan’ on the first tee, he will only have himself to blame.

CUSTOM-MADE CLUBS WILL SUIT YOUR SWING.

Club Combinations (#ulink_d803da48-969a-5644-906e-052252e24203)

Armed with his personal club spec though, there are still other considerations for the golfer to ponder over when it comes to selecting the combination of clubs that he carries around. Being long off the tee, or having a short game, can make a difference. Let’s see how the members of our fourball could each pick the best mix.

Bob, who is a confirmed slicer, should probably never wield a driver in anger. There’s nothing to be ashamed about this; it’s merely pragmatic. A 2-wood off the tee, with a modern loft of 13 degrees, will reduce his sidespin and slice. It should have a metal or graphite head, with an ‘R’ flex steel (or mid torque graphite) shaft. He could also consider carrying a three, a five and a seven wood of similar materials, while his irons should have similar shafts with perimeter weighted heads to aid off-centre hits. Finally, on all of them, he should fit (having tried out first) say one sixteenth of an inch thinner grips, which should increase his hand action.

Brian, who lacks length off the tee, constantly has to hit longer second shots to the greens, needs help from his clubs to gain as much distance as possible. All his shafts should be ‘A’ flex (or high torque graphite) to give as much ‘kick’ as possible. He should use a driver and try thinner grips to increase his clubhead speed.

Doug, the rare hooker in our fourball, could consider leaving his driver behind, a 2-wood giving him almost as much distance and probably being straighter off the tee. With ‘R’ flex shafts in all clubs, he should also carry a 4-wood, which is an excellent club from light rough. He should try slightly oversize grips to help him hold the clubs more in the palm and control his tendency to end up left.

Finally comes Matt, who has a handicap of 16, the lowest of the four. He may need ‘S’ flex (or low torque graphite) shafts on all his clubs and could sport a driver, three and five woods all with persimmon heads. He could also use forged traditional irons – if he could afford them and if he played more. But then we all need to play a bit more, don’t we?

Playing more with the right equipment would benefit, if not the Tour pro. It’s sobering to note that, despite modern technology, in mid 1994 the average drive of a player on the US Professional Tour measured some 264 yards, only eight yards more than the average in 1969, 25 years previously. Average US pro scores have fallen by one stroke (to 71) during this period – though many courses have been stretched. However, this has been credited to the fact that players are fitter today, more athletic and have benefitted from more intensive coaching. There is also the considerably greater financial incentives for each tournament. None of this applies to the social golfer, who probably hasn’t changed at all in the past 25 years – but high tech clubs would have a positive effect on his game, if only he played with them a more.

Balls for All Needs (#ulink_750e7d4f-a6df-5e6d-b5e9-87afbdd42add)

But what about that vital complement to any set of clubs, the balls that make the game go round? Well, they can make (or unmake) the player too. There is an enormous choice of golf balls on the market today and you can buy a type that both suits your game and the course you are playing. Too few golfers though know how to make that choice, or even think for a moment about the ammunition they use. Rather like motor cars, there are no bad golf balls now. Some are different and feel better than others, softer, harder, some last longer, some don’t cut as easily. But it is quite important and sensible to get a golf ball that suits your game. It can make quite a difference.

The proof is seen in most golfer’s bags: a mix of balls, two-piece and wound, with a few balata covers (often cut) and with a variety of compressions and trajectories. How can any golfer hope to play with any consistency with such a mixture? There is no need to.

All the ball manufacturers, in co-operation with golf magazines, regularly publish listings of makes with details of their construction, covers and compressions. There are also charts grouping balls suitable for traditionally forged clubs and perimeter weighted ones; high trajectory balls (if you normally hit them lower than you’d like) and low trajectory types; those suitable for courses with narrow fairways and others with wide open spaces. The weather is also catered for: certain ball types are listed for windy conditions, and others for abnormally dry or very wet ones.

A golfer can gain some useful information from these charts, but there are three points you should bear in mind:

A balata cover is very soft and if you’ve got any roughness on the face of your irons or if the grooves in the clubs are a little bit sharp, every time you hit it, even if you strike the ball correctly, you will rough it up as if you’ve rubbed a file or rasp over the cover and after two or three holes a ball can look very aged indeed. Surlyn is more durable, a little bit stronger.

You would probably find the use of a 100 compression ball downright off-putting (it’s rather like hitting a stone) so use a 90 compression ball and stick with it.

When you’ve decided on the optimum ball for your game and course, don’t buy any other type. If you find any others in the rough, use them for practice at best.

To sum up and to simplify advice to the club golfer on the tools of the trade, we could say that you owe it to yourself to:

make certain that your clubs are right for your swing, in terms of swing weight, flex and lie; and

choose and use only the golf balls that suit your game and your course conditions best.

This will bring you a certain peace of mind when you next tee off. Let’s see how you should use this equipment for the best . . .

3 (#ulink_6780f75d-0c37-5e76-8537-5f0059c8cdf5)

THE LAZY GOLFER’S SWING TECHNIQUE (#ulink_6780f75d-0c37-5e76-8537-5f0059c8cdf5)

Whenever a real golfer gets a new anything to do with golf (new clubs, a special wedge, the ‘ultimate’ secret from the latest book, whatever) he can’t wait to try it out on the course. But before you trot briskly off to the first, satisfied that at last your clubs and balls really suit you, there are some basics to consider and ponder about. Not least, what type of swing have you been using over the last ‘x’ years?

You do already appreciate that everyone has an individual swing, very individual as you will see if you scrutinise the line of players at a driving range. The world’s top Tour pros are also different, if not so divergent, in the overall appearance of their swings. Nick Price, for example, has a decidedly brisk tempo. Fred Couples, on the other hand, swings almost drowsily, lifting the club with his arms, turning his shoulders late and looping the club inside to be on plane at impact. Ian Woosnam seems to stand a long way from the ball, yet he smacks it with very little apparent effort a long way down the fairway, as does Greg Norman, who seems to stand almost on top of the ball, which he assaults with a vigourous, gut-wrenching action.

These four are instantly recognisable by their swings, even at the distance of a well struck drive. Yet they all have in common a sound swing technique which maximises their physical abilities and they are, to a man, top-notch exponents of the ‘modern’ swing. This is something of prime importance to really understand. For there are two distinct basic types of swing; the classical and the modern.

The Classic and the Not So Classic Swing (#ulink_c9dcfbf9-338f-58c2-a21c-6b8716e50e36)

Misunderstanding the different principles of the two types (and worse, using bits of one with parts of the other) has wrecked the swings of many golfers – and even a few Tour pros.

The classic swing is more of a hands and arms action (rather than the ‘whole body’ movement of the modern swing, where the arms follow, rather than lead). Dating from the days of brassies, spoons, cleeks and mashie-niblicks, it was exemplified by the flowing movement of Bobby Jones, who started his swing with the hands leaving the clubhead behind, contrasted to the compact three-quarter action of Sir Henry Cotton.

The classic grip was more in the fingers, promoting a faster hand action, and the classic golfer typically aligned slightly right of the pin and positioned the ball further back in his stance (centre for the 5-iron and even nearer the right foot for the short clubs).

Foot action was also more pronounced, with the left heel lifting high off the ground in the backswing, basically because the thick tweeds the players wore restricted easy movement. The arms were also kept close to the body, the right elbow tucked in at the top, the left on the follow through, and the overall action was quite rotary on a flattish plane. The classic swinger also hit against a ‘firm left side’ which, with his set-up and swing shape, produced theoretically a right to left shot, hopefully a draw.

The modern swing, in contrast, has much more emphasis on body movement. The legs drive, the hips turn, the arms follow and, in theory, the bottom of the arc is extended through impact, keeping closer to the ground for longer and hitting the ball further.

The modern grip is more in the palm of the left hand, more neutral, and exponents talk of “taking their hands out of the game.” They align square or more open to the flag and generally position the ball for all clubs (except the driver) some two inches inside the left heel. With lighter, less restrictive clothes, modern swingers roll their left foot on the backswing and stretch their arms a little further away from the body, creating a more lateral and upright swing, with the clubhead travelling more down the line to the target. All this tends to produce, particularly with modern clubs, a higher ball which flies left to right, hopefully as a power fade.

CLASSIC OR MODERN: BOTH CAN BE RIGHT FOR YOU.

Now what you as a club golfer must further appreciate is that using a hands and arms swing, a classic action, today is not wrong because it is outdated. Equally, it is not imperatively right to use a leg driven modern swing just because most top Tour pros do. The classic swing developed because of the whippy shafted clubs used in earlier times and the need to hit long, low shots under the wind on the firm turfed links. The modern swing is an evolution based on the technology of much stiffer, lighter shafts and the need to hit longer, higher shots, particularly on the stretched, lush courses in the US.

Some top pros appreciated this evolution and quickly adopted it, one being Tony Jacklin. When he started to play on the US Tour in the late 1960’s, he had a classic hands and arms swing. But then he studied the action of fellow pros like Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf and was soon convinced that he was not making adequate use of his legs to suit the courses they played. The change for him, which simply meant bending his knees a bit more and driving with his legs, took quite a time. Teaching pros today advocate practising a swing change sixty times a day for three solid weeks to groove it. For Jacklin, it involved hitting thousands of balls on dozens of practice areas and he believes he ended up with a slower, more rhythmic action which hit the ball further than he’d ever done before.

Doug once tried to change his swing in a similar way, having read of the ‘new’ Jacklin swing in his favourite golf magazine. He did it in a desperate attempt to cure his hook and hit a few balls on the practice ground one day, taking his remodelled swing onto the course the next. There he found to his horror that he had developed a pernicious push-slice, the ball flying right at forty five degrees to his intended line and then curling even further right, to end usually out-of-bounds, almost level with him. When, in desperation, he tried to revert to his ‘old’ swing on the eighth, he started to take deep divots, advancing the ball only thirty or forty yards forwards at a time. It took him a month in the end to cure his ‘cure’. What he should have realised from the start is that any small swing change, never mind a major reconstruction, demands practice, practice and yet more practice before it can begin to work. Doug, as a club golfer, should also have consulted his club pro before he started and have been guided by him throughout the change.

Supertips from Top Pros (#ulink_ff0c85dd-57d9-5994-a595-a266377244d6)

With the basic differences between the classic and modern swings however, there is one thing you must be very clear about. The hands and arms alone do not solely create the motive power to propel the ball. The whole body plays a part, while the legs are certainly active, not frozen as some would believe. Equally, with the modern swing, while the lower body drives, the arms must swing down fast and free. Both actions are essential motive forces that add power to the swing, be it classical or modern.

Body power is generated by coiling the upper torso against the resistance caused by a flexed right knee and solid feet – a good foundation is all important. These are released automatically on the downswing. The hand and arm action supplies power to the shot by working as a swinging unit and with both forces, good leg action is essential for rhythm and balance during the swing, but perhaps it is not such an important source of power as some have argued. Try hitting a few balls with a 6-iron with your feet together, knees touching. Seve Ballesteros can hit a ball well over 200 yards on his knees.

So what every golfer should be aiming for, whether he has a classic or modern swing, is a balanced combination of hand and arm action and body action which results in the club face hitting squarely through the ball with maximum speed directly towards the target. It is in trying to get this balance, this timing, right that the club golfer can go disastrously wrong.

Too much body action is the major factor that wrecks the timing of many golfers. Often swinging back too far with their hips, with no resistance from knee or feet, they think about using their lower body action too much on the downswing and consequently don’t swing their arms freely enough.

A SWING CHANGE TAKES A LOT OF PRACTICE.