AVOID THESE AND MAYBE YOU’LL START FINDING MORE CIRCLES ON YOUR SCORECARD.

11 ways you ruin your golf round before it even starts

It’s a tough realization. You just three-putted the 18th to close your round, and your scorecard suggests maybe you should have just stayed home and mowed the lawn.

And while you spend most of the 19th hole explaining to your buddies where and how your round went so terribly wrong, the truth is it didn’t happen with your three OB drives, two shanks or dreaded four-putt. Your round likely went south before you even teed off on the opening hole.

Here are 11 ways you can ruin your round before it even starts. Avoid these and maybe you’ll start finding more circles on your scorecard.

You show up too late

This is the biggest no-no. When you are late, everything is rushed — check in, driving range, putting practice (if you even have time for that). The round starts well before you hit your first tee shot. So don’t be late!

You didn’t get enough sleep

Late night working or watching Netflix? Arriving to the course groggy will make your game sluggish, too. Speaking of not getting enough sleep…

You are hungover

It happens to the best of ’em, but aching after a bachelor party or night out on the town isn’t going to improve your contact. It also might make the day pretty miserable overall.

You don’t warm up the right way

Think of your time at the course prior to your tee time as an extension of your round. You think Tiger and Brooks and Dustin and the fellas just show up and practice without a plan? Know how long you want to hit range balls for (and which clubs), and give yourself the time you need to stretch or putt or get your bag and gear ready. Give yourself minimums for each so you can check them all off, but leave some extra time to play with in case something like, say, your putting stroke, needs a few extra reps.

You have too many swing thoughts

By all means, head to GOLF.com and steal a swing thought or work on that tip your local pro has helped you with, but don’t overthink it. Too many thoughts are not good for the average golfer. Keep it simple, focus on one key element and go from there.

You hit only drivers on the range

Wow, that’s awesome watching you scare the range netting with your 14th straight blast with the Big Dog, but you’re still only hitting that club maybe 15 times, max, when you get to the course. Mix in a couple of wedges, will ya? You might need them.

You don’t practice lag putts

You never want to three-putt, and one of the best ways to avoid this is improve your lag putting. This doesn’t mean launching a dozen 90-footers aimlessly across the putting green, but you could benefit from rolling two or three 30-footers, just to get a nice feel for the speed of the greens. More often than not they’ll roll at a similar speed once you get on the course.

You don’t practice the important putts

Lag putting is key, but so is canning the putts that will make or break your round. Those putts are the ones right outside gimme range but inside about 8 feet. It’s the distance where you stand over a putt and aren’t intimidated by the look, and it’s close enough where if you miss you’d be annoyed. Putts from 4-8 feet are crucial, but not that easy to make. Ian Poulter leads the PGA Tour in conversation rate from 4-8 feet at 86 percent, but only 14 players on Tour make 3/4s of those putts. The worst player in that category, Paul Casey, makes 1/2 from the range. So focus on that tricky distance. Once you see one drop the hole will start to look bigger, and a strong putting day from that range — like making 7 of 12 instead of 2 of 12 — can shave five strokes in a heartbeat.

You didn’t eat or hydrate

Plan ahead! Grab a bottle of water. Eat at home, on the go or make sure you have enough time when you get to the course. But don’t jeopardize a promising round due to a lack of food fuel. (Here are some ideas for what to pack in your bag.)

You don’t know anything about the course

You may think you did everything right to get ready for a course you’ve never seen — hit balls, roll putts, etc. — but did you know the first four holes have tight fairways and doglegs and your best bet might be hitting a hybrid? Now you probably wish you would have striped that 17-degree more than twice on the range, huh?

You are too focused on other things

Stop worrying so much about your foursome’s betting game, what tees you are playing or that epic playlist you’ve been cooking up since the car ride over. Put the phone away and check out Twitter later or respond to that work email when you get home. None of it’s going anywhere. And plus, making sure your game is ready for a par-birdie-par start is way more important.

SOURCE:  golf.com

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A game changer!

Cutter CTR-1 wedge takes a different approach to solve the same old problems with our short games

Frustration has been the inspiration for golf inventions for all the centuries the game has been played, from the rut iron of the 1830s to Gene Sarazaen’s extended flange that created the sand wedge in the 1930s to Karsten Solheim’s more forgiving putters of half a century ago to the oversized drivers still being perfected today. Whether the distinctive Cutter CTR-1 wedge will be that historically significant in golf’s cavalcade of inventions remains to be seen. Its inspiration, though, is right in line with the history of golf innovation.
But the frustration that was the inspiration for inventor Dickie Walsh’s CTR-1 started with others. “I could see people getting to the point where they were throwing their wedges into a pond,” Walsh said. “I was seeing what people do and it’s so fundamentally wrong. So part of what I wanted to do with this wedge was to almost help counteract some of that fundamentally bad technique.”
Walsh, who is a business executive and neither teaches golf nor had he designed a golf club before, refashioned the shape of the traditional wedge with a dramatically curved sole design. The idea hit him as he was watching Tom Watson backhand wedge while stymied against a tree. “I wondered how he did that, and I saw how that almost v-shape of the toe of the wedge cut through the grass. I started messing around with some clay in my daughter’s room one night and that’s where the ‘aha’ moment hit me.”
According to Walsh, the CTR-1’s extreme heel and toe relief on the sole is designed to release the wedge’s leading edge by about two-thirds. Also, unlike most wedge and iron designs, the face is nearly symmetrical
Walsh worked with veteran independent club designer Jeff Sheets on his design, which also includes parallel bars on the back of the wedge framing the heel and toe in an almost horseshoe shape. Those bars are designed to stabilize the head for less twisting both on an off-center hit and to make it more resistant to the player twisting the club open during the stroke.
“Regardless of grip pressure, when the clubface opens and twists, that’s a very bad thing for a lot of high-handicap players,” Walsh said, who said he still wanted his design to not be limited as a wedge of last resort. “The goal is to have this help the players with poor technique, but doesn’t inhibit the players with good technique. I really wanted to design a confidence builder.”
The Cutter CTR-1 is available in 52-, 56- and 58-degree lofts ($130).

SOURCE: golfdigest.com

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So many years of hate, resentment and anger.

Charlie Sifford: The Man Who Never Quit

One all-time champion pauses to recognize the incredible courage in another.

One day in 1959, Charlie Sifford had pounded his drive up the center of the 17th fairway. His swing was as sweet as ever. A swing that had already cut through so many years of hate, resentment and anger.
As we walked up the fairway, I caught a glimpse of something I had never seen on a golf course, despite growing up in apartheid South Africa, where you could be jailed for simply supporting a black man. A few spectators ran to Charlie’s golf ball and kicked it into the rough. Right there in front of everybody. I know Charlie felt that kick as if they had delivered it right to his gut. My blood boiled, but my heart ached. It was a message of pure hate, one following a racist slur shouted at Charlie just a one hole earlier.
This was more than 60 years ago, but I can still see Charlie walking into the scorer’s tent and slamming his hands on the wooden table. I can see the little piece of lead from the tip of his pencil breaking off and hurtling to the floor. I can see Charlie’s shoulders drop and hear his heavy exhale as he tried to find words.
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The importance of a good grip

The most intriguing grips in pro golf

 

A substantial subsection of the golf canon is devoted to romanticizing Ben Hogan and his technique. And that includes his grip, which is shown in the photograph shown above for Life Magazine in 1947—before he weakened it to stop hooking and went on to dominate golf through the mid-1950s.

Even with all of the changes in equipment, clothing, agronomy and, most of all, the ball, how the best players hold the club has stayed mostly within a familiar set of parameters. “There has always been debate about grips—should you be weak, strong or in the middle,” says top Arizona teacher Terry Rowles, who coaches Aaron Baddeley and Martin Trainer on the PGA Tour.
“But the span of grips has always been the same. Henry Cotton looks like Tiger Woods. The action item is how players match their grip with the way they release the club.”
A stroll back through history reveals Arnold Palmer (“The Grip,” Rowles calls him) with his weak right hand turned toward from the target, Johnny Miller with both of his hands set weak and Lee Trevino and David Duval (below), who both believed you couldn’t grip it strong enough, or turned away from the target.
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PGA Championship, minus fans!

PGA Championship, minus fans, gets green light at Harding Park

The first major championship to be contested in 2020, the PGA Championship, will be played at San Francisco’s Harding Park but without spectators.

The PGA of America announced the decision on Monday after spending months considering other scenarios, including moving the tournament to another venue such as Valhalla in Kentucky or Quail Hollow in North Carolina. It was also waiting on state health officials, who determined the event could go on but without fans.

The organization decided to stick with its original site for the rescheduled tournament to be played Aug. 6-9. The PGA had been originally scheduled for May 14-17 but was rescheduled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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