Now as I said, personally, I don’t think I’ve bought a tee in twenty years. And I certainly would never pay more than a dime per tee. I have found plenty of the alternative tees and I use them. And if you buy alternative tees that you truly believe let you hit the ball farther, I’m not going to argue with you. Some players on the PGA Tour use them. Confidence is everything in golf. If you believe it works, it probably does.
But be mindful of the science and USGA testing. It’s a myth that you need fancy tees. You do need some long tees for your driver. You can find them, in all colors, on the ground near most any tee box.
Once, I was at a clinic John Daly was giving, and the moderator asked him for a secret to his prodigious distance off the tee. Daly explained that before he hits, he always leans the tee forward so that it and the ball are tilting toward the target in the fairway.
“Really,” the moderator said. “And how much distance does that add?”
Answered Daly: “About an inch.”
So, what’s the second most overrated golf essential?
The golf bag.
Ever seen these guys walking around the golf course carrying their clubs in what looks like an archer’s quiver or an oversize holster? It has canvas sides, a single strap, and two small pouches for balls and other stuff (like found tees).
Ever notice that these guys are often good players?
Sometimes good golf comes down to eliminating the superfluous. Truth be told, if physically able, all golfers should walk more often when they play. It’s good for you and studies show you will score better (more on that in a later chapter). One way to make it easier to walk is to have a tidy, small walking bag, something that’s easy to sling over your shoulder after 90—OK, 120—shots during a round.
This doesn’t mean it has to be unappealing. There are dozens of stylish golf bags weighing less than five pounds now made by manufacturers like Ogio, Sun Mountain, and all of the major golf companies: Titleist, Adidas, Callaway, TaylorMade, and Nike. All have kickstands.
So that’s step one. Get a lightweight bag for hoofing it, or for practice sessions. Or just because a big golf bag is overrated and unnecessary.
I know what you are thinking: What about those fancy member-guest tournaments? Won’t a lightweight bag make me look like a lightweight? Don’t you need a big golf bag—known as a cart bag—for those occasions? Nobody wants to look cheesy.
Actually, so long as it isn’t faded, stained, or spattered with mud, a small, trim bag will probably be welcome in most settings nowadays. Not only that, if you’re going to be accompanied by a caddy, it will be warmly welcomed. You shouldn’t ask a caddy to lug around a big cart bag.
Yes, every country club golfer once had a bag so hefty it barely fit in the trunk of that golfer’s hefty Cadillac. But the typical Cadillac isn’t as hefty as it once was, and neither is the typical golf bag. In some elite golf circles, you may need an additional, bigger cart bag for certain select occasions. For 90 percent of us, a new golf bag is a $150 purchase made once every two or three years, and it should not take more than thirty minutes out of our busy lives to choose one. And always consider downsizing.
Overrated as it may be, there are still a few essentials to a good golf bag. It must have a separate waterproof compartment for your valuables, such as your cell phone (turned off, of course), your wallet or small purse, jewelry, keys, or money. Waterproof is key. You need at least one full-length apparel pocket to house a rain jacket or sweater. It has to be big enough to contain two garments and an extra towel. It does not have to be big enough to hide a small load of laundry.
Only professional golfers need that kind of space. Hall of Famer Annika Sorenstam was once in the middle of an LPGA tournament round when she asked her caddie to get something out of her bag. But just as he reached for that zipped pocket, she remembered something and yelped, “No, not that pocket.”
But it was too late. One zip and out tumbled Sorenstam’s dirty laundry all over the fairway. Fans watching laughed. As did Annika, though she quickly started stuffing laundry back into the bag.
It seems that morning, Annika had been in a hurry packing at her hotel, and as she was heading out the door, she glanced at the bathroom and saw that she had forgotten a pile of already worn clothes in the bathroom. With her suitcases already packed, she stuffed the clothes in her golf bag.
“That’s not one of my usual golf lessons for average golfers,” she told me. “In fact, don’t do that. As pros, our bags are so big because it means the names of our sponsors will be bigger and more visible. We don’t really need all this room either.
“Well, maybe that day I did.”
But you do need a pocket on the outside of the golf bag to store your golf balls. After you’ve plunked one—OK, two—balls into a pond, and there’s steam rising out of your ears, you don’t need the added frustration of wrestling with the various pockets of your bag, looking for another ball. Make sure that pocket is easily accessible and user-friendly. Many now use magnetic closures instead of zippers to ease the irritation.
You will also need a double-strap carrying system and something soft, like fleece, at the top of the dividers that separate the clubs on the interior of the bag so that the shafts of your clubs are protected. It’s nice to have an easily reached pocket for a drink or bottle of water. Everything else is optional, and don’t choose too many options. You don’t need a special flat, scorecard-holding slot or an extra ball clasp where balls snap into place.
One way to think of your golf bag is as a reflection of your golf personality. Do you want it to be loud and showy? Do you want it to be colossal and bigger than life, making you look like a high-maintenance golf course personality? Do you want your bag to have lots of moving parts, or do you want it to be like a good golf swing—simple and efficient? How do you want your bag to arrive at the first tee? With a look-at-me thud? Or noiselessly, gently settling in the grass, calm and confident? Do you want it adorned with all those extra balls affixed to the outside, something that shouts, “Look how many balls are going to be needed today!”?
Or do you want it to be austere, with a look of confident discretion that states, “Today, I’m going to take out one ball, and only one ball.”
The basics of the golf bag are basic. Keep it clean and pick a color or a pattern that makes you smile. You will need the unspoken encouragement out there. So make it simple. Golf is complicated enough.
Here is my last overrated or presumed essential: everything one of your friends or your favorite uncle the good golfer has ever told you.
In the words of Butch Harmon, former coach to Tiger Woods and Greg Norman and the longtime tutor to Phil Mickelson: “More bad golf habits are learned trying to listen to somebody else’s tips on the game. Unless you have exactly the same build, the same athleticism, the same flexibility, the same personality, the same clubs, and the same golf goals, taking advice from another golfer is the surest way to get worse at golf. You might as well throw all your clubs in a pond or run them over with your car.
“What works for another golfer will almost never work for you.”
How’s that for making it plain?
But you don’t have to take Butch’s word for it. You can prove it yourself.
Have you ever played in a scramble where everyone plays a ball from the same spot, trying to hit a shot on the green or sink a putt? As each person hits, the other golfers stand behind that player, and what you see is that almost all of the players, even the good ones, line up their club or putter differently. They aim at different spots, even if the hole is only 4 feet away. They rarely actually aim at the hole or the green.
When the swing begins, each golfer’s club usually takes a different path to the ball, and the shaft is angled sometimes in exotic ways. Arms, hips, shoulders, and hands are all moving and thrashing in so many directions. You will notice that everyone swings with different rhythms, and everyone contacts the ball at different places on the clubface.
Some go
lfers hit balls left to right or right to left or straight. Some swings are steep and some are shallow. Some people take big divots of dirt and some pick the ball clean off the turf. Some shift their weight foot to foot and some do not.
There are almost as many ways to play golf as there are players.
And yet, we recreational golfers routinely let strangers we may have met just an hour earlier tell us how to play golf.
“Hey, your grip is a little weak,” someone will say just after he’s struck a good shot and you haven’t. “You should try using my grip. It’s stronger.”
And that’s how you’ll hold the club perhaps for the next three years. All kinds of things might be going wrong and you might try a hundred fixes. But all along, it could be your grip that’s the problem, and it’s something you picked up on a whim one day.
“In every other part of their life, people are careful who they take advice from,” Jim McLean, named one of America’s top five golf teachers by Golf Digest, said to me once. “They don’t let just anyone advise them on their finances. They won’t let a buddy tell them how to raise their kids or which house to buy. People understand that whether it’s what clothes they wear or what food they like to eat, it’s a personal thing.
“But when it comes to golf, if someone hits a few good shots during a round, it’s like, ‘Hey, how did you hit that?’ One guy might be 6–4 and 220 pounds and the other might be 5–8 and 150 pounds. They can’t exchange golf swings any more than they can exchange golf shirts.”
But people do it. For instance, have you witnessed this scene?
Three guys are talking in the bar after a round. One guy gets off his barstool and starts demonstrating a certain swing move or the way to hit some shot.
Next thing you know, all three of them are standing near the bar, practicing this maneuver.
The next time you see this scene, I have my own advice. Try to join those guys the next time they are playing, making it a foursome. It will be a fantastic chance to win some money because all three of them will be all screwed up for weeks.
Now, of course, the point is not that you always have to go it alone on the golf course. It’s part of the fun to compare notes and strategies. But choose your golf instruction oracles carefully. A certified PGA professional is a good place to start, and you can probably get a series of five group lessons for $100 if you have not taken lessons before. Along the way you can find a teacher with whom you have a rapport or with whom you feel you can develop one. And don’t keep going to that teaching pro if you see no progress. Find another one. There are more than 28,000 nationwide.
At the same time, obviously, it’s fun to read game-improvement tips in magazines, but they are offered by pros, too, not your uncle or one of your friends. Learn what works for you. I’ve often thought it was a good idea to read the tips and instruction from only one golf magazine and not several. I read both Golf and Golf Digest, for example, but I read the instruction articles from only one or the other in any given year because I find that the two magazines contradict each other on a regular basis. This game is hard enough without having to sort out whom to believe every month.
In the end, however, you probably do need to seek out some kind of expert counsel. This is especially true for beginning golfers, they of the $1,350 in spending during that first, overexcited year when they are bitten by the golf bug. Beginners often feel as if they’ve suddenly joined a mysterious cult and they are most susceptible to unhelpful, misguided advice.
Suzy Whaley, a popular Connecticut golf teacher and a member of the PGA of America’s national instruction committee, notes that beginners do need to know how to hold the club, how to stand to the ball, how to maneuver around the golf course, and how to use the different clubs to get the ball in the hole. And an instructor can teach all that and can be that early golfing buddy who assuages the pressure beginners feel to perform well immediately in what, to them, is an alien environment.
“The notion that golf is brutally hard prevents a lot of people from ever playing,” said Whaley, one of the very few women to qualify and play in a PGA Tour event. “I tell people that you don’t have to be great to have fun at it. We will help you get the ball in the air, and you’ll enjoy the time out there with your spouse, friends, or children.”
Among Whaley’s recommendations is that new golfers not begin at the tee box but instead drop a ball 150 yards from the hole and play in from there.
“You still get all the elements of golf, and you don’t have to feel the pressure to keep up,” she said. “When you can make double par—an 8 on a par 4—move back to 200 yards away. And when you can make double par from there, move back to the family tee box or some other forward box. And so on.”
Those are good tips worth heeding. As for the others you might hear out on the golf course, it’s all right to listen. Be polite because no harm is meant. But when the advice is over, just smile and ignore it.
OK, if there are overrated essentials, then there must be underrated ones, right?
And there are. Let’s start, for example, with good practice balls. It is my belief that most golfers don’t really learn how to play the game at the golf course but in the backyard. Some people think they learn at the driving range, and they could if they did many things differently at the range. More on that later. But most golfers ignore the gains that can be had in the backyard. It’s the perfect golf laboratory for golfers of all ability levels, provided you have a backyard (you don’t need more than 30 yards). You can sometimes get some of the same work done hitting into a net.
It is in the backyard that you can hone your pitching and chipping. It is in the backyard that you can build a repeatable swing. It is in the backyard that you can learn to shape the ball, hitting fades and draws. It is in the backyard that you can learn self-control when you cannot seem to do any of these things with any proficiency.
Or, you can learn what happens if you don’t have self-control. I still have the pitching wedge I wrapped around a backyard tree. And so, it is in the backyard that you can also amuse your neighbors.
But the key is good practice golf balls. There are a lot of types of practice golf balls because they have been around for decades. Some are pretty useless, like the hard white plastic ones with no holes. They do not mimic a true ball’s flight in any way. But in recent years companies have designed far superior alternatives. One of the best is the BirdieBall, which reacts off the club head like a real ball but flies no more than 40 yards and lands softly. It won’t break windows either, which is an important consideration.
The BirdieBall looks like a napkin ring or hair curler, but it’s tough plastic and the aerodynamics give it the real-ball feel off the club. And you can also purchase a distinctive hitting mat called the StrikePad. The StrikePad is different in that it isn’t flat like a traditional hitting mat but is instead cambered, so it absorbs more of the shock of a downward iron swing. It is also lightweight so you can move it around the backyard and hit down on shots without taking a divot out of your lawn on every swing, which is another important consideration.
Another good practice ball is the Almost Golf Ball, which is a pressurized ball with a semisoft covering that has some of the feel of a real golf ball yet won’t fly too far, so you can find it and hit it again. It also won’t break windows. There are also yellow foam practice balls that you can find at any major sporting goods retailer. They will work, and even the old reliable Wiffle golf ball versions are serviceable. They don’t go far, but if you’re slicing, they will slice. But they do not feel like a real golf ball at impact.
There are even indoor practice balls, and in my experience, the best is the Floppy, which is soft enough that you can smack it with a wedge off the sliding glass doors of your living room over and over. The first time I used the Floppy inside, I dropped it on the living room carpet in front of my wife and smacked it with a full swing right off the picture window. My wife nearly fainted until the Floppy smacked the glass with nothing more than
a soft thud. We have remained married.
Having good practice golf balls is vital because the golf course and the driving range are not easy learning environments. First of all, there are people watching you, or at least you think they are (actually they probably couldn’t care less, but you know what I mean). On the golf course, you can slice fourteen consecutive tee shots and never have the chance to truly assess what’s going wrong. Same thing on the range. But at home, you can try things you aren’t likely to try elsewhere, like slowing your swing tempo, or experimenting with your backswing path. You can spend an entire evening focusing on one specific goal, like squaring the clubface—always a good idea—without worrying about results. With any of the above-mentioned practice balls, you will get instant feedback.
The next most underrated essential is a good driving range regimen. Or any practice range regimen, because most people don’t have one. Most people give more forethought to finding a parking spot at Wal-Mart than to their hour at the range. I know this because I have seen you at the range. Wherever you play, I have seen you.
For example, you always buy the biggest bucket available, right? Is there any swing flaw that a hundred balls can’t fix?
You walk past the short-game area and the practice green and think, “I’ll finish up there on my way out.”
At your hitting station, you grab a 9-iron and launch five or six balls. They don’t fly straight, but they are in the air. Good enough.
You reach for the driver. You hit a couple dead straight, then a third. But they don’t go as far as you would like. You remember a tip you saw on TV while watching the Masters—something about “firing your left hip.” You try that.
The ball rockets off the clubface, 20 yards farther. You keep doing this—it’s like magic! Several shots in a row disappear toward the horizon like missiles. You start looking around: Hey, does anybody see how good I’m hitting it over here?
Billy Martin Page 67
