Golf - Perfect Putting

Ok, so there really is no such thing as perfect putting —— but you can get pretty close. Just follow some of these helpful tips:

GRIP and STANCE

Start with the correct grip. Lightly place your hands on the club. It's not a python you have to squeeze to death before it kills you. Use a very light version of your normal grip, but with the pinky on the club, rather than overlapped or interlocked. When you close your fingers, don't force the club into an angle. Address the ball squarely. Relax.

Place the ball toward the front of your stance, centered between your shoulders. Keep your hands near the top of the grip and focus your eyes directly over the ball. The target line is perpendicular to a power saw that would slice your body in half. This makes it easy to give a natural pendulum stroke along the target line.

If you're right handed, lock in your left hand. Left-handers, lock in the right. The putter face should be perpendicular to the target line, and the ball at the sweetspot, usually. As you lean over, your eyes come into line parallel with the target line. A ball dropped from your nose would land onto that line.

Feet will be generally set no wider than the hips, weight balanced slightly toward the inside of their left heel.

BALL
Your ball should be placed roughly between the center of your stance and your left instep. This squares up the path and the clubhead prior to impact. Also, it allows any approach angle to level out enough to for good follow through.

STROKE
Sweeping strokes are usually positioned slightly left, while a tapping motion should be more centered. Your goal is to strike the ball in the center (the sweetspot), unless you're putting on a downhill slope. Then, try hitting closer to the toe of the putter. This gives slightly less impact force, and lowers the odds of overshooting the hole. A smooth stroke back, followed by a forward motion in the same plane is the ideal. Remember, left hand holds, right hand strokes. (For right-handers.)

PRACTICE
If you look closely at most golf balls, you'll notice a line around the 'equator', where there are not dimples. A well constructed ball will be perfectly balanced, with equal weight on any line through the center. But not all are. Good manufacturers, ensure the cover is the same thickness all around, and the core materials a uniform density.
Still, not every ball is perfect. On a practice green (flat, dry, and level), try lining up the line on the ball with the target line toward the hole. Take a few practice putts from 3-6 feet from the hole, then ten feet. Look for any tendency of the ball to veer one way or the other that isn't due to errors in your stance or stroke. (Be honest!)

Now lay down a series of markers (strings or quarters, for example), at different distances from the hole. Try one foot, three feet, six feet, 10 feet, 15 feet. Practice shooting NOT for the hole, but to consistently place the ball within the markers. This will give you a good feel for how hard an impact at what angle rolls the ball how far.

Change the distance between the markers, making them closer together, and repeat until you can put the ball anywhere you want.
See, now you are perfect!

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Handling Tee Box Pressure in Golf

If you’ve played golf for any length of time, you have undoubtedly encountered a situation or two which made you nervous. This phenomena is called ‘tee box pressure’, or TBP for short.

Perhaps it’s happened when you were getting ready to hit your tee shot off #1 with a dozen people watching. Maybe it was when you were paired with the top golfer in your club championship. Whatever the situation, one thing is sure: every golfer will find themselves dealing with TBP sooner or later!

WHY THE NERVES?

What is it about golf that gets us feeling this way in the first place? After all, when you step onto the golf course, there usually aren’t any lives at stake. In addition, whether you perform well or not on any given day, there are a billion people in China who will not care!

This is a complicated question which will have different answers for different people. Often times, we have too much of our egos wrapped up in the game. The more we invest in something (and we all know that golf can be all-consuming), the more we expect in return. When the ‘game is on’, we fear failure. With this fear in our mind, our muscles tighten. This, in turn, makes it harder to have the free-flowing swing and effective touch game that is needed to score well.

Here are a few tips which will help you the next time you are getting ready to play a pressure round.

1. PREPARE MENTALLY

During the days leading up to the big game, prepare yourself mentally for the atmosphere you will be facing. You know you are going to be nervous. Being nervous, however, does not mean you cannot hit good golf shots. Think of all the times you have hit good shots under pressure before.

Picture yourself dealing with various situations that will occur during the upcoming round. Think of the feeling as you prepare to hit your first tee shot. Your heart is beating out of control. Then, you swing under control, in good tempo, and strike a solid one right down the middle of the fairway.

Next, imagine hitting one into trouble. You’re confronted with the options and weigh the risks of punching a miracle shot through the trees. Instead, you calm yourself and ‘take your medicine’ by chipping back out to the fairway. This type of clear thinking will help you to avoid those double and triple bogeys which ruin rounds.

Michael Anthony's The Mental Keys book, along with his Polish The Wheel audio CD, gives you the ultimate golf mental training program guaranteed to lower your score

2. CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY – CONFIDENT GOLF SWING TIPS

The term ‘choke’ is applied to people who don’t perform well under pressure. Who can forget poor Greg Norman losing that 6-shot lead to Nick Faldo at the Masters tournament? The main reason people choke is simply because their thought processes become illogical. They start thinking negatively as if they have never hit a solid golf shot. Or, they start to take unnecessary chances and over-swing in the process.

Before the round, make up your mind that you will not beat yourself. Let the other players beat you. Hit shots that you know you can hit. One top amateur player used this strategy in the Minnesota State Amateur qualifying round at the Lake City Golf Club. He wasn’t playing very well on the front nine and was tempted several times to ‘go for broke’. On the eighth hole, a par five, his second shot left him about 110 yards out in some gnarly rough. He had a good angle at the pin, but if the shot went long, it was obviously going down an embankment leading to a difficult chip with little green to work with. However, he felt like he needed a ‘make something happen’. So, he debated whether to try to finesse a full wedge, or to take a full swing with his gap wedge. He had more confidence in the gap wedge because he knew this club would never put him in the big trouble which was over the green. He selected the gap wedge (conservative strategy) and made a confident swing which left the ball 30 feet below the hole. He two-putted and took his par.

This strategy paid off as he made birdie on the next hole. All of a sudden, his marginal round was heading in the right direction! This may not have been possible if he had taken the aggressive route on the previous hole and gone over the green.

3. LET GO OF THE HANDLE BARS!

A player recently quipped, “You’ve got to let go of the handle bars!” How descriptive of the golfer who, when under pressure, holds onto the club as if it had “handle bars”. Unlike riding a bicycle, holding onto the handle bars is a bad thing in golf!

In other words, you’ve got to let the club swing to be effective. Holding on and trying to steer the ball down the fairway will produce less distance and less accuracy. A golfer has to feel like they are ‘giving up control’ of the swing. In other words, the golfer must trust that what he has trained will work when the pressure is on. This is called ‘muscle memory’.

Giving up control gets progressively harder as the round progresses. The tendency is to start counting your score as you try to figure out how you’re faring compared to everyone else. You must counteract that tendency by consciously trying to swing looser and freer as the round goes on. Stay focused on what you’re trying to do – forget about everyone else. You can’t control them anyway.

Keep the game simple. Pick your target, go through your pre-shot routine and let your swing go! Stay within yourself and you won’t be a victim of that TBP!

See you soon

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Crazy Golf Facts!

Crazy Golf Facts!

Lighthorse Harry Cooper was at the top of his golfing fame when he took a job as pro at the Oahu Country Club in Hawaii. On his arrival at The Islands, he was made aware that the committee members weren't completely satisfied with his press clippings. They wanted to see an exhibition.

Harry obliged. Using a driver, he drove ball after ball straight down the fairway. Then he changed to an iron and called each shot for distance and direction for a full half-hour.

The Hawaiians still remained unconvinced, and Harry thought it was time to haul out the clincher. For his trick shot, he borrowed a watch from one of his audience. He rested his ball on the watch, drew back his club, and swung carefully.

The ball sailed off down the fairway - a perfect shot - and Harry bent down to retrieve the watch.

Oh-Oh! The crystal was smashed to pieces. For a brief instant Harry looked down at the fractured timepiece. Then he calmly returned the watch to its owner.

"The trick of this shot," he said genially, "is to crack the crystal without damaging the watch itself!"

Can you beat that?

Then there was the case of C. Arthur Thompson of British Columbia, Canada, who had played golf for many years. It kept him so agile that he even was able to tour the links when he was past 100 years of age.

On October 3, 1966, at the age of 97, he managed to shoot a round lower than his age. Thompson scored a 96 on the 6,215 yard Uplands course.

Can you beat that?

Out at the Inverness Golf Club in Toledo, they still call the seventh hole "Ted Ray's Hole." It is so named in honor of the great Britisher who won the U.S. Open there in 1920.

The hole itself is a 320 yard dogleg which can be straightened out to 290 yards - if you carry the forest between the tee and the cup.

Four times in the U.S. Open, Ted Ray cleared those trees; twice, he got directly on the green; once he landed in a trap beside the green; and once, he came to rest on the fairway at the edge of the green.

The British pro scored four birdie 3's at this tough hole and he won the championship by a single stroke!

Can you beat that?

Or how about this...If you ever asked the golf pro Bobby Jones what was tough about the game of golf, he always gave you the same answer. "Long putts are the greatest problem in golf"...and Jones showed everybody how to handle them.

In 1928, for 10 consecutive rounds, Jones averaged 30 putts a round. Confronted with the longest putt in the game - a 120 foot affair on a green at St. Andrews, Scotland - Bobby unsheathed his putter, "Calamity Jane", and knocked that little white ball into that far away cup for a world's record!

Can you beat that?

Remember these crazy golf facts the next time you are out there on the links, and who knows, maybe someday you will have your very own fact to share with others!

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