Golf is Not a Game of Perfect

by Bob Rotella

  Someday, I am going to talk Tom Kite into conducting an experiment to prove this. We occasionally do clinics together. As I imagine it, at some clinic, he and I will select someone with a handicap of 20 or so to play a round with Tom. The duffer and Tom will each hit the first three shots on par fives, the first two shots on par fours, and the tee shot on par threes. Then they will switch balls. The duffer will hole out Tom’s, and Tom will hole out the duffer’s.

  I am prepared to bet that the score of the ball Tom takes over from the duffer will be lower than the score of the ball the duffer takes over from Tom.

  Look at it another way. Nick Price in 1993 led the Tour in scoring average with just under 69 strokes per round. He hit an average of twelve or thirteen greens per round. Most 20-handicappers I see hit at least four or five greens per round. If they had Nick Price’s short game, they’d be shooting in the seventies instead of the nineties. But they botch too many shots from 120 yards and in.

  Nick tells me that improving his short game has contributed enormously to the improvement in his general attitude over the past few years. He is so confident in his wedges and his putter that he knows he will score well even on days when he’s not swinging well. This gives him peace of mind and helps him maintain the mind-set that has characterized his recent play. He can be patient and trusting.

  Good short shots are extremely productive. On the average par four, you can hit an excellent drive, a pretty good approach, and still have lots of work left to make par. Foul up one of the putts and you’re looking at a bogey. Conversely, you can hit two bad shots with the longer clubs—say, a drive into the rough and a fat approach—and still save your par with an excellent chip or pitch that stops next to the hole. In terms of scoring, the payoff for a good short shot is much higher than the payoff for a good long shot.

  Curtis Strange won the U.S. Open in 1989 even though he hit the ball into nine greenside bunkers in the final round. He got up and down eight times. And yet, he appeared in golf magazines thereafter as an exemplar of the swing. His swing didn’t win the Open; if he had had a great swing working, he wouldn’t have been in nine bunkers. It was his ability to play sand shots, putt, think and stay patient.

  A couple of years ago, John Cook, Brad Faxon and Fred Couples were all in the top eight on the money list, but they were all way down in the rankings on driving accuracy. They won money because they all had great short games.

  Pat Bradley, during the years she dominated the LPGA Tour, told me that, in her mind, missing a green didn’t matter. She was just as intent on, and confident about, holing chips and pitches as she was on long putts. That’s how solid her short game was.

  Most amateurs have heard about the importance of the short game. But judging by their actions, most don’t believe it. At almost any club I visit, I will find ten players standing on the practice tee, whaling away with woods and long irons, for every one I see at a practice green, refining the touch and the shots that will help him or her score.

  There’s no small amount of machismo involved in this. The long drive connotes strength, power, virility. The short game has connotations of delicacy and femininity. Part of my job as a sports psychologist is to help players get past this.

  All I can say is that if you want to score well, attach your ego to how well you think, how well you manage your game, how well you hit your wedges, how well you putt. The long-drive swing won’t be in the slot every day. But you can always think well, manage your game well, and play the short game well.

  The short game is what a lot of great golfers learn first. Bobby Jones spent countless hours on long summer afternoons and evenings chipping and pitching shots to the 13th green at the Atlanta Athletic Club, then sinking the putts.

  “I don’t remember any glimmering thought of form or any consciousness of a method in playing a shot,” Jones wrote later of those boyhood years. “I seemed merely to hit the ball, which is possibly the best way of playing golf.”

  Sixty years later, in Spain, Jose-Maria Olazabal had much the same kind of early training. He lived on a golf course where his father was the superintendent, and he spent hours and hours chipping and pitching. In the decades between Jones and Olazabal, dozens of great players learned the game by learning the short game first. Some were caddies, pitching and chipping for penny wagers. Tom Kite’s father built a bunker and green in his backyard in which Tom spent countless hours. So did the fathers of Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson.

  In fact, I would say that most great players first became good at getting the ball into the hole, at the short game. Then, later, they refined their full swings.

  Some modern players had the good fortune to have teachers who understood how to inculcate a short game. Tom Kite has told me about how he and Ben Crenshaw learned from Harvey Penick. Tom or Ben would say, for instance, “Mr. Penick, how do you hit a high lob over a trap and stop it real fast?”

  Harvey Penick was smart enough not to fill their heads with a lot of instruction about weakening their grips and not turning their right hands over. He gave them some balls and sent them out to a practice green. He told them to stand behind the bunker and pretend there was a tree growing in it. Then they were to hit balls over the tree. They were to make the tree grow higher until it was the right size to make the ball sit down and stop near the hole. And when they could do that, they were to come and tell him about it.

  Eventually, Tom and Ben would come running into the pro shop, proudly announcing that they had completed their assignment. Harvey Penick would go out to the practice green and watch.

  And if one of them asked him a question about technique for the high lob, Mr. Penick would reply, “I don’t know. Show me again.” After they’d demonstrated again, he would say, “It’s what you just did.”

  For the short game, he knew that touch, feel and confidence were paramount. And he knew how to teach them.

  How do you develop a good short game if you didn’t grow up on a golf course, have a backyard bunker, or have Harvey Penick for a teacher?

  First of all, you practice it. The professionals that I work with all do. If you’re not spending 70 percent of your practice time on shots from 120 yards in, you’re not trying to become the best golfer you can be.

  The pros play little games in the practice area. They’ll have their caddies take a couple of shag bags and put them ten yards apart, a hundred yards out. Then they’ll put a towel midway between the bags. Then they’ll shoot at the towel. They get a point for every ball that lands between the bags and three for every one that hits the towel. They lose two points for every ball that lands outside the bags. They frequently change the distance they’re hitting, of course. Or they play little up and down games around the practice green, frequently for small bets. A player can’t get enough of this kind of practice.

  Tom Kite has a couple of excellent short-game practice routines.

  In the first, he sends his caddie, Mike Carrick, precisely 40 yards out from the practice tee. Tom then tries to hit to a ball bag at Carrick’s feet. As soon as he makes contact with the ball Tom yells out the distance he thinks it will go. He might, for instance, yell, “thirty-eight,” if he thinks it will land two yards short of Carrick. When the ball lands, Carrick tells him the exact distance it traveled. If it goes precisely to the target, Carrick simply raises his arms over his head—touchdown.

  Once he’s handling 40 yards, Tom changes to 50, then 60, then 70, and on up to 120. When he’s done that, he starts staggering the distances—first 40, then 80, then 60, then 110. In this way, he sharpens his touch with his wedges.

  Tom and I often play a similar game from the practice bunker. I’ll stand on the green, 20 yards away, and hold out my hand. Tom has to blast the ball close enough to my hand so that I can catch the ball without moving my feet. When he’s done that, I move a few steps closer. And then closer, until, in the final stage, I am squatting on the lip of the bunker, just a few yards from Tom, and he has to feather the ball to me the way he would if he we
re blasting to a tight pin.

  I don’t suggest that high handicappers try this with their firstborn children as catchers, at least not at first. I offer it as an illustration of how well a player like Kite hits wedges, and how hard he works to maintain his touch with the short clubs.

  The ideal way to develop a good mental approach to golf would be to learn how to think your way around the green, and then let those skills transfer to the long game. From a psychological point of view, the short game requires the same uncluttered mind, the same focus on the target, and the same disciplined routine that the long game requires—only more so.

  What do I mean by more so?

  First of all, have no swing thoughts whatsoever from 120 yards and in. Think only of the target.

  You will use your standard routine for the short game, except that you may want to make a few more practice swings, eyes focused on your target, until the swing feels right and you can trust it completely.

  More so than in the long game, you will have shots that require some adjustments in grip and stance. You may have odd lies. Take care of those adjustments with the first couple of practice swings.

  Don’t hit the shot thinking about making a weight shift, or how far your backswing should go. That kind of thought introduces tension into the body, and tension can ruin a pitch or chip.

  Frequently, the pitch shot you face will be shorter than the distance you get from a full swing with your wedge. This poses a problem for many amateurs. One way to combat it is to know what your optimal wedge distance is and lay up to that distance. If you’re 260 yards from the green and you can only hit the ball 230 with your fairway wood, it makes no sense to hit that wood if your favorite approach shot is a wedge from 100 yards. Hit a 6 or a 7-iron, then hit the wedge.

  But when you do face a wedge from other than your optimal distance, trust your feel. If you’ve practiced enough, you’ll have it. And don’t try to get too cute. If your normal swing produces a 100-yard wedge shot, and your distance is 98 yards, don’t start thinking about taking two percent off your normal swing. Even professionals can mess themselves up trying to take just a little off their full swings.

  Once you’ve set up, taken your practice swings, and envisioned the shot, don’t freeze over the ball. Look at the target. Swing.

  For my professional players, 120 yards from the pin is a threshold distance. From within that range, I want them to be thinking about sinking the shot. The hole is their ultimate target. Obviously, this may be asking a little too much of most amateurs. I would not recommend that a 20-handicapper try to hole a 110-yard wedge shot if the flag is tucked on the far edge of the green, close to a pond—because, by definition, 20-handicappers don’t hit their wedges that accurately. Facing such a tight and dangerous pin placement from 110 yards, the 20-handicapper should pick a safer target, closer to the middle of the green. The threshold distance for an amateur might be 40, 60, or 80 yards, depending on his or her skills. Every player has to judge that individually. But inside your threshold distance, don’t just go for the middle of the green and don’t just try to get it close.

  From inside your threshold distance, think about holing the shot.

  You have to consider how the ball is going to roll once it hits the ground. If the slope of the green is going to make the ball break, you must shift your target accordingly. It may become an imaginary hole two feet to the left of the real hole or five feet right. But whenever possible, you should have your imaginary target be the same distance from the ball as the real target, the hole.

  Ninety percent of the players I work with pick a target at the distance they want the ball to travel. This is the way I would teach a youngster to do it. But some players have been brought up to chip or pitch to a landing spot and to think of that as their target. If they have, I don’t insist that they change, but I do insist that they commit themselves to spot-chipping every time the same way. The main thing is that the player be thinking about chipping the ball in the hole, not just getting it on the green or getting it close.

  There may be occasions when you can’t see the hole on a short shot. You might, for instance, be at the bottom of a slope, pitching up to an elevated green. In that situation, think about dropping the ball straight onto the flagstick. This frightens some people. They think the ball will go too long. But the slope of the land causes the ball to pop up higher and land shorter than they expect.

  WHEN I FIRST started to work with Davis Love III, he was a student at the University of North Carolina. His father was an old friend of mine from Golf Digest schools, and he sent Davis to me for help with the mental side of his game.

  As a college student, Davis already had a long, fluid swing and enormous distance. He knew how to hit the short shots, having been taught by his father, who was a master. But his short game wasn’t as productive as it would need to be if he wanted to be a successful professional.

  I suggested that he approach pitches and chips the way his friend Michael Jordan approached scoring in basketball. Jordan just looked at the basket and shot. I wanted Davis to do the same thing with chips and putts—just look and react. I told him to think of his short game as a run-and-shoot offense.

  I threw another metaphor at him, suggesting that it was a lot like playing jazz on the piano. Anyone can learn to put his fingers on the right keys, just as anyone can mechanically place his putter or his wedge in the right spot. But to make beautiful music, a piano player has to let it flow, the way a putter or chipper has to look and react.

  Davis also needed to learn to think about holing his short shots. When he first came to me, he was not thinking about getting his chips and pitches into the hole. He was thinking about getting up and down. Sometimes he’d be confident he would. Sometimes he’d be worried he wouldn’t. But he was not thinking about the hole.

  That had to change before he could win consistently, and it did.

  Davis has gotten better every year, and he’s become a fine player with his wedge and putter. Of course, I’m particularly happy for him when he wins a tournament with his short game.

  A few years ago, at the Tournament of Champions, in the last two rounds, Davis hit something like six fairways and five or six greens. He won the tournament because he had his wedge and putter going so well.

  I remember his triumph at the Tournament Players Championship and in particular the way he played the 8th hole at that tournament, a long par three. During the final round, Davis pushed his tee shot a bit and wound up right of the green. He was getting ready to play his second shot when he heard a couple of guys in the gallery behind him making bets about whether he could get up and down. Davis stopped.

  He turned toward the bettors and said, “Guys, I’m going to make this shot.”

  Then he turned around, went through his routine, and holed the pitch for a birdie.

  Of course, thinking about the hole doesn’t always work quite that well. A few years ago, Brad Faxon got into a sudden-death playoff at the Buick Open. He hit an errant approach and left himself with a nearly impossible shot—from a thin lie, over a bunker to a tight pin. He had to make it to stay alive.

  Most players, faced with that shot on national television, would have thought about avoiding disaster. They would have played not to stub it, not to leave the ball in the bunker. They would have been satisfied just getting the ball somewhere on the green.

  Not Brad. He took a long, fluid swing and flopped the ball just over the lip of the trap. It trickled down, rolled just over the edge of the cup—and past. Brad fell to the ground, unable to believe it hadn’t gone in.

  Those are the breaks of the game. The important thing is that Brad had focused sharply on hitting the ball into the hole. If you do that, your misses will be closer and the breaks will, eventually, even out.

  Above all in the short game, be decisive. Your model might be Tom Watson’s famous chip shot from the deep fringe at the 17th hole at Pebble Beach, the shot that won the U.S. Open in 1982. Bill Rogers, Watson’s playing pa
rtner, must have taken ten minutes to get the ball from the fringe up to the pin. Watson’s mind remained quiet. He took a look at the lie, then returned to stand with his caddie, Bruce Edwards, to wait until it was his turn to play. Then he walked behind the ball, took two practice strokes, decided it felt good, took a last look at the target, and let the shot go.

  Most golfers would have hunched over that ball forever, until whatever touch they had was gone. They would have decided that it was good enough just to keep the ball close. Then they would have jabbed at it and sent it skittering past the hole.

  But Watson told his caddie he was going to put the ball in the hole. And he did.

  10.

  What I Learned from Bobby Locke

  WHEN I WAS a boy in Rutland, Vermont, I quite accidentally got to know Bobby Locke, the man widely acclaimed as the greatest putter who ever lived. I had a summer job toting clubs at the Rutland Country Club. Locke, coincidentally, had married a Vermont woman, and he spent a few weeks every summer with her family. The Rutland Country Club was the best course around, and he would come by to play a few rounds or give an exhibition. I got his bag.

  Altogether unwittingly, from both his perspective and my own, he began my education in that part of golf which is played between the ears.

  Bobby Locke did not, to my eyes anyway, look like much of an athlete. He was pear-shaped, with a thin little mustache, and he still wore plus fours and a long-sleeved shirt with a tie, even though this was around 1960.

  Nor did he display the fierce demeanor that I had been led to believe was common to all successful athletes. He was not one to get up at dawn. Most days, he would show up at the course around ten in the morning. He’d hit fifteen or twenty wedges, chip and putt for a few minutes, and then go play. He walked very slowly, so much so that some members grumbled when he was on the course. But I noticed that he never spent very much time over the ball.