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Archive : June 2007

June 22, 2007

Loosing Your Grip

It's mid June and we are all going to weekend tournaments and playing 9 hole scrambles at various courses. By this time in the season we are playing fairly good golf and have our techniques pretty much set for the season...and then it happens.

You take your club back and realize that you have lost your grip and then scramble to regrip which causes the clubhead to get out of alignment and when you strike the ball, nobody knows where it is going!

Most of the time we lose our grips at the top of the swing and even though we should not grip a club too tightly, I have a some pointers for maintaining control of the club.

1. Wrap the last three fingers of you left hand fairly firmly around the club's butt end.
2. Apply some slight pressure with your left thumb as you place the lifeline of the right palm upon it.
3. Apply some pressure from your right index finger as it pushes against the shaft, sealing your grip.

One of the first things I remember somebody telling me when I first started trying to learn the game of golf, which is a never ending process, was to place two or three blades of grass between the fleshy heel of the left hand then put the rest over the left thumb, extended down the shaft, to be trapped by the fleshy part of your right hand as you place it over the left.

Try this using a wedge and hit some shots to make sure your hands are in the same place when you complete the swing as they were at address. This means you did not lose the blades of grass during your swing. This will help with hands-on control.

I still do this when the wheels fall off on my golf swing and most of the time it is where my hands are that are causing the problem.

June 19, 2007

The Long Shot!

When the final round of the U. S. Open kicked off Sunday, Angel Cabrera was not on any list as a possible winner...he had not ever even won a major tournament yet, so Tiger Woods was the expected winner.

I had said from day one it would be Tiger Woods or Jim Furyk, but Sunday's outcome just shows that "on any given day, any player can win."

Cabrera toughed it out on probably one of the hardest courses possible and faltered a time or two but continued through his 18 holes and posted his score.

Tiger and Furyk knew what they needed to do...birdie, birdie to force a playoff or birdie, birdie, birdie to win.

Tiger's magic wand, his putter, sputtered and he came up one stroke short of the victory. Jim Furyk is the runner up again.

I wonder if Angel Cabrera had a special blanket to cover up the trophy when he went to bed that night...do you think he stared at that trophy all night long?

June 15, 2007

Day 1 - Oakmont

The U. S. Open is tough again this year. After the first round there are only two players, Angel Cabrera and Nick Dougherty, who managed to be in the red numbers.

There is a large group of players with a score of 1 over par. Bubba Watson, Fred Funk, Jim Furyk, Geoff Ogilvy, Justin Rose, Vijay Singh and Tiger Woods are in this group which makes them tied for 5th.

The good thing about all of this ... they are only 3 strokes off of the first place score.

Tiger had problems getting off the box into the fairway (9 out of 14), along with his putter letting him down a little. He was the favorite coming into the tournament and nothing that happened today has changed that idea yet.

The #2 player in the world managed a 74 even with the wrist brace that kept coming off and then going back on. Phil Mickelson scrambled through and finished a complete 18 holes for the first time in three weeks. He's still not out of the running, but he just hasn't been able to prepare for this tournament to really give Tiger a run for his money.

There are maybe 9 players who can win the Open this year. Honorable mention goes to Jim Furyk, Adam Scott, Geoff Ogilvy, Zach Johnson and Vijay Singh. These guys are contenders ... but it really comes down to Phil and Tiger.

My money will be on Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk.

Bob Estes and Justin Leonard finished with 5 over to be in the group tied for 77th position.

Happy 51st Birthday to Fred Funk ...and did you see Ian Poulter's outfit today ... get me my sunglasses!

June 12, 2007

Putting - The KISS way

There is an old adage known as "KISS," which is translated as 'keep it simple stupid' (not to imply that any of us are stupid, it's only an acronym.

I am big on keeping things simple on the golf course.

Golf is a hard game, and when you make it more complicated by thinking too much and trying to do too much, you only make it more difficult.

I've had a horrible time putting this year, so I decided to break it down to the "KISS" principle and fix it.

To do this I started with a couple of basics which are now what I am focusing on each time I make a trip to the golf course. I had to make myself stop thinking about par, birdie or bogey and the horrible 3-putts, since that only made things worse.

Instead, I decided to concentrate on making a repeatable and consistent putting stroke - straight back and straight forward just like a pendulum, and to keep it smooth.

The other point I concentrated on was the speed of the putt. I've tried this for about 10 days worth of practice, and this past weekend it paid off big-time.

The scoring just started taking care of itself when I only thought about those two things. That allowed me to enjoy my round of golf a whole lot more than being frustrated with my performance.

Yes, I know I have to be able to read the greens and recognize the slope and undulations and see the line, but I know that if I can just get that first putt close to the hole, then I should be able to get a par, which will lower my scores by doing away with bogeys and 3-putts.

Since the majority of our scoring is based on what we do on the green, it is a good thing to work on this aspect of our games.

And it did lower my score!