When Bad Things Happen to Bad Golfers: Troubleshooting the 150 Most Troublesome Shots

By Gary Perkinson and T. J. Tomasi

Whether you’re new to the game but don’t want to advertise it or a good golfer who’s having a bad round, this book helps you solve your golf problems right on the course—before your next shot. The book shows you the “Five Faces of the Perfect Club,” a concept that helps you hit the ball out of any lie, from anywhere on the course, even if you don’t have a world-class swing. You’ll also find 150 practical solutions to common problems that will help you shave shots, save face, and enjoy the game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Aug 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9780470250150

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The year was 1992. The place was Phoenix, Arizona. I was a struggling young golf writer working one of the toughest beats in the country: the seedy, cutthroat world of Southwestern PGA Section golf. (Okay, okay . I was actually kind of a lazy, slightly overweight, early-middle-age golf writer who lived in a nice apartment with a balcony overlooking the mountains, drank a lot of beer, flew around to tony resorts, got lots of free golf shirts, and teed it up for nothing.) But though I may not have struggled much with the Arizona lifestyle, the game of golf was definitely another story. I wasn’t a complete waste of time on the golf course—like a lot of hackers, I’d played other sports, and I could occasionally put together a few good shots, or a few good holes, or even a couple of decent rounds from time to time. But in the overall skill hierarchy of the industry in which I worked, I pretty much sucked.

Working down the hall from me at the time was a crotchety, chess-playing golf professional from Burlington, Vermont, named T. J. To-masi. We’d met a few years earlier in New York, but we hadn’t really hung out until we met again in our Phoenix offices and realized that we were living right around the corner from each other, he next to a golf course, and I, somehow fittingly, next to a mall. We soon became fast friends, playing courses all over the valley and then retiring to the Tomasi homestead to drink, play chess, and watch golf. I listened reverentially as the master complained about the vagaries of his own game and then analyzed the swings of the guys on TV. I realized pretty quickly just how much I had to learn about this old, mysterious game, and I also realized that whether I liked it or not, I was probably going to have to learn it from this guy.

My real golf education with T. J., however, was reserved for those ovenlike Phoenix summer days when we would trudge over to the local daily-fee courses that the tourists avoided like the plague. I think he and I enjoyed these rounds not only because we entertained each other—I with impossible 2-iron shots out of the desert scrub that never worked, and he with silent fits of rage over just-missed shots that I would have died for but that he deemed to be complete garbage—but because we both knew that we were probably the only people in the state of Arizona willing to put up with each other’s nonsense.

I drifted out of the golf world a few years later, but I kept in touch with T. J. as he made his way to various head professional positions around the country and I took my writing and editing skills to fields as weirdly unrelated as baseball and animal welfare. And when my career eventually came full circle and I took a job in 2006 writing instruction articles for Golf magazine, T. J. had already been elected to the magazine’s Top 100 Teachers in America list, which meant that we would officially be imparting—or imposing, depending on your point of view—our vast collected knowledge of the golf swing to the masses.

It was around this time I started thinking that if I had learned anything over all those years of writing about swing planes, reverse weight shifts, and spine angles, it’s that average golfers are desperate for information that they can take to the golf course the next day, or the next weekend, and use to fix—even temporarily—whatever it is that’s ailing their game. They all know that they should be taking lessons, and some of them do. But most of them don’t, sometimes due to cost, but more often due to a lack of time.

I knew that golf magazines—with all of their drawbacks and limitations—and, more recently, the Internet, were serving that purpose, but I also knew that even at their best, these sources of information were often unable to bring together under one roof all the problems and situations that a typical weekend golfer faces when he heads out to the course with his friends or business associates. The simple fact is that as a golfer, you may take lessons every day of the week, read every golf magazine on the newsstand, and visit every golf site on the Internet, but when you slice your tee shots, or shank your wedges, or leave every putt short, you want answers at that moment—not after the round, or a couple of days later, but right then and there. It’s that simple—and it’s exactly what this book is designed to do: pinpoint what you’re doing wrong, and then tell you in simple terms what you need to do to fix it before your next shot.

This book will offer creative solutions to shot problems—solutions that may occasionally have you scratching your head (or questioning our sanity), but that can often help turn a disastrous situation on the golf course into something a lot more palatable. This is not to say that we won’t tell you to lay up or to hit your ball back to the fairway, because in many cases, that’s absolutely the correct play. But like the 2-irons I tried to hit from the jumping-cholla plants in the Arizona desert, creativity is what makes the game fun and what keeps you on your toes out there. There are probably few things more satisfying than making par from what everyone else had deemed an impossible lie.

The book starts out with a description of the five faces, an instructional concept developed by T. J. that moves away from the limiting idea that the clubface must always be square at impact. It works on the assumption that five angles of attack can be created with the clubface—square, open, closed, hooded, and laid back—and that when you match these angles with the position of the ball in the stance (forward, middle, or back) and the direction in which the shoulders are pointed (left, right, or straight), you’ve broken the code. (A quick note: throughout the book, the terms left and right are used as they apply to a right-handed golfer. Left-handers should reverse these designations as necessary.) You have all the information you need to hit the ball out of any lie, from anywhere on the golf course. And the best part is, you don’t have to have a world-class swing to take advantage of the five-faces system, and you don’t necessarily have to change your swing to reap the system’s benefits. We provide a detailed analysis of every swing problem that appears in the book, but the fact is, once you’ve grasped the concept that five clubface positions, three ball positions, and three shoulder positions are behind the trajectory of every shot in the game of golf, how you get the club down to impact becomes almost secondary. You can play well with the swing you’ve got—and over time, consistent use of the five-faces system will actually teach you how to make a better golf swing.

Once the five-faces concept is understood, the golfer can move to the second part of the book, which is a situation-by-situation description of just about everything that can go wrong on a golf course, and how—using your knowledge of the five faces—you can successfully navigate the problem and keep your scorecard from being littered with round-wrecking double and triple bogeys.

The rest of the book is divided into four parts, each representing the four main sections of a golf hole: the tee, the fairway, the short-game area around the green, and the putting green itself. Each part answers general questions about that particular area of the golf course and tackles the specific obstacles, situations, and swing problems normally encountered on that part of the course.

You’ll find that many of the problems and solutions overlap with other problems and solutions, which is really not surprising since there is a finite universe of physical moves that a human body can make when it’s asked to stand next to a small white ball, lift a golf club up around its shoulders, and then swing down and successfully make contact with the ball. But as it turns out, this was an advantage for us, because it allowed us to present a variety of solutions to problems that were similar but not identical. For example, if you’re hitting your wedges fat but also topping your drives, you may well have a weight-shift problem, and both are addressed in this book. For this reason, if you don’t find exactly the cure you’re looking for in one place, we encourage you to browse through the book and check out other tips for alternate solutions that may help your problem. The book is designed primarily as a reference text, so if you choose to read the book straight through from cover to cover, you’ll encounter some unavoidable repetition. For this reason, once you’ve read through and absorbed the information presented in the chapter on the five faces, you can feel free to skip ahead to the section of the book that specifically describes your problem.

As two guys who have played the game for a long time—and who have played it both well and (at least in my case) horribly—we’re confident that every golfer who picks up this book will find something that will improve his or her golf game—today. Believe me, if you’ve done it or been stumped by it out there on the golf course, so have we. The good news is, the solution you’ve been looking for is inside.

PART I

THE FIVE FACES

OF THE

PERFECT CLUB

If a lot of people gripped a knife and fork the way they do a golf club, they’d starve to death.

—SAM SNEAD

Mention the face of a golf club to most golfers, and if you don’t receive a blank stare, you’ll almost certainly get something along the lines of, Keep it square! That’s not horrible advice, and it’s certainly true in many cases, but it would be a lot more applicable to reality if golf were a game played in a huge indoor arena with artificial turf and eighteen perfectly straight fairways of the same length and width boxed in by walls and a ceiling; no bunkers, water hazards, hills, trees, or rough in sight; and bowl-shaped greens with the pin always cut smack-dab in the middle of the bowl. In this case, a square face would be all you’d need to play decent golf.

But of course, golf is anything but the neat and clean game described above. In fact, if golf is anything, it’s really a never-ending series of problems that require solutions. Golf is bad swings, bad lies, bad weather, bad luck, and bad vibes. Of course, it’s also good swings, good lies, good weather, good luck, and good vibes, but most mortals don’t seem fully prepared to deal with what happens when all the good and bad things are jumbled together in one big cosmic bag and dumped in front of them during a round. That’s golf—and keeping it square just isn’t going to cut it (or fade it, for that matter).

Along with the keep it square mantra that’s drilled into most golfers’ heads are the knowing admonitions that you’re opening the face at impact, or you’re snapping the face shut, or that you really smothered that one. These may all be true on any given shot, but the fact is that no spin/trajectory combination is bad in and of itself. The flight of the ball (low/high, right/left) is either appropriate or inappropriate for the shot at hand. The sooner the average golfer disabuses himself of the notion that there is one magic clubface position or shoulder position or ball position that’s going to have him hitting the ball like a tour pro, the sooner he’ll actually start getting closer to hitting the ball like a tour pro. As Ben Hogan said, Golf is a game of adjustments, and the sooner you learn how to make these adjustments by matching up your clubface, ball position, and shoulder alignment to create the ball flight you need to pull off the shot, the sooner you’ll max out your talent and ability to play the game.

Before we get into the specifics of each of the five faces and how they affect your ball flight, it’s important to first discuss the two other key aspects of your setup—the position of the ball in your stance and the alignment of your shoulders relative to the target line—and how they combine with the five faces to give you an arsenal of shots that will allow you to tackle any situation on the golf course.

Ball Position

If you’ve taken lessons or played the game for any length of time, you’re probably aware that there’s a standard or normal ball position for each type of club in your bag, and these positions generally move farther back in your stance as the club you’re using becomes more lofted (and physically shorter). For example, the normal ball position for a shot with your driver is off the heel of your front foot, while the same position with your wedge is in the center of your stance, equidistant between your feet. But when you want the club you’re using to produce a different trajectory from the one that’s built into the face at the factory, you need to adjust your ball position.

The position of the ball in your stance at address—whether it’s directly in the center, far forward off your front heel, far back off your back heel, or anywhere in between—is the primary factor controlling the height of your shot. Positioning the ball back in your stance creates a low shot because it effectively delofts the face of whatever club you’re swinging. In other words, when a club contacts a ball in the back of your stance, the shaft is angled toward the target, which reduces the effective loft of the clubface at impact—and less loft equals a lower shot trajectory.

Positioning the ball forward in your stance has the opposite effect. The face now has more effective loft because the shaft is leaning away from the target. A forward ball location gives the club you’re swinging a little more time to reach the ball, which in turn gives the face of the club more time to lay back (point up toward the sky) before it reaches the ball. (An important point to remember is that as you move the ball forward or backward in your stance, the butt end of the club handle should remain in the same position, roughly even with the inside of your front thigh. The only thing that moves forward or backward with the ball is the clubhead.)

Not surprisingly, you can do many different things with a golf ball just by moving the ball forward or backward in your stance—you can hit a low shot under the wind or a high, soaring wedge shot that drops straight down on the green, spins, and stops. You can get the ball under a low-hanging branch or to clear the top of an eighty-foot tree. The question is, why stop there, when you can also add shot variations created by the position of your shoulders in relation to the target line, and later, by the five faces themselves?

Shoulder Position

If you’ve spent any time reading golf articles, you’ve undoubtedly run into the concept of an open, closed, or square stance. Invariably, these articles describe these stance positions by referring to the position of the feet, usually through an imaginary line across the tips of the shoes known as the toe line. We think this is misleading for one primary reason: the golf club isn’t connected to your feet. The golf club is connected to your hands, which are connected to your arms, which are connected to your shoulders—and, biomechanically, the arms swing on the shoulder line.

You can have your feet aligned perfectly parallel to the target line, but if your shoulders are pointed left, chances are good that the ball will go left. Conversely, if your shoulders are square to the target line, you can pretty much put your feet anywhere you want and the ball will probably start straight down the target line.

In short, pretty much everything that’s ever been said about the toe line—at least when it comes to aligning your body correctly to the target—should have been said about the shoulders! It’s the position of your shoulders at address and their relationship to the target line— that is, the line that runs from your ball at address to the target—that determines exactly how the clubhead approaches and makes contact with the ball. That, along with the face of the club, controls the direction (left, straight, or right) in which the ball will travel just after impact.

For this reason, we will pay only minimal attention to the toe line in this book. It is our belief that you will have an immensely easier time understanding the flight of your ball if you understand the direct link between the position of your shoulders and the path of your swing.

Shoulder Options

Briefly then, what are your shoulder options? You’ve probably already figured it out: if a line drawn across the points of your shoulders (known hereafter as the shoulder line) is parallel to your target line, and your clubface is square at impact, your shot should start down the target line.

If your shoulder line is open to the target line—that is, if it’s pointing left of the target line but not parallel to it—your ball should start left after impact. And if your shoulder line is closed—in other words, if it’s pointing to the right of the target line—your ball should start to the right of the target line at impact. It’s important to note that in all cases, we said start. Where the ball finishes depends on its curve (left, right, or straight), and this is controlled by the position of the clubface (square, open, or closed) at impact.

When Open Is Closed

Before we go any further, let’s clear up an issue that understandably confuses many golfers. The terms open and closed do, in fact, have completely opposite meanings when applied to the clubface or to the shoulder line. The clubface for a right-hander is square when it points straight down the target line, open when it points to the right of the target line, and closed when it points to the left of the target line.

Your shoulders, on the other hand, are considered to be open when your shoulder line points left of the target line but not parallel to it, closed when your shoulder line points right of the target line, and parallel or square when your shoulder line is parallel with the target line.

To understand this concept better, picture a railroad track. If your stance is square, the face of your club should point directly down the outside rail toward the target, while your body lines—your feet, knee, hip, and shoulder lines—should all point directly down the inside rail toward the target, which is also known as parallel left.

Open Shoulders: The shoulders are open, or pointed to the left of the target line.

Closed Shoulders: The shoulders are closed, or pointed to the right of the target line.

Square Shoulders: The shoulders are parallel to the target line.

Get it? Great—now let’s take a closer look at each of the five faces.

The Five Faces

The five faces denote the five possible positions that your clubface can