So You Want to Play Golf: A True Beginner's Guide

By William Murdick and Paul Steward

A beginner's guide to understanding and playing the game of golf, including its equipment, rules, etiquette, and shot making techniques. A final section offers alternative methods and fixes to the common problems that plague even experienced amateurs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543948493

Book preview

So You Want to Play Golf

A True Beginner’s Guide

Copyright © 2018 by William Murdick and Paul Steward

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-54394-848-6

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-54394-849-3

BookBaby Publishing

Cover Photo

82-year-old Dan Cunha of Tallahassee tees off on the 18th hole at Smoky Mountain Country Club, Whittier, NC. iPhone photo by William Murdick.

Contact Michael Cornblum at [phone] or [e-mail] to inquire about the wonderful accommodations and affordable golf packages at Smoky Mountain CC.

Other Photos

Other photos in this book were taken by Yoshiko Murdick at Hilaman Golf Course, Tallahassee, FL. Our thanks to Jan Auger, course manager, for allowing us to use the scenic Hilaman course for a background.

Table of Contents

The Game of Golf

Whence Golf?

The Structure of the Game

How This Book Teaches Golf

Course Amenities

The Nature of Competition

Handicaps

The Downside to Golf

Attitude is Very Important

Golf Clubs

Buying Golf Clubs

Distance Indicators

Golf Balls

Golf Tees

Golf Bags

Golf Push Carts

Golf Shoes

Golf Gloves

Sun Protection

Bad Weather

Shirts and Pants

Rules of the Game

Etiquette

Should You Take Lessons?

How to Choose a Teaching Pro for Your Lessons

How to Take a Golf Lesson

Shot Making

Swinging the Driver

Details of the Driver Swing

Fairway Woods and Hybrid Long Irons

Irons

Pitch Shots

The Basic Sand Shot

Awkward and Difficult Sand Shots

Chipping

Putting

The Fixes

Get Flexible: Mentally, Physically, Creatively

Get More Distance

Get Fitted for the Right Shaft

Get Rid of Your Slice

Stop Pulling and Chunking Your Irons

Improve Your Sand Bunker Play

Improve Your Pitching

Improve Your Chipping

Improve Your Putting

Practice Intelligently

Course Management

Understand How Good Scores Are Achieved

Golf-Life Management

Part 1

The Game of Golf

Chapter One

Whence Golf?

We first encounter the word golf in a document written by King James II in 1457 banning the activity. Supposedly he wanted the athletic men of his realm practicing archery instead, so they could save his butt in case of an attack. But we suspect that he may have played a round of golf himself and experienced the unique displeasure of unintentionally hitting his golf ball into a lake.

The pro golfer Raymond Floyd has his own etymological theory: "They call it golf because all the other four letter words were taken."

Yes, a sense of humor is useful if you want to play this game. And some patience. There is a lot to golf. It’s not like going out into a field and throwing a frisbee around. And it’s not just hitting a golf ball. Golf is a whole culture, with traditions regarding general attire and rules of etiquette for behavior on the golf course and in the clubhouse. The tools—the golf clubs, golf balls, carts, GPS devices, et al.–are a complex set of instruments offering many possible choices, and they should ultimately be selected with care. Even the scoring systems (note the plural) require explanation. As do the rules of the game. Hence Part 1 of this book provides an explanation of the culture you will be stepping into, if you want to play golf. It also shows you how to get into the game smoothly, without stress.

No doubt, if you are thinking about getting into golf, you are eager to get out to the practice range, if not the course itself, and start hitting golf balls. Good. Do that. Part 2 of this book will help you get started as a ball striker. But don’t neglect the important information in Part 1. You can’t hit a golf ball without a club and a ball, and Part 1 tells you how to choose those items and where to get them cheaply, or at a very high quality level at a very high price. And it will tell you how to behave on a golf course so that you don’t irritate your fellow players and embarrass yourself with one social blunder after another.

Ideally, if you are just taking up the game, you will spend a couple of days reading Part 1, then make some preliminary purchases of equipment, and then start reading Part 2 before you ever swing a golf club. Ideally. But however you proceed is OK. This book is here for you when you need it, and if you are a typical beginner, you will need it often.

Chapter Two

The Structure of the Game

In golf, you hit a golf ball with various types of golf club. The purpose of golf is to get around a golf course in as few hits (called strokes) as possible. Courses are divided up into sets of holes, either 9 or 18, each one of which has this structure:

a starting point, the tee box

a fairway, a stretch of nicely cut short grass

some rough, longer less amenable grass along the sides of the fairway and sometimes in front of the beginning of the fairway

obstacles, such as a creek or a lake or trees or a sand bunker (a pit with sand in it)

a green, a section of incredibly short, carpet-like grass; a typical green might be 40 feet deep by 50 feet wide.

a hole, a buried cup in the green, which is your target; the hole will have a removeable metal stick with a flag attached to the top so it can be seen from a distance. Workers change the location of the hole on each green every day, or every other day, depending on the amount of play.

White out of bounds stakes might show up along one side of the rough. If you hit your ball across the line of those stakes, it is officially out of play and you suffer a two-stroke penalty.

Each golf hole is ranked as a par 3, par 4, or par 5. Those are the scores (the number of strokes it takes you to get the ball in the hole) that you are expected to make if you play each hole correctly, without error. The ranking assumes two putts once the ball is on the green. Putts are strokes in which you roll the ball along the ground with a special club called a putter. So on a par 3, you are expected to hit your ball onto the green in one shot from the tee box (your starting point), and then be in the hole after two putts. On a par 4, a much longer hole, it should take you two strokes to reach the green. A par 5, the longest type of hole, allows three strokes to reach the green.

The rankings are based on the length of the hole: a par 3 might be 150 yards long, a par 4 might be 375 yards long, and a par 5 might be 480 yards long. Those numbers vary on each hole depending on which tee you are using. A tee is a starting point indicated, usually, by two colored wooden blocks or metal objects set in the ground. Golf courses set up different tees and tee boxes for women, seniors, men, very good players, and tournament players or super-long hitters. Typically, red tees mark where the front-most tee position is, making for the shortest distance to the hole. Those are traditionally for women and children and are sometimes called the ladies tees. A set of yellow tees a bit further back might mark the starting point for seniors in their 60s and up. Regular men’s tees, further back, are often colored white.

You paid the fee to play the course, so you can play from any tee you want to, at any age.

When men play from the ladies’ tees, those tees are addressed euphemistically as the front tees, to preserve the players’ sense of male virility. Yes, macho attitudes are a problem on the golf course, as they are everywhere else.

The Professional Golf Association (PGA) advises players to play it forward, meaning don’t play from back tees out of pride, but choose tees that make sense in terms of how far you actually hit a golf ball. We, the authors of this book, advise the same. In Chapter Thirty-Six we reprint a distance table created by the two American national golf organizations, the PGA and the USGA, for determining which tees you should use.

Beginners rarely get pars. More experienced amateurs typically get 3 to 9 pars each round of 18 holes. A pro golfer, male or female, shoots a few strokes below par on a good day. That means she or he has made some birdies and possibly an eagle or two. A birdie is a score of one under par. So if you hit your tee shot onto the green on a par 3 hole, and then make your first putt for a score of 2, you have made a birdie. On a par 3, if you hit the ball into the hole on your tee shot—a hole in one—you have made an eagle. Double eagles, called albatrosses, are possible on the pro circuit—a two on a par 5, or a hole-in-one on a par 4—but put that thought out of your mind for the time being. Or forever.

You are more likely, as a beginner, to become familiar with bogies (1 over par), double bogies (2 over par), triple bogies (3 over par), and quadrupole bogies (4 over par). If you get to the point where you are putting or chipping for a quadrupole bogey, most amateur groups will tell you to pick up your ball and go wait on the next tee. Don’t be embarrassed. Scoring an ugly high score on a hole happens to everyone, even professionals. Kevin Na, a top player on the men’s Tour, hacked around in the woods for a 16 on a par-4. John Daly, who had won two major tournaments on the Tour, had an 18 on a par-5. Even Presidents disgrace themselves. In 1911, President Taft scored a 27 on the par-4 17th hole at the Kebo Valley golf course in Maine. The hole features a huge sand bunker covering the whole front of a hill, atop of which sits the out-of-sight green. It took Taft 14 strokes just to get out of the bunker.

Chapter Three

How This Book Teaches Golf

This book comes to you in three parts. Part 1 explains the nature of the game. Part 2 is designed to get you out on the golf course, alone or with friends, in such as way that you have a little bit of fun and don’t humiliate yourself beyond redemption. That’s not easy or automatic. Golf is a difficult, high skill activity, and both the course itself and the rules of the game are structured to make it even harder.

Part 2 will not teach you how to play golf the way the pros do on TV. It will teach you basic golf swings, without going into so much detail that your thoughts get tied in knots. The swings we will teach you will be designed to move the ball down the fairway (avoiding the woods way off to the right or left), then, on the following shots, move the ball in the direction of the golf green and the pin and the hole. We will give you methods of hitting the many specialty shots that will comprise the majority of shots you hit on each hole: the hit & run, the long pitch, the short pitch, the sand bunker extraction, the chip shot, and various putts, as well as shots from uphill and downhill and sidehill lies. Sometimes the methods we will teach you will be the same methods used by the pros, but in Part 2 we will also show you alternative ways that are most likely to prevent you from disastrous failure. For example, for the great pro Tiger Woods, chipping—knocking the ball onto the green from a short distance away–comprises a delicate set of shots using any of seven different clubs. But in Part 2, we will teach a way to chip mainly using just one club—the so called favorite club method. Then we will suggest you expand that to a three-club method.

Part 3 will help you solve the kinds of problems that plague beginners and even experienced amateurs. This part of the book will often (though not always) teach you how to hit shots the way you are supposed to, that is, the way the pros do it. More often it will show alternative methods used by good players, as well as oddball gimmicky methods that might be your only salvation. Once you are shooting an 18-hole course score of 110 or so, and it has become apparent what your weaknesses are, then Part 3 will help you improve your game by focusing on those weaknesses, so that you can get your score down into, let’s say, the mid-90s. From there on, you will improve depending on your willingness to practice and take lessons—or simply play the game for years.

Or, heck, decades later you may go to your grave with a low score of 95. Don’t feel bad. You’ll be in the majority up there in Golf Heaven.

A caveat for left handers:

We generally assume that the reader is right handed. So, for example, when we refer to the forward foot, we mean the left foot. Left handers will have to re-imagine many of the shot-making instructions. Sorry, but to say everything twice, once for right handers and once again for left handers, is not feasible without seriously increasing the size and cost of the book.

Chapter Four

Course Amenities

Golf courses offer various amenities, designed to make your round go faster and more comfortably. In addition to the various tee markers on each tee box, you are also likely to find water jugs or fountains on many holes. You should carry a thermos and keep it filled. Don’t get dehydrated.

Ball washers are also located near the tee boxes on many holes. They are generally painted red and look like a water jug on top of a pole, with a black knob of a handle on top and a towel hanging down below. You lift up the top piece to reveal a round slot. Then put the ball in the slot and pump the handle up and down. There should be soapy water inside the washer. A half dozen strokes will do the trick. Then release the ball and dry it with the cloth below the washer. Clean golf balls supposedly travel further and straighter than dirty ones. Perhaps. Anyway, clean balls look nice and are easier to find in tall grass or the woods.

There will probably be yardage signs on the tee box telling you how long the hole is from each