Why not drives: The ball is teed up. Everybody’s already played from more or less the same spot during practice rounds and/or the pro am (hence, days to strategize.) The fairway provides is the largest target on the hole. Huge headed drivers.
Why not short iron/wedge approach shots: 3 wedges of the same length provide lots of variation in trajectory and distance with the same swing. Square grooves.
Why not putting: Sure, for tour pros, it’s an absolute pressure cooker. But I’ve seen guys who’ll never break an egg putt like Morris Hatalsky for couple of holes.
Long irons…the X-ray, CAT scan and MRI of the golf swing.
I read somewhere that Merion is going to play at about 7000 for the US Open. The thing they are not getting is that when you just move the tees back, you change the shape of the hole and completely change the shape of the required tee shots, the angles and intention. A straight high drive out to the apex of a dogleg is not the same as shaping a tee shot into the correct position. It would be better to keep it at 6400 and grow the rough a foot deep on the second cut… bring the fairways in to 25 or 30 yards wide.
That would be great, but as you say, TV and sponsors wouldn’t go for it. And it’s ironic that it was mass media and mass marketing which took away much of the pleasure from what had always been the ultimate individualist sport. Persimmon and blade golf was a grindstone that shaped character, an individual struggle for accomplishment. The sport where you call penalties on yourself!
The USGA didn’t (perhaps couldn’t) put up much of a fight. The manufacturers, the tours and media moguls “fixed” golf to their engineering and profit projection specs. Now everybody can play some. But almost none play the game golf’s greats played. We could. It’s harder to learn, slower to perfect but so much more satisfying and interesting to play.
A buddy of mine just retired at 55, full benefits, great health etc… He’ll be retired for another 30 years! His swing is so full of band aids and compensations that I urged him to sign up with ABS and go left handed with blades and persimmon. In five years of daily practice he’d have a great game. By the time he was 70 he’d be shooting his age. My point - life is no longer too short to golf the right way, the great way.
The problem is 99% of the golfing public don’t have any desire for the sacrifice & the effort needed to get truely good. They want results and want them now. They wanna take one less club into the green than their buddies. Even if they are in the trees it doesn’t matter. The new shiny driver X launched this week promises another instant 92,000 yards off the tee and they fall for it. Imagine how quickly a company that invented a guaranteed straight driver but cost 20 yards would go bust?
The golfing public is lazy. I don’t blame all the teaching pro’s out there band-aiding a living. They are giving the people what they want. They know as long as a client is striking the ball better at the end of the session they will return. Fix the swing on that day and it’ll put food on the table. Like the straight hitting driver co, they’d go bust if intentions were pure.
You bring up some really good points, but I don’t think “the golfing public is lazy”. It is a matter of priorities. They just don’t have the time and they don’t want to be a slave to the game. Just my thoughts of having spent thirty years on the lesson tee.
haha I do get carried away a little at times. I do agreed about life getting in the way. heck I’ve got a 50hour working week to get through before I can lift a club. Thankfully I work nights though.
Perhaps I should have said staying power or commitment to the goal. Its too often I see a good lesson ‘go down the drain’ as the player returns to their ‘old swing’. That guy failed himself by blaming the pro when he didn’t commit to the task of improvement. Thats the angle a great teacher needs to find. How to inspire & get the goal through to the student, and keep that fire burning.
Despite being a good player myself, I’ll never hands out swing tips to playing partners, because they want instant results. For them, I’d rather teach them how to play the game rather than swing a club
I agree with both of the above posts. Sacrifice and effort is needed to get really good. And those in the golfing public who have neither the time nor inclination to take that route aren’t lazy, but they are playing a different game for different reasons.
There’s those for whom golf is purely social. They play just for the camaraderie of knocking it around with friends and/or friendly strangers. If they play well enough to keep a steady pace, without interrupting the conversation, that’s all they need. And of course there’s business golf, the putting green sales pitch, the company tournament etc… I say that’s great! It’s all good!
Then there’s those aspiring to ‘work the ball predictably with a long iron’ level. They practice and play measuring their progress against themselves and the course. What clubs others hit to the green or who out drove who is irrelevant in the larger picture of their game’s improvement. They tend to be the quiet guys on the course. They’re also the ones who set up at the far end of the driving range where they can be alone with their thoughts and video cameras.
Everybody I’ve ever met who was truly interesting either was (or was working on becoming) really good at something. The guys at the end of the range have decided golf is that “something”. You could speculate for days on what ‘inner needs’ this fulfills, but I believe it’s no different from restoring vintage cars or turning wooden bowls. They needed to find something deserving of their time, something they can invest in and take satisfaction from.
I spent a lot of time practicing golf, grinding balls and playing until the moon rose over the trees… mostly alone.
I missed out on a lot of keg parties and road trips with friends. But I think the pursuit of golf is a noble cause. It fine tunes a lot of things like concentration, physical fitness to some degree, spacial awareness, chi awareness whether conscious or subconcious, touch and feel, dedication to a task, control of breath and heart rate if you are having success at competition. There are a lot of qualities being developed by learning golf at an advanced level.
For awhile there were a number of books written with the word “Zen” in the title, from “Zen in the Art of Archery” to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. People reach for an activity to structure their consciousness, their artistic and creative impulse, their self regard, their values…all kinds of things.
As Lag describes his practice, it seems to offer all these opportunities. Even in my slowly evolving action, in each and every ball I hit, I’m brought face to face with the absolute truth of what’s been accomplished and what remains to be done. That’s a rare thing these days.
Nothing is going to offer this more than striking a long iron off turf. It’s what I miss most when watching professional golf these days… and to me, it’s a big miss.
It seems that between his 2 feet, he likes to keep a full foot-print (combined between left and right) on the ground. For example, when he adds pressure to his left heel on the backswing, he removes it from the right heel. He ends up on his right toe on the followthrough, while his left toe moves off the ground. Etc.
The interesting aspect to my gaze is the cuffs on his pants and the 1" break of material on the top of his shoes. Most slacks have a slight backward taper toward the heel and a slight break on the front of the shoe.
When he loads back, the tensions via torque are making the slacks shorter and exposing his socks, and even when getting lower through the zone the socks still show, so those torques must be still present. So he is going from longer to shorter while keeping torque buildup downstairs…so no slack in the slacks.
It might sound strange, but to a certain extent, when I watch hogan’s right foot and where his club head is post impact I am reminded of the video where lag makes his swing off of his right foot and doesn’t land on his left until well after the impact zone (I’ve linked the video below). I’m not saying that hogan was trying to do what Lag is doing in the video, but the intentions that hogan has (I believe) are exhibited (through exaggeration) in the motion lag enacts. Hogan’s foot doesn’t seem to “release” from the ground until after impact (If i had to guess its 4-5 inches or so after the ball) Not simultaneous to or before. It just seems to me that Hogan hits that ball with all the force he’s generating with his right foot and the ground:
