Take your medicine

March 1, 2013 8:08 pm

TIP-take-your-medicine-1As the spring approaches and the grass starts growing, so will the rough and the bushes and in the event of a freak wind or a bad bounce and your golf ball ends up in the jungle, then I would always advise “Discretion is the better part of valour”.

It amuses me that when a player has missed a gap 50 yards wide called the fairway and yet they believe themselves able to thread their golf ball through a gap 6 inches wide to find their way back as in picture 1. This will not work more than once in a thousand attempts and yet the rate of attempting this miraculous recovery is certainly greater than that figure.

TIP-take-your-medicine-2One classic error I see is due to the restricted backswing scenario as in picture 2. What so often happens is that on checking how long a backswing the player is able to make they find it is restricted, now this should immediately lower the expectations of how far the next shot can go. Accordingly the club selection may as well be to a shorter club, and the acceptance should be made that a “shot back into play” is the best option, but yet so often instead the player makes the swing back with too straight a faced club, reaches the point of the restricted backswing, pauses to steel themselves for the oncoming assault on the ball which also serves to tense their muscles rendering them even less effective, and then an all-out lunge is made at the golf ball, culminating in either the ground going further than the ball, or even more embarrassing, no contact made whatsoever and the player is (red)faced with the same situation but with one more stroke added to their score.

I guess we have all made that mistake and I think you probably have to make mistakes to learn for them, but if you take my advice from many years of watching golfers in their natural habitat of the rough, take your medicine and just get back on the short grass and leave the miraculous recovery shots to the Bubba Watson’s of this world.

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