Congratulations. By picking up this book, you’ve made a commitment to your golf game. And commitment is what it takes to improve your scoring. Golf is a simple game in theory, but as you know, the skills and techniques required to excel are very complex. Whether you’re playing for a national championship, a club championship or simply trying to beat your personal best, you have to develop trust in your swing, your short game and your strategies. Tour players must trust their decisions and their ability to execute shots on the golf course in order to win tournaments and make a living. You have to do the same thing to get the greatest rewards from your golf experiences. In this book, I’ll show you how, using the same methods I use when I coach some of the best players in the world.
Golf’s most unique element is that no two rounds and no two courses are ever the same. Weather conditions change. So do ground conditions. Golf courses occupy flat sites and traverse hilly territory. A change as simple as the position of a pin can completely alter your shotmaking options. So golf is about adaptability, recognizing how conditions and circumstances will affect your shots and altering your strategy and execution to fit the specific requirements of the shot.
We marvel at the scores the Tour professionals shoot, and it’s true that most of us will never know what it feels like to fire a 65 on Sunday with the tournament on the line. Top professionals do it by squeezing every ounce out of their games. Like you, they don’t hit the ball perfectly every time. They miss fairways and greens. They struggle in difficult conditions. But they also know what it takes to fade the ball around a tree or to hit a soft flop shot to a tough pin. When they find themselves in the fairway with 100 yards to the target, they know how to play a number of different shots depending on conditions. They understand when and how to chip or pitch or putt from off the green. And they know how to practice so that they are rarely in unfamiliar situations on the golf course. In other words, they give themselves scoring chances even when things are not going perfectly.
Anyone can play good golf on those magical days when every shot is pure and every putt is dropping. The key is to develop that sixth sense for scoring—knowing how to get the ball into the hole from anywhere. That’s what I want to show you in this book. Scrambling isn’t reserved only for your off-days. Good golfers scramble in every round. Good scramblers are always good scorers.
When I sat down to develop this book, I spent many hours determining which shots to include. The twelve shots I chose to feature are excellent additions to your golf game in and of themselves. But each of them is truly a jumping-off point that will allow you to develop not just a dozen new weapons but many, many more. Shotmaking is much more than simply curving the ball or hitting it low and high. It’s understanding how the lie, the wind, the contour of the target and the hazards of the course will affect your decision-making process. As you develop a feel for these subtle differences, you will find yourself instinctively modifying the twelve featured shots to fit very specific needs. That’s when you’re really playing golf.
And now, play away.