As an amateur, learning to properly hit a punch shot is important to keep our golf scores low. This type of shot is designed to fly close to the ground in order to avoid obstacles that would impede our progress. Generally, this takes for in the way of branches, because we hit a wayward shot, from trees that suddenly decided to get in our way. Regardless of the obstruction, learning to hit a punch shot is very important to ensure we can extricate our ball out of difficult situations with the least amount of strokes.
Continue readingGetting Ready For Golf Season
It is about that time of year when my golf juices really get flowing. We just had two days of double digit highs and the snow has receded by at least half. This generally means that it is time for me to start looking at the season ahead. But hold on a moment, it is still at least 4 to 5 weeks before golf courses in my area will be open for business. This timeline leads me to wonder what I should do that will slowly prepare me for my first hit of the season!
Continue readingEliminating Silly Golf Mistakes
Every once in a while my round of golf is nothing but a comedy of errors. I seem to lose focus and make silly mistakes that I should definitely avoid. As a lower handicapper, I should have command of my game such that making pointless avoidable mistakes should be second nature. Unfortunately, that is not always the case and my frustration level rises every time I add strokes to my round. Interestingly, there are a few very avoidable mistakes that are more common than most; Rick Shiels brings these to light for us so that we can improve our scores and lessen our frustration.
Continue readingToe Chipping With Success
We have all heard of life hacks that make our lives easier. Well, golf is no different as there are a few tricks and tips to help you shoot better scores. And this is one of them. I use this technique often and it is something I learned about 20 years ago. It is such and integral part of my game, I actually overlooked talking about it earlier. Today we rectify that oversight. It is time to talk about the benefits of chipping with the toe of our club.
Continue readingDropping In Golf’s World Ranking
I debated about writing this article because it is so subjective that I was not sure I had a defined point of view. As I plunk away at the keyboard, I muse about if dropping in the world ranking is really a valuable subject or not. After some deliberation, I decided to give this topic a try and see where we end up. If you are wondering what sparked my sudden interest in golf’s world ranking (which I normally do not focus too much attention on), well I read that Phil Mickelson dropped to 101 and Rory McIlroy dropped to 11 in the world rankings. Neither of these players slide is surprising or is it?
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The Grateful Golfer 