2016 PGA Picks

Baltistrol, from Golfdigest.com

The 2016 PGA Championship has been thrown on its head by the Rio Olympics.  For the first time in recent memory, the start of the fourth major of the season gets under way only 11 days after the third concluded.  The Olympics are turning into a joke and the golf tournament is in the PGA’s traditional August slot.  Who will be able to deal with the change in routine and the shortened rest and recovery window?  The majority of the worlds top players are either skipping the Olympics or have not qualified, and if they manage to recharge quickly enough, could use the disruption to their advantage.  Imagine them charging into the PGA full bore, skipping the Olympics, and using the extra time off to rest up for the Ryder Cup and FedEx playoffs, which also required significant energy.

The state of Olympic golf from tfs.org.uk

Make no mistake, the PGA is the most important event left on the calendar and the American and European stars know it and will be highly focused.  Let’s look at the particulars to get you a winner.

Phil Mickelson, fresh off one of his greatest performances in a major, always plays the week before a major but skipped the RBC Canadian Open because of the timing.  Lefty has some local knowledge at Baltustrol, but he played so well at Troon and has got to be deflated from the energy spent on another 2nd place finish.  I suspect he’ll have a go on Thursday and Friday but will run out of gas.  Henrik Stenson can’t possibly duplicate his effort after his performance in The Open.

This major will play out in an epic slug-fest between the world’s top four.  Jason, Jordan, Rory, and DJ are all skipping Rio and have their priorities in order.  They have been bobbing and weaving in the 2016 majors with Dustin Johnson holding an edge in performance and consistency.  Sergio Garcia has been performing well and is always buzzing around the top 5, and the last two majors have been won by players previously on the BPTNWAM list.  Sergio is the trendy pick but he is going to Rio and will be too distracted.  Who will win it?  I am feeling a Rory, DJ and Scott Piercy Sunday horse race  This will be a power ball striking tournament and DJ is striping it better than anyone now.  He is your 2016 PGA champion.  Yes, two majors in one year for a guy I thought would never win one.  Like that pick?  Who’s your pick at Baltustrol?

The Joy of Hard Work And Improvement

Today I had a great day on the golf course.  It was my first 18 hole round since I took a golf lesson on July 2 and only the second round I’ve played in the last five weeks.  To reiterate, I took a full swing lesson and am trying to break some bad habits that I’ve been playing with for the last 40 years, and the change has been a challenge.  I’ve been practicing full swing for the past few weeks and all but ignoring my short game except while playing my executive nine and during a round at a short course down at the beach.  Today, it was time to start playing real golf again.

In the past, I’ve found the first round after a lesson hard, and today was no different. To make the change from playing golf swing to playing golf, I tried to allow myself only one swing thought per shot, even though there were several positions I had been trying to reach during my practice sessions.  To compound things, it was sweltering in the DMV today, and I had a noon tee time and decided not to hit balls before I played, which was probably a mistake.  I tried not to worry about what I was shooting, but kept score because you have to resume playing sometime.  It was a good idea not to be hard on myself because with my head flush with swing thoughts and positions, I couldn’t square up a shot on the first two holes and started out bogey, double bogey.  I started to wonder when the golf gods were going to show me some love and it didn’t take long.  A well struck six iron on the par-3 third hole brought my first GIR and a routine par. It’s funny how one good shot can relax you, and that’s exactly what happened.    After another routine par on #4, I hit a 3-wood onto the par-5 fifth hole in two.  Finally!  One of the major issues I hoped to address was to eliminate the squirrely smother hooks I’d been hitting with the 3-wood off the turf.

To shorten the tale, our threesome cruised around in only 3 hours and 45 minutes and I carded a nice little 75.  Before we started, I told myself I didn’t care what I shot, but I did.  I also saw enough of the new good shots to acknowledge my hard work and to counter some of the old bad ones that occasionally crept in.  This change has been pretty seamless with the short irons, but has been difficult with the driver.  It’s going to take time to eradicate the bad habits because they’ve persisted for so long, but the positive feedback on the good shots will keep me going.  The short iron progress is important because I think I can hit what I’m aiming at inside 150 yards, which was not the case one month ago.

I hope you are as excited about your game as I am mine.  Play well!

145th British Open Championship Picks

I always thought that if Dustin Johnson was going to win a major, The British Open would be his first because the slower bumpy greens equalize the putting ability of the world’s greatest players.  Johnson is a notoriously mediocre putter especially during big clutch moments, but has suddenly turned the golf world on its head and is winning everything.  Having cleared his first major hurdle, is he now unstoppable?

The other big three (Jason Day, Rory McIlroy, and Jordan Spieth) all seem capable, but currently vulnerable.  Spieth is suffering from mechanical issues.  McIlroy hasn’t sorted out his putting, and Day had the WGC Bridgestone in control until an uncharacteristic late round collapse.  The pre-tournament betting line has all four at 8-1.  It’s going to be a wild ride so let’s sift through the morass and get you a winner.

It’s exciting when someone from the BPTNWAM list finally breaks through as DJ did at Oakmont.  The final round at The US Open had layers of intrigue.  DJ, Sergio Garcia, and Lee Westwood were all well positioned.  But alas, only one player can win it.  I liked the way Sergio finished (for a change).  He hung tough and didn’t choke.  He’s looking good to me this week.  Westwood was awful on Sunday and I have to believe that he didn’t believe enough in himself to play well under the gun.  Rapidly joining that class is Rickie Fowler.  I knew Rickie was done at Oakmont before the tournament started because he basically threw up his hands in the practice rounds and said (I’m paraphrasing) “I cannot putt these greens; they’re ridiculous.”   Haven’t heard anything from Rickie this week, which is a good thing, but the guy is in a slump and he doesn’t close well.  I need to see improvement before I even consider him for BPTNWAM membership.

The Open Championship always manages to tease us with an aging champion getting into contention, and sometimes gives us a winner, like Ernie Els in 2012 when Adam Scott  collapsed late at Lytham.  How about Greg Norman or Tom Watson?  How about Colin Montgomerie in 2016???  Could you see a Monty, Westy, and Sergio BPTNWAM threesome battling it out on Sunday for the Claret Jug?  No.

Back to reality.  This year’s champion will have to steel himself mentally, and has to relish playing in the wind and rain (it’s forecast to be wet the whole week).  Normally, I’d love someone who would leverage the adverse conditions against the field, someone who knows that bad weather culls the weak from the heard.  Someone like a Phil Mickelson.  But Lefty has run up against Father Time.  Not happening for him this week.

I see the winner coming from a group of six players.  The big four, Sergio, and Danny Willett will battle it out all week.  Willett plays great in Europe, has the major bonafides and should be able to leverage the home court advantage.  But he can’t sneak up on anyone any more.

Of these six, Day and Spieth have the best minds for the game.  Day for concentration and patience, Spieth for guts and grit.  It’s a battle of attrition, I’ll take guts and grit.  Jordan Spieth is your winner of the 145th Open Championship.  Let’s get it on!

 

The Best Golf Lesson Ever!

It was Saturday, June 5th and I was at True Blue in Myrtle Beach, and I could not make solid contact on the driving range while warming up for my round.  I thought I was simply gassed from playing so much golf on the trip but that was not the case.  Two weeks later on June 19, I had an awful time trying to hold my swing together during a round at Poolesville.  My poor strikes were starting to put pressure on the other parts of my game and my attitude soured.  Was I was facing mid-season burnout?  The next weekend, I practiced down in Delaware and took swing video during a rough ball striking session.  I spotted several things I didn’t like and tried to implement fixes but nothing worked.  Last Wednesday was the final straw.  I went to my school field with a bag shag and a sand wedge and discovered I could not advance the ball 70 yards.  I left despondent.  The next morning I called for a lesson with Justin Keith, the PGA pro at Falls Road Golf Course in Potomac, MD.

The lesson:

I arrived at the course and warmed up for 10 minutes.  On the five minute ride to the lesson tee, Justin took my history and golf vital signs.  I didn’t reveal I was a mental basket case, just that for the last seven years, I’d averaged 8 GIR per round and wanted to improve the consistency of my ball striking.  He asked if I had taken any recent lessons or been working on anything in particular.  I told him my last lesson was a few years ago where it was pointed out that I lose my spine angle on the downswing, and that the fault would be a very hard to correct.  Essentially, it was the source of my inconsistency.  He understood and we went to work.

He had me hit half a dozen 7-irons and videoed my last swing on his tablet.  We sat down in the cart and reviewed my swing.  I had two problems.  One was a cupped left wrist at the top of my back swing which was getting me off plane.  The second, which was likely a result of the first, was a downswing initiated with my hands instead of my body.  This was the reason I was pull hooking long irons, hitting wedges fat, and push cutting everything else.   He pointed out that in my follow through, I had a big chicken wing with my left elbow, and that was an indicator that I hadn’t rotated through the ball but had released early.  He also thought that I’ve been able to maintain a 5-handicap with this move because I could time my down swing well enough to square the club face at the impact.  But when my timing was off, I had no chance.

Then we worked for a half hour just hitting nine-o-clock to three-o-clock punch shots with my 7 and 5-irons.  On my back swing, he had me flatten out the back of my left wrist using Dustin Johnson as a mental image.  DJ bows his wrist more than anyone, but this thought worked great.  On the down swing I worked to initiate the move with a bump of my left hip.  On the follow through, he told me to cut it off halfway, with both my arms fully extended and elbows close together (to get rid of that chicken wing).  This was hard and felt very weird at first, but after a few swings I noticed that when I executed I had easily maintained my spine angle without even trying.  The thought of the spine angle fix as an artifact of the other changes filled me with tremendous hope and enthusiasm.

At the conclusion, Justin videoed my last swing and we went back to the cart to view.  He showed me the correction I had implemented along with a down the line shot of Hunter Mahan in his follow through, and how I had gotten much closer to the ideal position.  I thanked Justin and with my head full of positions and excitement, went home for lunch.

Here’s a picture of my follow through with a 6-iron.  Notice the chicken wing left elbow:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now here’s a picture of Hunter Mahan down the line with a 5-iron.  Notice how he’s fully extended his arms and how his elbows are close together and how he’s retained his spine angle.  This is the image I’m working to get to:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Implementing the change:

After lunch I went out to my course for a large bucket of 7-iron punch shots, just trying to get the feeling of the new positions and to initiate the downswing with my body.  The contact was excellent and the ball flight lower than normal but very straight and controlled.  I finished with a few sand wedges and discovered I had regained 15 yards of distance that had mysteriously disappeared a few years ago.  The only issue was that all this work had been done off a mat.

The next day, I headed out to Blue Mash for an extended practice session off the turf.  My first indicator of progress was that my divots were flying straight with the gap wedge and 7-iron.  Previously even well struck shots had my divots flying left with that early release.  Again, contact was good, and I mixed in some 4-irons.  Later I added some 3WDs and a few drivers.  Towards the end of the session I started to hit some loose shots with the 3WD and driver, but figured I may have been getting tired since I had hit the equivalent of six buckets of balls in the last two days.  So I rested the next few days and went to work 🙂

Thursday after work I hit a bucket off the mat and received excellent feedback with the gap wedge and 7-iron and I began to experiment with different ball positions and hitting knock-down shots.  I was pleased that I could now control trajectory better by moving the ball back or forward and rely on maintaining  good contact.

On the course:

A special shout out goes to The Grateful Golfer.  Jim had recommended that during my learning, I mix in 9-hole rounds of play without keeping score.  What an excellent idea!  I did that yesterday on my executive nine and was pleased with the results.  While shooting at actual targets, of my 11 full swings I only missed one.  It was the old swing, but the number of new good ones was very satisfactory.  I hit 7 greens and a fringe and the single I joined up with was impressed enough to ask for the name of my teaching pro.

What’s next:

The back swing position is starting to feel natural but the down swing and follow through need more reps.  I have also not hit a driver on the course yet.  I could probably play real golf with this move if I had to but will not rush it and will use the balance of July to keep working the move and getting comfortable with the driver.  Hopefully my play will take off in August.

A special thanks goes to Justin Keith.  In the past, I’ve taken a lot of golf lessons.  Some good, some mediocre, some poor.  This was the simplest most productive, and well timed instruction I’ve ever had.  If you are in the DMV and need help with your golf game, call Justin at 301-299-5156 or email him at jkeith@mcggolf.com Thanks Justin!

Play well everyone.

Turn That Music Off!

Back in April, I was playing a round at Poolesville and had bunkered my tee shot on the par-3 8th hole.  As I was preparing to play, a group pulled their carts up to the nearby 10th green.  One of the carts was playing music loud enough for everyone in their group to hear, as well as my group and anyone within a couple  hundred yards.  At first I thought some house nearby was having a party, but then I watched this group play out on the 10th and drive off to the 11th tee and it was clear the source was them.  The quality of this sound wasn’t off some phone, it was a powerful and came from a good set of speakers.

Fast forward to my Myrtle Beach trip in June.  I’m playing an afternoon round at The Legends – Parkland with my friend and we catch up to a twosome of young guys on the 9th tee.  They were blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd from their cart.  While they were kind enough to ask us to join them for their final hole, they made no effort to turn the music off while any of us was hitting.

This morning I was out cleaning the patio in preparation for my July 4th barbecue.  My house backs to the 3rd tee at Lakewood Country Club, and a foursome pulls up in two carts with music blaring.  They all play their shots and speed off as if nothing happened.

When I’m out back working with power tools and a group comes through, typically I’ll power down as a courtesy until after they’ve hit, and sometimes I’m thanked.  When you attend any professional sporting event, music is usually played during stoppages in play but when the action resumes, it’s discontinued.  Music is hardly ever an issue at a professional golf tournament (with the exception of The Phoenix Open), and even there, the drunks keep the noise level on the 16th to a dull roar when players are hitting.

I love loud music.  I’ll turn up my electric guitar when nobody is home and rattle the windows; rock and roll was made to be played loud.  But on the golf course?  Is this the new normal?  Rory McIlroy is now sponsored by Bose and typically warms up with his music, but uses headphones.  Where is the decorum out there?  Have you noticed this as well?

Steve Williams, Out Of The Rough – Book Review

Steve Williams’ account of life on tour in Out Of The Rough (2015), is a fascinating look inside the experiences of the world’s most successful caddie.  Williams covers his career starting as a youth who got a very early start in the game, and was encouraged by his father to get involved at the expense of finishing school (which he never did).  Throughout the book he returns to this theme and wishes that he’d completed his education, but is thankful that his Dad looked the other way.

Williams’ list of high profile bosses is impressive.  He was on the bag for 150 wins world wide and carried for the likes of Greg Norman (who he classifies as the toughest player he ever worked for), Ray Floyd, Ian Baker-Finch, Tiger Woods, and Adam Scott.  Williams provides many inside the ropes anecdotes, as well as passages from the aforementioned players that detail his contributions to their careers.

Most golf fans got their introduction to Williams as Tiger Woods’ caddie during the 13 years of Tiger’s pursuit of Jack Nicklaus’ majors record.  What we learned is that Williams took on and ultimately mirrored Tiger’s psychic mentality and single mindedness during the chase, and he gives the reader the impression that he almost felt dual ownership of the successes and failures with Tiger, even though Woods was ultimately the one hitting the shots.  Williams is a perfectionist and readily admits that some of the boorish behavior TV fans have become familiar with was born out of this single-mindedness attitude but also due to his natural personality.  Williams has always been very business like on the course and protective of his players which has gotten him into trouble.  Like the time he took a camera off a spectator at the U.S. Open at Bethpage Black and threw it in a lake.  Tiger appreciated Williams’ support and picked up the cost of his fine.

Williams notes that he maintains an active friendship with all his ex-bosses except for one; Tiger.  After their falling out at the AT&T National in 2011 the two have rarely spoken and Williams holds a lot of bitterness towards Tiger that he can’t let go of.

Williams details a few regrets.  There’s some poor advice he gave to Norman and Ray Floyd that may have cost them major titles, as well as the interview he gave after the 2011 WGC Bridgestone, after Tiger had sacked him and Adam Scott won with Williams on the bag.   The book also has several excellent passages between Williams and his ex-bosses, like the time Greg Norman confided in him during an all night beer drinking therapy session on the beach after blowing the 1996 Masters to Nick Faldo.  The details around the extraordinary effort by Tiger to win the 2008 U.S. Open on a broken leg were fascinating.

Williams ultimately obtained celebrity status and in the book he sometimes makes this more about himself than the professionals he worked for, but at the end of the day, most of his good fortune was due to being on the bag of Tiger.

Check this book out.  It’s fresh, it’s current, and there’s good content for golf fans at every level.

2016 Mid-Season Golf Reboot

Thank you to all who commented on my swing video post from last weekend.  There were many salient observations and excellent offers of help.  I worked during the week to make a couple changes and went to my school field yesterday armed with a bag shag and 54 degree wedge to get some positive live fire feedback.  Instead I got the blue screen of death.

I have always lived by the three strikes axiom when struggling with your golf swing.  If you play bad once, forget about it.  Play bad twice, go work on your issues during practice.  Play bad three consecutive times, get help.  My last three rounds were 85-89-83, and after the debacle with my sand wedge yesterday I had seen enough.  My lesson tomorrow is at 11:00 a.m.

Recently, I had fixed my short game and was performing at a high level even during these bad ball striking rounds.  My putting has been solid, and the day before my awful video range session, I had an excellent practice session rolling the rock at Bear Trap Dunes.  But with me all confidence is derived from ball striking, at least to a level where I know where the ball is going when I try to strike it.  Getting by on short game and putting is just whistling through the graveyard.  That’s where I’m at and the full reboot starts tomorrow.

I’ll let the instruction and subsequent practice sink in over the holiday weekend and report back during the week.

Happy 4th of July to everyone and play well!