Snedeker's Yip-proof Chip

Every golfer I know who has been playing a long time at a fairly high skill level seems to have some form of the yips (technically focal dystonia), that is, unexplained problems with shots requiring fine motor skills such as putting and chipping. It got pretty bad for me with one of my playing partners saying "...you stand over a simple chip shot thinking skull, chunk, skull, chunk, skull, chunk, ..." never knowing which bad shot you're going to hit next.

My solution to this problem was to basically perfect the chunk shot, that is, hitting slightly behind the ball and taking a divot. Everybody I play with hates this shot but it was the lesser of two evils (skulking the ball over the green always ate up a bunch of strokes), it was all I had and I was producing better and better chips as I perfected the technique.

Then I see the video above where Brandt Snedeker chips one in on the 17th hole in the final round to win the 2012 Tour Championship. Surprise: he took a divot with a 60 degree wedge, the same shot that my playing partners hate to see me hit. It was not an accident (notice him practicing taking a divot before he hits the shot at the beginning of the video). Why would he do this at such a pressure-filled moment of a high-profile championship? I've never heard him talk about the shot, but I think the answer is obvious: he couldn't risk skulling the shot and he was under a lot of pressure, more pressure than I've ever felt standing over a chip shot.

The Golf Channel replayed the chip a number of times from different angles (screens shots above) and never once did any of the announcers say "Wow, look at that chili dip" or even "Great chunk-and-run". Rather, "...Rog, the lie appears really good..." yet Snedeker still takes a divot.

I guess the message for all of us with the chipping yips is: (1) get your 60 degree wedge, (2) take a few practice swings taking a divot to feel the ground, (3) set up with your hands ahead of the ball, (4) concentrate on hitting the ground right behind the ball, (5) take a little longer backswing, (6) keep your head down and (7) hit the chunk-and-run. You'll never skull one over the green again and maybe one will even go in!

Chipping Challenge: Shaved Bermuda Tight Lie

One of my correspondents in Phoenix, AZ ran into a difficult chipping problem at the Troon North Golf Course in Scottsdale. The Bermuda grass fringes around the greens had been cut very close, "shaved" to be precise. It was impossible to get the club "under" the ball for a conventional chip or flop shot. Every club in the bag (high-loft wedges, short irons, long irons, hybrids, fairway woods, everything except the driver) was tried. The only approach that produced reasonable results was the putter and it was very difficult to control the roll over the shaved Bermuda to have any chance of getting up and down in two.

My suggestion was to simulate the conditions by putting an artificial-turf golf mat on the concrete patio next to my correspondent's home putting green and keep practicing with every club in the bag (except the putter, of course, in this case) to see if he could find a shot.

Your challenge is similar to his: set up a similar situation and come up with a chip or flop shoot that works. We'll be looking forward to your comments.

How About Steve Stricker as Tiger Woods New Swing Coach?

Tiger Woods announced yesterday on his website that he and his current swing instructor, Sean Foley,  were ending "...our professional relationship." During his professional career, Tiger Woods has had three swing coaches: Butch Harmon (1996-2003), Hank Haney (2004-2010), and Sean Foley (2010-2014). Tiger's performance on the PGA Tour has been declining since his time with Butch Harmon (see the record here), but he has also been through an infidelity scandal and a long list of injuries. But, golf at the level Tiger Woods has played is a big time sport and, in the words of the Golf Channel's Brandel Chamblee, "...if Tiger Woods were a football team and Sean Foley were the coach, he'd have been fired a long time ago." And now, the speculation starts about who will be next.

Paddy Power, a bookmaker based in Ireland, put together the odds (listed above with more analysis here) on who might take over as Wood's next swing coach. The even odds go to Butch Harmon and the 500/1 odds go to Elin Nordegren, Wood's ex-wife, with slightly better odds on Wood's mother, Kultida Woods at 300/1. One name in the middle of the pack at 33/1 caught my attention and that was Steve Stricker. 

Stricker has already given Woods putting advice, pictured above at the Doral Country Club practice green (with Sean Foley looking on). Steve Stricker's career on the PGA Tour is winding down (he is a few years away from eligibility for the Senior tour) and he has joked in the past (here) about offering his services to Woods. Of all the people on Paddy Power's list, Stricker is the only one that has played head-to-head with Tiger Woods and, if Woods were to take Lee Trevino's advice (I can't find this quote, but I know I heard it from Trevino) "Never take lessons from someone you can beat". Trevino's advice would rule everyone on the list out except Stricker.

So, just to have some speculative fun, what would coaching from Steve Striker look like? Stricker himself staged a spectacular comeback after playing miserable golf in the early 2000's and finally loosing his tour card (playing privileges on the PGA Tour) in 2005. In 2006, he was voted "Comeback Player of the Year" on the PGA Tour and was then ranked 14th in the World. How did he do it?

In Ben Hogan's words, Stricker "dug it out of the dirt" (read the full story here) or more literally "the snow". Stricker spent his Winter practice time in an open-ended heated trailer at the far end of Cherokee Country Club's practice range in Madison, WI. Stricker's long-time golf coach is his father in-law, Dennis Tiziani, head pro at Cherokee. Exactly what role Tiziani played in Stricker's swing makeover is a little unclear, but it seems that Stricker mostly worked it out by himself.

For me it's hard to believe that Tiger Woods does not have the necessary golf knowledge to work out, by himself, the swing changes that he needs. Many well known and excellent players from prior generations (Hogan and Trevino stand out for me) had no swing coaches. But attitudes have changed. It's now believed that the best players have to be coachable. The counter argument to the current conventional wisdom is PGA instructor E. A. Tischler's contention that you need to Own Your Golf Swing. When you're out there in the middle of a competition and things aren't going right (as they have often done recently for Tiger Woods), you have to figure out what the problem is and pull things together. Your swing coach can't be out there giving you advice. You have to own what you are doing.

Needless to say, E. A. Tischler was not on Paddy Power's list but Tischler's concept is very important. Steve Stricker owns his own golf swing. So did Ben Hogan and Lee Trevino. They dug it out of the dirt, knew what to do when it wasn't working and had great golf careers. My fantasy is that Steve Stricker would say to Tiger: "Come to Wisconsin. Spend the Winter in the trailer. Dig it out of the snow. Everything you need to know is in your head. Find it."


NOTE: A small cottage industry has developed criticizing Wood's time with Sean Foley. Here are a few videos to give you the flavor of the criticism. The final video provides another speculation not on Paddy Power's list. The Sean Foley left-side dominant swing (in E. A. Tischer's system) is often described as being close to the Stack & Tilt Swing. A criticism of Foley's work with Woods (in the first video) was that Woods was trying to hit a fade which is not suited to the Foley swing. The Stack & Tilt swing is a draw swing (one of it's potential weaknesses) but would actually suit Woods better if he wanted to continue with the left anchor swing.

The Sergio Stinger

The "Sergio Stinger" is a great shot that you might have seen if you were watching this year's British Open (the video above is on Hole No. 3). It's great for playing both into the wind and downwind (when your not sure what the wind effect might be on your ball flight).

Matt Rudy, of Golf Digest, explains the shot as:

...a downward blow from an adjusted ball position. "On TrackMan, the average tour player hits down on the ball three degrees with a 3-iron," says Lukas McNair, a senior instructor at the Hank Haney Golf Ranch outside Dallas. "Here, he's bringing the angle of attack to five degrees. He moves the ball back in his stance so his head is in front of the ball at address, hits down and makes an abbreviated followthrough with a low arm swing."

Matt's description is not the only way to hit the shot. You can also try: (1) stacking your weight on your left foot (if the ball was in the middle of your stance, this would shift your head forward of the ball), (2) as you swing back, lean toward the target, (3) take a three-quarter backswing as Sergio does in the video above and (4) hit down on the ball (hit the ball first and then take a divot) with an abbreviated, low arm follow through as Sergio does in the video above.

As a bonus, this is also a great drill for learning what it feels like to have your weight firmly on your left side when making a full swing and hitting down on the ball (three degrees?) with full compression.

About

The idea for this blog came from a comment by professional golfer Mike Bennett. Bennett has said that there is only one fundamental (fact?) in the golf swing: hit the ball first and the ground after you hit the ball. This is called "taking a divot". However, some professional golfers evidently did not take a divot, for example Jack Nicklaus. Fact or fiction?

Andy Bennet and Mike Plummer also have a "system" called Stack and Tilt (S&T). The S&T System contradicts a lot of conventional golf instruction and has a lot of critics. There are many other golf swing systems: The LAWs of Golf, the One-Plane Swing, the Golfing Machine, Power3 Golf, and many more. Each of them has slight  to major differences with the conventional wisdom.

Typically (and reasonably) the "facts" of these systems are based on studying the swings of professional golfers. However, the more you look at professional golf swings, the more that the factual base of swing systems seems to evaporate (in the video above, if you carefully study professional golfer Aaron Baddley's swing when actually hitting a golf ball you will notice that it is different from the swing he uses when posing for S&T instructional pictures--if you want more detail, see professional golf instructor Brian Manzella's analysis of the video here). Is the system fact or fiction?

The unfortunate "fact" about golf instruction is that it is all based on pretty weak theory (the theory is embedded in golf machines such as Iron Byron used to test golf equipment) and equally weak research. One example of high quality research (sometimes called the "gold standard") is the clinical trial. In a clinical trial, people are randomly assigned to a drug treatment or therapy, there is a placebo control group that does not receive the treatment and the results are compared statistically. Either the drug on average worked or it didn't.

Imagine if the clinical trial methodology was applied to golf instruction. People would have to be randomly assigned to learn different golf systems or different variants on the conventional wisdom. After a period of instruction (how long does it take to learn a golf swing--maybe many years) we would observe the statistics of all the golfers in the study: driving distance, greens in regulation, average scores, etc. etc. And, we would know which instructional approach produced the best golfers.

Don't hold your breath: a clinical trial of golf instruction will never happen. We could never even start by drawing a random sample of people who would be subjected to years of golf instruction. Most people would wisely refuse to participate in such a study and any resulting sample would never be random.

What are we amateur consumers of golf instruction to do? We can evaluate the golf systems for their internal consistency, their simplicity, and their ease of understanding. We can experiment on ourselves (dig it out of the dirt as professional golfer Ben Hogan used to say--Hogan had his own system called the Five Lessons). And, we can write about it. That should provide enough material for a number of years of blogging!