As a PGA Professional and former mini-tour player, I am constantly on the lookout for products that can make a difference in my game, so I have been scouring the web looking for some serious value this Amazon Prime Day. Like many of you, I am extremely price-conscious right now, so I have put together a squad of products for around $200 in total that I believe could be the catalyst for some great golf this season…
Odyssey Golf Putting Mirror
I play in an awful lot of Pro-Am events and the number one cause I see of missed putts is poor alignment. As an old pro once told me growing up “A hunter can have the best gun in the world, but if he doesn’t point it at his target then he won’t eat that night!” The same can be said of putting, you can spend hours honing the most textbook putting stroke imaginable, but if your putter is not lined up to your intended target then it is all for nothing.
Putting mirrors like this one from Odyssey Golf can help you with that. Simply find a straight 6-10 foot putt on your practice green, get down behind the line of the putt get the guidelines pointing to the center of the hole, and fix it into place with some tees. All you have to do then is hit putts, ensuring your blade is perpendicular to the target line (this is easy because there are further guidelines to help with that). Your brain will receive messages through your eyes to recalibrate what a square club face looks like, and hey presto, all of a sudden you are hitting start lines more often and making more putts. For a relatively small investment, this is a must for anyone serious about their game.
GoSports Tri-Turf XL Golf Practice Hitting Mat & Amazon Basics Portable Driving Practice Golf Net
This is a two-parter, as these deals go hand-in-hand despite being from different companies, They are both really handy bits of kit for a minimal investment that I believe can provide the catalyst to more practice. How often do you sit at home thinking about heading out for a practice session, but quickly realize that you don’t have the time when you factor in travel etc? Well, if you have a convenient home setup, then you can simply nip outside and work on your swing for ten minutes or so in between meetings, and in my experience, this is often a more efficient and effective way of practicing than a grueling hour-long session. Combine these two products and you have the ideal home practice station, and with the multi-surface options of the Tri-Turf Mat, you can even perfect your technique from adverse lies!
Training Grip
Keep your eye on Scottie Scheffler the next time you see him on the TV coverage, and watch just how fastidious and diligent he is about how he applies his hands on the grip of the club. It is pretty extraordinary and in my opinion, stems back to his work with this molded training grip.
Scheffler understands that the grip is the only point of contact with the golf club and the most influential area of technique over the club face and absolutely refuses to take it for granted. He fits his molded grip onto a 7-iron built in his gamer specs and will without fail hit several full shots with it in every practice and warm-up session to reinforce good solid fundamentals which I believe is one of the keys to his incredible consistency.
As a PGA Professional who has seen thousands of poor grips over the years, I would absolutely urge you to get hold of one of these grips, take it to your local Pro Shop have it installed on something similar to Scheffler like a 7-iron. With such a long list of things that can and do go wrong within the golf swing, ensuring a good, consistent grip is both easy to do and will reap huge rewards in terms of consistency.
FootJoy Pro SL Golf Shoes
Shoes might seem like a strange thing to put into a post on things that I believe can help your game, but these are no ordinary shoes! Stability is something that is spoken a lot about in sporting footwear in general, but nowhere is it more important than golf, and I believe the FootJoy Pro SL shoes are some of the best golf shoes in the game. I have seen too many scorecards ruined by an untimely slip of the back foot, but that is not a worry with the Pro SL. In addition to that, they combine sporty and smart aesthetics really well and provide extreme levels of comfort which can also be a performance enhancer. Fatigue or aching feet towards the end of a round can be a real distraction and these shoes flat-out eliminate that. A great swing starts from a stable base, and that is what these give you, so pick up a bargain!