Without a shade of doubt, the number one error I see on the golf course every week are players coming up short of the pin. There are many reasons for this, from incorrect club selection to poor shot execution, but nearly every golfer I play with under clubs.
I believe the root cause is not knowing your numbers correctly. By that I mean your carry distance with every club, not counting the run out as this can vary from day-to-day depending on the course and weather conditions.
For instance, playing in a strong wind you’ll need to adjust and club up or down to allow for it. Equally, when the temperature is warm, the ball tends to travel further than on a cold day, but it’s something you should know quite precisely.
It’s a number that can be gleaned by using technology like a TrackMan radar on the driving range or indoor sim, or you can do a simple 10 ball test yourself, hitting 10 shots with the same club and eliminating the worst and best and taking your average carry distance for the remainder of the shots.
From experience, I tend to find that men, in particular, often let their ego get in the way when it comes to club selection. They hear a mate saying that they hit a par-3 with a 7-iron, so they try to better it by hitting an 8, when most of the time they actually need a 6-iron.
There’s also the golfer who refuses to believe that they’ve lost a few yards with age and are still holding onto the memory of how far they used to hit the ball, thinking that their 7-iron can still carry 160 yards because it did in 1992.
Whether it’s ignorance or stubborn inaccuracy, nearly every golfer I play with gets their yardages wrong. When it comes to accuracy, there’s also a lot to be said for looking at the pin position on the greens.
If the pin is at the front and all the trouble is short of the flag, but you’ve got plenty of green to play with behind the pin, then why risk ending in the trouble? Play to the heart of the green instead of going for the flag.
To be honest, most of us are choosing a club based on the probability of hitting a perfect shot. Golf is not a game of perfect! You need to play the percentages. The chances are you’ll only strike a perfect shot about one in every 10 attempts. The remainder will be a slight mishit and finish shorter than you expect.
Another common circumstance where I see poor club selection, especially in women, is for recovery shots out of the rough or tricky lies like out of the heather.
Many women immediately grab their hybrid, mistakenly thinking that it is as per its namesake a ‘rescue’ club. To a degree that is true, it can be used out of certain lies in the rough quite effectively, but there are definitely limits to the hybrid’s effectiveness when the ball is really nestled down in the rough.
From this type of buried lie you need a much steeper angle of attack with an iron to drive it out. Hybrids are designed with rounded soles to sweep shots away - not chop down on the ball in the rough. They also only tend to replace your long irons or woods.
So ask yourself this question, would you have picked a 5-iron from that lie? Albeit a hybrid is an easier-to-use alternative, a 5H simply lacks the loft to bail this escape shot.
Conversely, some men stubbornly refuse to replace their hard-to-hit long irons with a hybrid due to a macho belief that they ‘should’ be able to hit a long iron. Put your ego aside and replace them I say. You’ll save hundreds of shots a year.
Part of the reason I play off a low handicap is because I have learned to manage my way around the course. I always take my medicine, grab a wedge and get the ball back out into play, as opposed to wasting two or three shots attempting something high risk from the rough.
The opposite can often be said for tough greenside shots. I’ve lost count of the number of golfers I see using lofted wedges to chip when they simply don’t need to play this type of shot. My rule of thumb for greenside shots is to keep the ball as low to the ground as possible to eliminate the chances of a bad bounce.
Always putt when you can putt. Use a long iron like a putter if you’re a little further out and only go for the sand or lob wedge when you need to carry trouble like a bunker and get the ball to pop up and stop quickly on the greens with spin.
Overall, I’m certain that if an independent study or survey was conducted it would show that golfers’ inaccuracies are caused by poor decision-making leading to wrong club selection, especially on approach shots. As an experiment, next time you play, make a concerted effort to use one club more than you think you need going into every green. I genuinely think the results will be transformational.
