SHIFT YOUR BODY (AND DIVOT HOLE) FORWARD FOR BETTER IRON SHOTS

• Until this past summer, Glover felt like he had to knock every approach shot stiff to shoot a good score. He would hit a 5-iron to 25 feet but would think it wasn’t close enough because of his struggles with the putter. The yips were starting to negatively impact his irons swings.

“His comment to me would be, ‘It’s just not solid. It’s just not solid,’ ” Baile says. “The thump was gone.”

By “thump,” Glover meant he was looking for better compression between the ball, the club and then the turf. To get it, Baile first had

Glover spin the clubface more open at address to counter his stronger grip. The face had become too closed, and for a player who liked to draw it like Glover, he would instinctively have to rock his torso behind the ball to start it right of the target line and curve it on line. This would push the low point of his divot further and further back (the low point for most pros is at least a few inches after the club makes contact with the ball). Ironically, Glover had fallen into the same bad habit of many amateur golfers—he was hanging back on his trail side at the start of the downswing.

To get Glover’s upper body moving more forward and creating a feeling that he’s on top of the ball at impact, Baile had him start hitting left-to-right shots (cuts). Baile asked Glover to take a divot as far left and forward of the ball as he could and feel like he could “spit straight down into the middle of his divot hole” at impact. That swing thought prompted Glover to shift his body forward earlier on the downswing, and that gave the feeling of his torso hovering over the ball at impact.

They started working on the cut ball flight at the Memorial Tournament in June, and it didn’t take long before Glover got into a groove. Two months later in his win at the Wyndham, he put on a ballstriking clinic, ranking first in strokes gained/approach—picking up 8.48 shots on the rest of the field. He also was No. 1 in greens in regulation, missing only seven all week.

Another drill that helps Glover improve his weight shift in the transition from backswing to downswing is to place a half-full water bottle on the ground just inside his right ankle. The goal is to knock the bottle over with his right leg before the clubhead makes contact with the ball (photos, right).

This move causes the trail ankle and leg to bank forward, and the upper body to transition toward the target earlier so that he can hit down and through the ball and compress it.

“I’ve always been a divot guy,” Glover says. “That’s how I compress it so well. It’s not so much the look of the divot as it is the feel of it—it’s not steep and it’s not sticky; the club goes through the ground easily, and the hole is more toward the target than directly under the ball.”