Surviving the short side
The 64-year-old German won the Charles Schwab Cup for a record sixth time last year, so his tips are worth reading...
1
If you do shortside yourself, as here, what you do next will depend to a degree on the lie, but even if it’s good, you’ve got to be realistic. Yes, you’ll be itching to get the ball as close as possible, but sometimes you’ll have to forget the flag and focus on playing to a safe spot you ideally want to putt from, perhaps where the putting surface is flattest. If you do get up and down, great; if you don’t, you should do no worse than bogey.
2Sometimes you’ve got to take your medicine to avoid the top scenario – getting too greedy and plugging it in the bunker face, from where you could run up a big number. Make bogey your worst score – the mistake comes from the shot you’ve just played, rather than the one you’re about to. You can hole a ten- or 15-footer (bottom photo) and if that comes with much less risk, that’s the way to go. Look at the difference in emotion between these two photos.
3Better still, work on your course management to reduce the risk of shortsiding yourself. The flag can be a bit of a distraction at times – when measuring, too. I’d recommend thinking about two flags – the actual flag and an imaginary one, which is your personal target on a safer part of the green. Here, the danger is on the left side (top photo), so my imaginary flag is further right (bottom photo). I won’t get into serious trouble if I pull it slightly.
1. Driving
To me, it’s mostly in the set-up. If you have a good grip and address position then you have much more chance of making a good swing. But if you’re lacking in the grip department and the address then you’re going to struggle. And it’s going to show more with the driver than with any other club because the driver has the longest shaft and less loft, so it creates more sidespin and the ball goes further. A wedge you hit about 120 yards or whatever, and a driver goes twice as far, so any mistake will show up much more with a driver than with a pitching wedge.
2. Iron play
I think with an iron it’s not how far it goes, it’s how consistent it is. I don’t care if you hit your 9-iron as far as I hit my 7-iron, I’m interested in hitting my 7-iron the same number every time, within plus or minus one or two yards. That’s my goal. There are people out there who only care about how far the ball goes, but that’s not important for an iron. You want to hit your driver far, but an iron is about finding the same distance consistently. That’s the best way to trust it and get the ball as close as possible to the hole.
3. Chipping
Most people don’t trust the loft of the club, they scoop it, try and help it up in the air or flick their wrists at it. I’d like to see people utilise more of the bigger muscles, like the arms and shoulders, and use body rotation. Leave the wrists out of it. The loft of a sand wedge is often 56°, which is more than enough to get the ball up in the air – you don’t need to help it. Hit the little ball first and then the big ball second, that’s the goal.
4. Bunker play
I often see amateurs address the ball without opening the clubface. They have the club square in the sand, and when you do that you dig more. So I encourage them to open it up, which can be scary at first because they think they’re going to shank it. I try to get them to open the club up and swing harder at it, because the more clubhead speed they create, the more spin they create. And then I also tell them not to hit the ball – you want to hit the sand in front of the ball. If you do that a few times and see that it works, you build trust and allow it to happen, instead of scooping it and doing all sorts of things wrong. Bunker play is mostly technique and technique can be learned.
5. Putting
It all depends. Putting is so individual and there are so many different ways of doing it. I think there are two important factors in putting. One is reading the greens – if you don’t read the green well and have your line correct then you have no chance. Secondly, it’s the speed of the putt. If you don’t match the correct read with the correct speed, you won’t make a lot of putts.