‘I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE... I NOW OWN A CHIPPER’
Looking back over the last year, I’ve had some real golfing highlights. I was lucky enough to play Loch Lomond and also experience my first taste of links golf at Castlerock in Northern Ireland. I started a fitness regime which I’ve actually stuck to, giving me about 10% extra distance on all my clubs. I hit my longest ever drive (314 yards – I think it carried about 200 of them) and made consecutive birdies for the first time. I started co-presenting Beef ’s Golf Club,a new golf podcast with Beef Johnston, and there’s also the small matter of taking him on over nine holes and shooting my best ever score in an unlikely victory!
Also, I think my miss is getting better. (I did have a brief flirtation with the shanks but I’ve corrected that now. I was leaning too far forward and losing my balance. Now I know what causes it, even if it does rear its ugly head it won’t derail a whole round.) I find myself cursing the strike of balls that end up in a position I’d have been pretty pleased with two years ago. Golf is a game of misses, after all, and better for a slightly thin 7-iron to miss the green short-left than bounce off a sheep in the adjacent field. Frequently I will utter an “Oh John!” while my club is still in motion, only for my playing partner to say, “What are you talking about? It’s on the green!”
But as winter comes (later and wetter than expected), why do I still sigh as I fruitlessly clear leaves from the line of my putts? Well, looking back to where I was last year, the stats don’t lie: my handicap is the same. Over 65 rounds of golf, a fitting, a dozen lessons and 100 bruising Crossfit sessions and it hasn’t moved an inch. Well, it did jump up a few shots over summer, when the courses were like concrete and parts of the country literally burst into flames. But anyone who uses the England Golf app will be familiar with the precipice I am now faced with.
Eight green scores lined up like lemmings beside the black line, with only worm casts, soggy fringes and standing water waiting to catapult my handicap over the next few months.
So what’s the plan for 2023? Well, I had hoped to get #Operationsinglefigures away to a good start, but being realistic, by the time the courses are dried out I’m going to be looking at a handicap of somewhere above 15. I’m currently at 13.3, but that’s going to take a hammering in the coming weeks.
One thing that absolutely has to go is my mental block over short putts. As my club pro insists on reminding me, it’s actually harder to miss a two-foot putt than it is to hole it. Well, I’m the exception that proves the rule there. Something just changes in my head when my ball rolls to just outside gimme distance, it’s like a form of vertigo. I’m going to go back to looking at the hole for these tiddlers, and also dust off my putting mat. There’s no excuse for it whatsoever.
Secondly, and you can snigger and tease me all you like, I’ve bought a chipper. I don’t think there’s a more controversial club to pull out of your bag, but my chipper is here to stay. I’ve played three rounds with it, and while there have been no fireworks, every single ball I’ve hit from off the green has left me with a putt. No fluffs, no duffs and no knifing it over the other side. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s also not a stray one. When courses are muddy and high footfall makes the 20-yard radius of the green an obstacle course of unreliable lies, it’s the perfect tool for the job. And when we go back to rock-hard bare lies in summer, I think it will shine there, too.
But why do we single out the chipper for such disdain? Is it because it suggests weakness? Strange if so, because most people don’t hesitate to tell you how awful they were around the greens after posting a big score. Do we think it’s cheating to use a club made for a specific task? Why? No one rolls their eyes when you pull out a hybrid! Is it because it makes us look even more amateurish, not attempting to stop the ball dead when you’re short-sided? Yet the pros use them more than anyone. A chipper is just a club that replicates a 7 or 8-iron, just with a slightly more upright stance.
I like to look into my bag and see the one club with no number on it, it’s like a special forces operative, called in to get a job done that no one else can. So watch out 2023, with my putting mat rolled out and my chipper in hand, maybe I’ll be a force to be reckoned with after all.