Darrell Klassen Inner Circle --- SCORING REPORT PART #3 --- BREAKING 70 If you are already shooting consistently right around the par number on your home course, then your first goal is to be able to shoot those nice, low numbers on nearly every golf course you go to play. This will take just a bit of doing on your part, but you are so close to the 60ʼs that you do not want to quit here. In this special issue just for those of you who are already shooting low, low numbers I am going to show you how to begin to break into the 60ʼs, and I want to tell you, This is where golf really gets exciting, in my opinion. In fact, that is part of the reason I donʼt play the game any longer. Oh, yeah, I play a nine hole round from time to time, but I just never play eighteen holes any more. As I have aged and gone through four major surgeries I cannot play in the 60ʼs as easily as I did ten years ago, and it simply is no longer the challenge it once was. I can still shoot right around par, but that doesnʼt seem like enough for me. I liked the challenge of going LOW. I have shot seven rounds of 60 in my lifetime. I never was able to card a 59, and that drove me nuts. No matter how well I played I would always end up just a shot or two away from that magic little number. That would have been thrilling, I do believe. My oldest son shot a 59 one time, although it was on a short course with a par of 68. I will say on his behalf that that little short golf course could eat your lunch so fast it wasnʼt even funny. I have shot Darrell Klassen Inner Circle pg 1
62 on it a number of times, but to go lower than that was as difficult as shooting it on a full-length 72 par course. When your are basically a scratch player you have a bit of a different challenge than those in the previous sections Breaking 100; Breaking 90; and Breaking 80. If you think of the percentages, someone coming from 100 to 90 is shaving ten shots off his score, yet that might represent a 30% drop in handicap, figuring the difference between 100 and say 72. When you have the same drop in relation to a percentage number, you are already shooting 72 or 73 and you only need two or three shots in order to achieve your new goal. However, in relation to par and on a percentage basis, you are required to change your difference between you and par by nearly 100%. I know this may not make sense to all of you, but I am trying to tell you that it is way more difficult to shave three shots off of a par round than it is a round of 90 or 100, so you really have your work cut out for you. Because I have always liked the mental side of everything I do in life, this was not only a great challenge to me, but it was a barrel of fun accomplishing it. The reason I say it was such a mental challenge and that it was also so much fun was this. When you are basically playing scratch golf, and you wish to go lower, you must learn how to shave tenths of a stroke off of your average score for at least five to ten holes on your home course. This gets a little tricky. The first thing you MUST DO is to (Iʼve heard this somewhere before) spend more time working on your short game. You need to do your best to develop the proficiency of a touring professional around the greens, on the greens, and out to at least one hundred yards from the green. I have told you this story before, but I must tell it again to you who want to reach this level. A young man nineteen years of age came to me several years ago and said he had the backing to go on tour. If I thought he had the ability it would be a down deal. I told him I thought he plenty of talent. He just needed a lot of work. Darrell Klassen Inner Circle pg 2
Where do we start? he asked, and I said, With the short game. this shocked him. He assured me his short game was already pretty good and that he felt he needed to become more consistent from tee to green. THIS WAS THE ABSOLUTE WRONG THING TO SAY TO DARRELL KLASSEN, because I have been there. I took the young man out to one of the holes which was open that afternoon on the golf course, and I placed a brand new golf ball right at the one hundred marker. I then asked him what he was thinking from the one hundred yard mark. I will never forget his answer. Iʼm thinking I canʼt afford to miss the green form one hundred yards, and I would LIKE to get it inside fifteen feet for a run at a birdie. I told him that was why he was only playing to a two or three handicap at the time and that it was also the reason he had never been able to get his handicap any lower. He asked me what I was thinking from one hundred yards. I told him, From one hundred yards out I am thinking I want to knock it into the cup. You should have heard him laugh when I said that, so he then asked me, What are you really thinking from here? I got out of the golf cart and grabbed a pitching wedge out of my bag. I took a couple of rehearsal swings and struck a nice little knock-down punch shot to the green. The ball landed about fifteen feet short of the flagstick. It took two nice little soft skips and DISAPPEARED RIGHT INTO THE CUP. I turned to him and said, From one hundred yards I am thinking Iʼm going to knock the ball into the cup. I then reassured him I did not make all of them from here, but in my practice I kept statistics and right at 5% of my shots from one hundred yards ended up in the hole. Here is the point. It is not that 5% of my shots in practice would go into the cup from one hundred yards. The real benefit was the 87% of my shots from one hundred yards would be inside an eight to ten foot circle, and that means that nearly all of my shots from one hundred yards ended up within four to five feet from the flagstick. As a result, I was up and down from the hundred yard marker Darrell Klassen Inner Circle pg 3
nearly 90% of the time. This meant that was getting A WHOLE LOT OF BIRDIES in my round, and that makes for low numbers. I used to line up golf balls on the green like I was going to do the Line Drill. Then I would chip them into the cup one at a time, rather than putting them into the cup. This built my confidence that I could chip the ball into the cup from anywhere around the green. I am dating myself, but I used to watch Jerry Heard practice. We grew up in the same area. He would chip fifty to a hundred balls from off the edge of the green until he could fill the cup and leave ALL of the rest of the balls touching in a circle around the cup. He was magic, and when I started copying that little routine I became magic, also. Once you REALLY have your chipping and putting razor-sharp then you need to begin to chart your play, hole by hole. Keep a ten round average and work on getting a five par on which you average number of strokes is 4.7 down to 4.3, as an example. Maybe there is a very difficult par four hole in which you can only average 4.1. Try to work the average for that hole down to 4.0. When you have accomplished this on several holes on the course you will have reduced your handicap by one to three strokes. As you can see this is slow work and it is tedious work, but it is well worth every minute of it. It is worth every minute of it, because in the process of accomplishing this little task YOU WILL BECOME A SMARTER PLAYER THAN YOU HAVE EVER BEEN. This is the main thing we are trying to accomplish at this level. We are trying to become SMARTER players. We have heard forever about COURSE MANAGEMENT. Well, this is the real deal when it comes to course management, and there is no secret to it. You simply either learn to play smarter or you do not learn to play smarter. Some of you will be able to do it, and others will not be able to do it. It all depends on where you are, and where you are coming from. I know that isnʼt very good English, but what I am trying to say is that some of you are already at your full potential and some of you are not. I have seen some Darrell Klassen Inner Circle pg 4
great players never make it to the big-time because they just didnʼt have what it took to make it over this hurdle. I have always told them to not be frustrated or embarrassed by it, though, because they are already in the top.01% of all of the golfers in the entire world when they are playing scratch golf. That is something to be quite proud of accomplishing in itself. If you will take the time to read and study what I have just shared with you, you will have a very good chance of making it. It also requires a lot of patience in order to attain such a goal, so do not be in a hurry. Let it come to you by enjoying your practice and making it a lot of fun. Otherwise I can guarantee you it will never happen. I am excited to hear from those of you who are in this category. I want to hear of your successes, so please drop me an email to keep me informed and to ask questions as you make the journey. Darrell. P.S. For those of you who are not in this bracket I hope you noticed what I had to say to the elite players: Your short game is not good enough, yet. It was the same thing I have told the rest of the golfers. I told a young tour player recently that I had watched him quite a bit and that he has a lot of talent. Then I told him his short game is not as good as it needs to be in order to make it all the way to the top. He was a bit offended until I assured him nobodies short game is EVER GOOD ENOUGH PERIOD!!! Ok, golfers I am ready to hear about your scores coming down this should be one of the most helpful articles you have ever read on scoring. If you are smart, you will realize it, too. You will notice I did not go into mechanics. All of that is covered in the DVDs, and you have (or can get your hands onto) all of those. This is all mental, and it is the mental side which allows us to play the game like professionals no matter what your level of play might be at the time. Darrell Klassen Inner Circle pg 5