Secrets to the SHORT GAME. Special Report by Darrell Klassen

Secrets to the SHORT GAME Special Report by Darrell Klassen

SPECIAL ISSUE Master Your Short-Game Is your Short Game good enough? How good do you need to be from 100 yards out from the hole. The best way to practice your Short Game this little game will easily knock 4-5 strokes from your score. Golf Ball buying tips Save money and save strokes here. (plus more..) Hello, Golfers!! I hope you are doing as well as I am doing. The oldest and finest private country club in Fresno, California, which is about a forty-five minute drive from my home, has just invited me to become their teaching professional. I ve played golf there for several years. It s a flat golf course with trees everywhere. It has small greens, and the course plays to 7,000 yards. It is a tough one. The greens are great, so if you can read the putt and start it on line, it will definitely go in the cup. At my age, and especially with my disabilities until I get these hips and knees replaced, I no longer hit the ball very far. If I bust a hemorrhoid, and catch the driver dead square in the sweet spot, I might hit a drive around 230 yards. I used to hit it easily 280, when I was healthier in the legs and hips. Well, now, the course plays pretty long for me, and in order to make a good score, I have to rely on my short game. Fortunately, that is where I have always shined. On the first hole, a 425 yard par-4 and that s from the amateur tees, not the long ones I managed to get my second shot to about forty yards in front of the green. The pin was up front, so I carved a little sand wedge in there, flying about six-feet off the ground, landed it about five feet short of the pin, and snapped it to a grinding halt just one foot behind the hole. That gave me a wonderful little par to get things started. Thank God for the wedge game! I was always pretty sneaky with the wedges, though. I was giving a student a lesson several years ago, and he was a scratch player. He mentioned that he thought he should be playing on the plus side of zero, but he just couldn t seem to get there. I immediately told him he had a good enough long and middle game, but it was his short game which was keeping him from becoming the player he really wanted to be. He took offense to that, and somewhat snapped to me, My short game is pretty damned good, Darrell. How do you think I play to a zero, now? One really shouldn t do that to me. I ve been at this for too long. I took a range ball, turned and pointed to a garbage can which was about thirty-five yards away, and said, Let s see you do this, then, Bob. Then I proceeded to lob a soft little sand wedge right into the can on the fly. His eyes got a bit like the saucers you put under your coffee cup at the breakfast table, as he looked with total unbelief. That s when I asked him if he wanted to see me do it with another ball, and he calmed down some. That was also Page 1

the moment he asked me to teach him more about the short game, so we got started. I think I ve told you about the young man who wanted to give it a try on the PGA Tour, so he came to me for some swing help. He was playing to a 3 handicap, and wanted to know if I thought he had the tools to make it out on the big-time tour. He was only nineteen years old at the time, and his parents had plenty of money to make it all happen, so thought he was ready to make his mark in the golfing world. I told him he had the game for it, but he needed to really become serious about his short game, if he was serious about the tour. He assured me his short game was pretty good, so I took him out to a hole on the course and put a brand, new Titleist balata right on the one-hundred yard mark. What are you thinking here, son? I asked him. From one-hundred yards I m thinking I want to get my golf ball within fifteen feet of the cup for a run at a birdie. I can t afford to miss the green, and I would like a birdie, if possible. I told him that was why he was only a 3 handicap player, so he asked me what I was thinking at one-hundred yards. I told him, I m thinking I want it in the hole from a hundred yards, son. He laughed and then asked me what I was REALLY thinking from a hundred yards. I calmly got out of the golf cart and reached for my pitching wedge. I took two little rehearsal swings, and hit a low punch shot up toward the green. The ball landed about fifteen feet short of the cup and took two short skips and then rolled right into the cup. Excuse my English, but he nearly pooped his pants. I assured him it was only luck. However, at the time I was practicing a lot, and I actually holed out right at 5% of my shots from one-hundred yards. Think about that for a bit. I actually hit five out of every one hundred golf shots into the cup from a hundred yards. As I told him, that meant that nearly 85% of my shots were within three feet of the cup from one-hundred yards out not fifteen feet, like he was merely hoping to achieve. I see a lot of golfers who can play a pretty fair game. In fact, they think they are pretty good players. Well, they are pretty good players, by all rights, but they aren t GREAT players. All of the GREAT ones are REALLY GOOD FROM ONE-HUNDRED YARDS AND IN TO THE CUP. You can NEVER be TOO good from one-hundred yards and in. In fact, in my opinion, you can NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH from that distance and in. YOU CAN ALWAYS BECOME BETTER THAN YOU ARE WITH YOUR SHORT GAME. PERIOD!!! I used to have a couple of buddies who played the PGA Tour when I was in my thirties. When they would come to visit me, we would always tee it up for a few bucks. They liked to play a $100 nassau, four ways, with automatic presses when you were two down. I loved to play that game with them, because they were out there playing under all of that pressure, and making all of that BIG money, and Page 2

then they would bring it home for me to take from them. I took it regularly, too. I played at tour level in those years, so they didn t have anything on me for game. However, I had the best short game they had ever seen. I would merely try to keep as even with them as I could, until they missed a fairway or a green. That was my clue to jump on them with everything I had, and I almost always worked. They finally said to me one day, Darrell, when we miss a green, we are trying to save par, but when you miss a green you are going for birdie and you get it a lot of the time. How do you do that? I told them it was quite simple. They would spend hours and hours on the driving range hitting balls, and I would spend hours and hours practicing my chipping and pitching. I would make up shots. I would try new things. I simply wasn t willing to let missing a green cost me an opportunity to still get a birdie. Saving par was as easy as falling off a log, then. I NEVER worried about saving par when I missed a green. That was a given. I want you to go back and look, or think, about what you have asked me in all of the past issues. Then take a look at any golf magazine you wish, and look at the questions for the pros. They are ALL questions about the golf swing. You virtually NEVER see questions about the short game. It s like we will get to that AFTER WE LEARN THE LONG GAME. WHAT A HUGE MISTAKE!!!! You see, I learned all of this without a golf professional teaching me. I had to learn all of this on my own. I may not be the sharpest knife in the block, but I did have the sense to do something I ve never seen elsewhere. I stopped and thought on day, when I was a youngster, about the process of learning. It all has to start with the easy things. When I played basketball, my older brother would beat the pants off of me. That s where I got the idea to start short. I started practicing the shots right under the basket the layup shots. Then, I learned how to make all of my shots from just a few feet farther back, and so on, until I could shoot the ball into the hoop from anywhere and with ease. The same thought came to me with golf. What would make me think I could become proficient with the longer shots, if I wasn t good at the shorter shots? So I started working on my short shots. I used to chip balls into the cup from two and three feet from the hole. I thought if I could do that, I might then be able to eventually learn to have the confidence to chip them into the cup from ten yards. That lead to pitching them into the hole from twenty yards. For some reason, I had the idea that if I could pitch the ball close to the cup from twenty yards, I would be able to learn how to do it from thirty yards. Then it was forty yards, and fifty, and right on out to one hundred yards. Then I found that the same swing which would allow me to consistently get it close from a hundred yards would work with an eight-iron from a hundred and forty yards. This is how I built my personal golf game into a tour quality Page 3

game. And I did it without any instruction. That is why I now teach the very same method of learning. I want my students to start with the short shots. I want them to learn how to use their wrists in order to strike the GROUND WHERE THE GOLF BALL LIES, IN ORDER TO LEARN THE FEELING OF MAKING BACKSPIN. When you can make the golf ball spin backwards, you can learn to control the amount of roll you will get when you land the ball on the green. When you can control the amount of spin and run you will get on the green, you can begin to learn how to make your shots stop CLOSE TO THE HOLE or even knock a few into the hole. You will begin to have shorter putts to make. Once you can spin it with some control, you are ready to pitch you shots farther and farther, until you are actually hitting full golf shots. Then you learn to apply the side spin I keep talking about in order to control the way you want your golf ball to curve, and the amount you want it to curve. This is all a part of learning to hit the golf ball where you want it to go, and it really isn t all that difficult to do. I was with a student recently, and he asked if I could still hit all of the shots. I told him I could. You never forget. It s just like learning to ride a bicycle. Once you have it, you never lose is. If you don t practice regularly, you may not be as sharp, but you will ALWAYS HAVE IT. I used to knock range balls into the trash cans for my students, and now the balls roll up to the trash cans. That s still good. The nine holes I played just last week at the course in Fresno included two chip-ins for birdies. I bogeyed one hole, also, and so I shot one under par for that nine. I don t shoot over par very often. I m not strong enough in the legs to go eighteen holes, even riding in a cart. I shoot good numbers, though, because I can get it up and down quite well even for a fat, old, crippled guy. Here s Your Homework for This Month If you really want to knock a few shots off of your handicap, all you need to do is to start practicing your short game. Start with this little game. Take five golf balls, and give yourself a total par of fifteen. Chip the five balls onto a practice green, and go putt the balls into the cup. Then pitch onto the green from behind a bunker and still make your par fifteen. When you get good enough so fifteen is no longer a challenge, make your par fourteen, or thirteen. I used to make my par for five golf balls be ten strokes, and I wasn t happy shooting par. I wanted to be under par in my practice. My par was still ten, when I was pitching onto the green from fifty yards away. When I was practicing that distance, I still wasn t happy with par. I wanted to hole at least one of the five balls from fifty yards. Did I do it regularly? NO! But I was trying to do it. That was my goal, though, and I was almost NEVER over par from fifty yards out. Think about that for a bit. If you never Page 4

took more than three shots to get your ball into the cup from fifty yards out, you would probably shave several shots off your score card. What would averaging two and a half shots from fifty yards do for you? What about taking only two shots from now on from fifty yards from the green? Can you see where you are having your trouble playing to the handicap you would like? It s definitely in the short game. That goes for all of us. Yet, everyone wants to know how to hit it longer and how to hit it straighter. Everyone thinks longer and straighter golf shots is the key to playing good golf. Let s take a moment or so to ask someone who you all know about this. His name is Tiger Woods. Here is a world-class player. Tiger is number one in the entire golfing world, and he can t hit a fairway to save his butt. Yet, he is the top player in the world. He hits less than fifty percent of his fairways, and is still the top player. He doesn t get anywhere near the credit he deserves for his short game. He is a GREAT short game player. This guy can get his golf ball in the cup out of a garbage can from fifty yards and in. he is superb with the wedges and with the putter. But what does everyone talk about when they are analyzing Tiger s game. They talk about his power. They talk about how ANYONE WHO HITS IT WITH THAT POWER AND WITH THAT MUCH DISTANCE makes it easy to get the ball into the hole from there. They only mention that it must be simple to get it into the cup when you hit it over 300 yards off the tee. Listen up here. It s just as difficult to get it into the cup with a 300 yard drive as it is with a 200 yard tee shot. The cup is still only four and a quarter inches in diameter, no matter how far you hit your drives. Here in the US golfers constantly ask me the difference between the PGA Tour and the Nationwide Tour. It shocks them when I tell them the answer. The youngsters on any of the lesser tours all strike the golf ball just as well as the guys do on the PGA Tour. The difference is in the short game. The guys out on the big tour are great when it comes to the short game, and the other tour players are only good at the short game. That should tell the average golfer something. My dad used to play to a 5 handicap when he was seventy years of age. He was a great athlete in high school, and had an opportunity to play professional basketball, right out of high school. He had been an All-American in both his junior and in his senior years. As good of an athlete as he was, he could never hit a tee shot over 210 yards. I would take him out to the practice range and have him hitting soft draws that went well over 250, and then on the course he would always guide his shots, and he would lose all of the distance I had just helped him achieve. From the time he was in his middle forties, he had to hit a five-wood in from 150 yards. He could hit that five-wood within fifteen feet consistently, and he hardly ever missed Page 5

a putt from within that fifteen feet. He was awesome with the short game. In his case his short game started on the tee box. He never was long. If he missed a green, it was a very good possibility he was going to chip it into the cup for a birdie. He drove the younger players crazy at the club where he played. They would smack the feathers out of the ball, and he would just plod along. They would shoot in the low 80s, and occasionally break into the 70s, and he was always between par and 75. I had very good example to follow as I was growing up. He was a great short game player. I could see from his game it was the short game where I needed to become skilled. It was the short game where I needed to spend the majority of my practice time, and that was exactly what I did. Fortunately, I was able to take it to a whole new level. I learned shots he never dreamed of hitting. Of course, I had no choice, because, as a youngster, I was in so many terrible places I had no choice but to learn how to get out of trouble quickly. I had to learn how to make it bite out of the rough, because I was in the rough so much of the time. I had to learn the sand shots. I was in the sand a lot. I use to think to be legal I could only carry twelve clubs, because I also had to carry a pail and a shovel for getting out of the sand. We will take time in an upcoming issue to discuss the sand shots. They are actually quite simple, once you can understand what is actually taking place in the shot. In order to make the improvements you need, you must, as I continue to tell you, go to the practice area and begin to experiment with different ideas of your own. Ask yourself, What if I were to do this with the club and with the golf ball? Whatever THIS is, try it a few times to see if it would be something you could ever use on the course. If it is, then practice it to perfect it a bit. That is how I learned everything I know about the game and the swing. I used to hit during practice flop shots with a 1-iron. I learned to hit one-hundred yard slices with a 3-iron, at pitching wedge and sand wedge height. That one has saved me a ton of shots throughout the years. There have been numerous times I have been behind trees and needed to be able to slice a wedge, but a wedge is almost impossible to slice. I would take some iron out of my bag and hit a nice high shot, and many times, because it is flying like a wedge, it would even check back because of all of the spin I had been able to apply to the shot. You have no idea what you can do with a golf club until you begin to try. Once again, we all get caught up in trying to practice PERFECT golf shots. Yet, there are many occasions where we do not need a perfect shot. We need some type of special shot. I played for several years with a friend of mine. He was playing off a 4 handicap at the time, and we played at least once a month. Whenever I would hit a shot off into the trees, I would intentionally complain all the way to my golf ball about it. Page 6

He tells it this way, Darrell would always complain about hitting it off the fairway and into the trees and trouble. Then, when he would get to his ball, buried in trouble, he would ALWAYS and I do mean ALWAYS say Thank God, I hit it into an opening. Well I ve NEVER been able to see even one of his openings. Yet, he would step to the ball and proceed to knock it either on the green, or so close it was no problem getting it up and down. I tell you that story because I want you to see something very important. Because I could hit the golf ball and make it curve left or right upon command, and because I could also hit it either high or low while curving it left or right, I could see shot possibilities which would never occur to him. This is the entire message of this newsletter. You have to learn to make a lower score. You will begin to do this when we can improve our touch and shots from one-hundred yards and in, and when you are able to learn how to extricate yourself from trouble. That is why I encourage you to go to a practice area and start experimenting with different things. Learn to hit bump-and-run shots. Then learn the flop shot. Learn how to hit those cute little low scooters that have a ton of spin on them. (You won t be able to hit those shots, and some of the others, if you are playing HARD cheap golf balls. That is simply a fact of life.) I m not trying to put you down or anything, but many of you will not spend the amount of money which is required to purchase the soft-covered golf balls, and then you can t figure out why you can t spin the ball the way us professionals are able to spin them. The balls you need to do your best with those shots are high dollar. However, there are some pretty good balls out there which will do almost as well. One of my favorite cheap balls is the Precept Lady. I think the Laddie is just as good, but I m not quite convinced, yet. However, those are both very good balls for the money. So is the Maxfli Noodle. That ball seems fairly soft for the money. I don t know whether or not you have the Top-Flite Strata over there. It used to be just a STRATA, and it was made by the Spalding Company. Us professionals flat refused to play anything which said Top-Flite on it, so Spalding changed the ball to say only STRATA. A lot of us played it and liked it quite well. Then, through some of their changes they went back to Top-Flite Strata, and I haven t hit it. I ve heard it is still fairly soft for the money, though. The plain cheap Top-Flite s, and balls of that quality, are so hard that they will spin at about one-half the rate of the expensive balls. My students constantly ask me why they can t get the spin I do on my shots, and I have to tell them they aren t spending the same amount of money I am spending for golf balls. Now, a lot of professionals get their golf balls for FREE. I don t! I refuse to be obligated to the manufacturers in that manner, so I don t take any of their freebies. The golf ball makes a huge difference, though. I played balata covered balls as long as I could get them, because they had the most spin of any of the balls out there. They were Page 7

very expensive, and they cut extremely easily!! I remember the days when I was a young professional, and I didn t have very much money. I would have one good round new golf ball to use in a money game. I knew I would virtually never lose in those games, and they were a great way to pick up the extra cash for my family to have at least a few small luxuries. Well, I would crush a drive right down the middle of the fairway, only to see some hacker come into my fairway and take a swing at my nice, new, round ball. Whack!!! Right in the eye he would hit it. As I watched my one good golf ball rolling back toward me, I knew he had just cut it to the rubber bands. Either way, it was no longer usable, because he had knocked it out of round. He had just put a beautiful shiner on it. It was really a chore to settle my mind on staying in the game. I wanted to get mad at the guy, but I also knew that would blow my focus, and I wouldn t play my best. I had to merely declare the ball out of play and put an old one into play for the remainder of the round. Those were the days!!! We had a lot of great fun. In summary, get that putter trained to make everything out to five or six feet. That gives you a ten to twelve-foot circle to chip and pitch to. Then learn to get your approach shots inside that ten to twelve-foot circle, so you can one-putt a good percentage of the time, and your scores will start dropping like flies in a snow storm. Then start working your way back from the green in five yard increments, seeing if you can still keep the ball in that ten to twelve-foot circle. If you can work your way back to twenty or thirty yards and still get most of your shots into the circle, you have just taken ALL of the pressure off of your approach shot to the green. You don t even need to hit the green, because you are able to chip and pitch it close enough to one-putt most of the time. When there is no pressure on your approach shot, then there will also be no pressure on your tee shot. Why would you need to get uptight over a tee shot, if your approach isn t required to hit the green? There is no reason. All pressure has then disappeared, and you are on your way to becoming a single-digit player. This whole thing starts at the cup and works its way back to the tee box. However, every golfer I have ever seen imagines it just the other way around. That is why so many of you are not achieving your true goals. You think LONGER AND STARIGHTER OFF THE TEE IS THE ANSWER TO BETTER GOLF. That is the wrong approach to the whole game. Get as good as you can get out to five feet. Then learn to get it into that ten-foot circle from as far as twenty to thirty yards from the green. When you can do that, your whole attitude toward the game will take a major change for the better, and you will become a much better player. Good luck!! We ll see you next time. Just remember... Golf s an easy game. Darrell Klassen Page 8