Green Grass Golf Shop

Hello friends, it’s Chippin’ Chewsday, innit? I’m here at my new digs, a significant upgrade from my basement, Five Iron Golf, here in tropical downtown Baltimore. If you’re in the area, come check us out for the excellent food and drinks, year-round golf, professional instruction, and if it’s your first visit and you mentioned this video, your choice of either a free 30-minute sim reservation or a quick 10-minute swing analysis. Today we’re going to touch on my favorite topic, that’s avoiding those wasted strokes around the green that, in my opinion, are really easy to avoid wasting if you can just stop taking those unnecessary risks that maybe you don’t even realize you’re taking with every chip and pitch. The moral of today’s story is that the ground is always your friend, especially when you’re trying to save par or bogey and avoid hitting that same chip or pitch over and over again. Think about all the things you have going through your head when you’re trying to hit that higher lofted pitch: “Where do I need to land this? How soft is the green? What kind of bounce am I going to get? Can I make clean enough contact to get spin? If I can, how much am I going to get? If not, how much is it going to roll out? Is it going to roll out into that slope? How much power do I need to land it in that spot? Where do I need this in my stance to make clean enough contact and get the height that I expect or that I want? Am I pitching into a slope? Is the green rolling away from me? How will that affect my shot?” I can go on, but the point is we can get rid of all of those wild thoughts and variables if we swallow our pride, take out a mid or long iron, and hit a long putt along the fairway to end up anywhere on the green. Shooting low scores is about controlling your lost strokes, avoiding triple or quadruple bogeys, or worse, it’s not about making more birdies and eagles. The best way to do that is to control our misses. Out of the many shots that we can hit, picking the one that in the worst situations from the worst shots will still produce a result that we could score with. That means taking the long chip that at the absolute worst will end up somewhere on or at the very least near the green rather than trying to hit that high lofted pitch over nothing but flat fairway and leaving yourself either a foot in front of you or sending it screaming across the green. The next time you have nothing but fairway in your way, take out your six or seven iron, hell, even a hybrid. Put that ball back in your stance with your weight forward, stand tall and close with that toe down and hit a long putt. All I’m thinking about with that shot is how far do I need to take this club back? Where’s the fairway and green sloping? End of list. Take out all of those swing thoughts that everyone is so desperate to shut out of their mind. Take a page out of the old guy’s playbook at your club that you can outdrive by 100 yards but can’t outscore. Make the ground your friend. Be sure to like and subscribe for the next tip next Chewsday. See you on the course!