The Forget About It Guide to Better Golf

The newest issue of Golf Digest includes an article on the current state of Tiger Woods. It’s a recap of his superhuman accomplishment in the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. A testament to his strength and fortitude. And confirmation of something I’ve been thinking about ever since I read his book, “How I play golf.”

My conclusion is this:  I should stop listening to his advice. He’s fun to watch, and inspiring in many ways, but his approach to the game, and his natural skills, are so far beyond my comprehension, well,  forget about it! And let’s face it, there aren’t many other guys who would benefit from his chapter on “How to hit the 2-iron stinger.”

Here’s a list of what Tiger has that you and I don’t have.

1. Genetically-ingrained discipline. His dad & mentor was in the Special Forces! He was raised by military guys who believed you get the job done, no matter what. Even if you’re shot you can “still operate.”  Hoo-Ha. My dad was a pastor, my mom a grade school teacher. I don’t have a killer bone in my body. And if you’ve ever seen my dad swing a club, you’d say it was a God-given miracle that I can get the ball around the course at all.

2. Physical superiority. Earl Woods once said Tiger could have been a world-class sprinter or an Olympic decathlete. His legs are long, his torso perfectly proportioned and his biceps cut like a belt-wearing welter-weight.  The guy works out with the Navy Seals! Even with concerted pushing from my personal trainer I’ll never touch that. My legs are too short. And I’m too much of a wimp to play 91 holes with a broken leg and blown-out ACL.

3. An Analytical Approach.  Tiger’s always been one to analyze things. As Lee Trevino said, “He’s the most intelligent player I’ve ever seen about the golf swing.” He always has to know the reason why something worked, or didn’t work, and he believes that gives him an advantage over other players, especially feel players like me. My strength is creativity. The minute I start analyzing things is the minute it all starts to unravel.

4. Mental Toughness.  If you’re going analyze the cause and effect of every little detail, you better be tough! Tiger’s intensity and his ability to out-think the competition is what makes him so great. Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t work that way. I can relate more closely to Phil Mickelson’s la-dee-da mental approach.

5.  Competitiveness. On a scale of one to 10, with one being “totally laid back and 10 being “Ultra competitive,” Tiger’s a 10.  He’s the guy who brought killer stares and fist pumping to a leisurely, gentleman’s game. I’m more like a three.  Okay, five. Six at the most.

by John Furgurson

This is one of those times when the planets just don’t seem to be aligned quite right. People are out of work or out on strike. The stock market’s bouncing around like a Pinnacle down the wrong cart path. There’s economic uncertainty, political uncertainty, and in many parts of the country, seasonal uncertainty.

It’s times like this when you need golf more than ever. Mother nature’s not decided yet, so you get to cherish these last, glorious days of autumn. (If only the Chamber of Commerce could bottle these up.)  It’s the perfect time to just get out and enjoy it. Breathe the air, bathe in the colors, and forget about all the nonsense that’s been hindering your game through the peak of the golf season.

If every round of golf is like a little vacation, this is the time to take one. Here are a few, helpful hints on how to get the most out of these last few rounds of the year.

• Put all the stressful work stuff in a little compartment in your office, and slam the door on your way out. It’ll still be there when you get back.

• Take a break from the honey-do list, the kid schlepping and all the other family-related drama. (There will be plenty of time for that during the upcoming holidays.)  

• Go out of your way to visit a golf course you don’t normally play. The unfamiliarity will help heighten your senses almost as much as the color of the trees.

• Put the scorecard away and shift your focus to something more artistic, more pleasing, than just the final numbers.

•  Stop analyzing, and start appreciating what’s right there in front of you. Get out of your head, and into the game.

Then, when you’re all done, you might be amazed at how well you actually scored.

by John Furgurson

If you’ve played this crazy game for any length of time you’ve surely experienced a humpty-dumpty moment. It’s when you’re out on the course and all the pieces of your swing just seem to fall apart.

Your shoulders are doing one thing, your arms another. The southern hemisphere — hips, legs, feet — are racing ahead, counteracting the positive gravitational forces of the Northern hemisphere. And to top it all off, your hands are more active than a hyped-up kindergartener.

The results can be quite painful.

So what do you do when all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put it back together again?

The natural tendency is to start analyzing the problem. You tap into that vast databank of tips in your head and try to recall a swing thought that’ll help sync everything up. Forget About It! Sometimes that works for a hole or two, but it’s seldom sustainable. And often it just introduces yet another variable — another detail in an already cluttered mind.

Instead, try this:  Take a practice swing and hold your finish. Zero in on a very specific, memorable target and just stand there, staring at it until it’s burned into your head like a bad tat. Shift ALL your focus away from the mechanics of the swing, and onto that target. Then do whatever it takes to get the ball out there. After all, a good swing is not the object of the game.

If you can maintain that razor-sharp focus on the target for more than just a few holes, you’ll be amazed at how well you can score even when your swing feels completely disjointed. When you start slipping back into that analysis mode, which you will, hold your finish again and refocus on the target.
If you need a swing thought in your head, keep it squarely focused on the target as well. Dumb it down to something like “go there ball.” It’s a powerful departure from how most of us think on the golf course, and a good way to get yourself back in the game.

So even when your swing is off, the story can have a happy ending. Relatively speaking.

I went to the driving range today, more for the exercise than anything else. I knew one bucket couldn’t possibly cure the problems I’ve been having with my driver, but I needed to pound something.

I’ll bet you’ve done the same.

Some days you just go out there for therapeutic reasons. Or because it beats working. Other times, you hit a bucket hoping to find that magic swing key that will unlock Tiger-like power and pinpoint accuracy. Totally different objectives, same results: You get your heart rate up, but that’s about it.

The fact is, there’s very little learning going on at the typical American driving range. For most people, it’s just a series of experimental swings where you try something, look at the results, and then correct that mistake with another equally bad idea. Occasionally you might actually happen upon a compensational move that provides immediate satisfaction, but it’s never anything you could replicate the next time you tee it up.

It’s a merry-go-round of guesswork, and the only way to get off is with some professional help.

For me, that means 15 minutes with my friend/coach/co-author Andy Heinly. That 15 minutes will be more productive than 115 visits to the driving range.

Like all good instructors, he won’t waste time trying to explain why Mr. Snappy is haunting me on the tee. He’ll just give me some simple drill that’ll fix the problem in no time. He’ll add purpose to my practice and eliminate the chances of me making things worse than they already are.

Andy says, “In golf, practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes Permanent.” In other words, if you don’t know what’s really wrong, and you keep practicing, all you’ll end up with is more bad habits.

“My job is to get people out of the fault and fix mentality that’s holding them back, and give them something more constructive to work on,” Andy says. “I give them tangible things they can work on that doesn’t invite a lot of analysis… stuff that will translate directly to the course.”

So I’m not going to waste any more time ingraining my newest bad habits on the driving range. Forget About It! I’m not going to practice any full swing shots until I get the guidance I really need to move forward.

I want off this merry-go-round of experimentation!  It’s really no fun.

A lot of golfers I know hate playing in scrambles. They poo-poo any event where you get four tries at every putt and a couple of mulligans for ten bucks.

They’d rather play in a nerve-wracking Chapman where you’re guaranteed to succumb to the pressure at some point and infuriate your partner by missing a simple little downhill, double-breaking fifteen footer.

These so called “serious” golfers are missing the point.

If they’d just lighten up a bit, they could actually learn a lot from an afternoon charity scramble or corporate couples event.

First of all, in a scramble, it’s much easier to forget your wayward shots. Say you blast a drive over the tree line and into a neighboring fairway, no worries. You don’t even have to endure the embarrassment of walking over there and picking up the guilty little Titlest.

Last time I played in a scramble I didn’t look for a single golf ball the entire round. On the first hole, I suggested to my teammates that we shouldn’t waste time searching. If it’s gone, it’s gone. Forget About It! Besides, it was a desert course that I play frequently, with lots of sand, rock, sage and bitterbrush. And I was sick of picking cheatgrass burrs outta my socks.

That’s the scramble mentality that you need to take to your normal, Saturday morning game. Hit a bad shot? Just let it go and start over.

A scramble is also a great format for building teamwork and camaraderie. You’re rooting for all three of your partners, and they’re rooting for you. Rather than that half-hearted “good shot” you normally get, they’re all genuinely happy when you make a miraculous par from nowhere. Maybe Paul Azinger should use the format for some pre-Ryder Cup practice rounds.

Another thing you can learn in a Scramble is the limits of your power. It’s very tempting to swing outta your shoes when you already have the short ball safely in the fairway. It takes discipline to throttle it back, but what you’ll find is that less effort, with good contact right in the middle of the clubface, works better than swinging for the fences. And it’s always nice to have four good drives in the fairway to choose from.

Most of all, a good scramble will remind you of why you play golf in the first place… To have fun! To relax. To enjoy the golf course and the people you’re with. That’s what it’s all about. 

The Q-Tip tour came to town last weekend for their last major of the year.  As an “honorary observer” I had a unique perspective on the action. What I learned confirms many of the points we made in our book:

• I have to quit swinging so hard.
As one the old saying goes, you need effortless force, not forceful effort. Not once did I see a herculean, bust-outta-your-shirt type of swing that’s so common on the bomb & gouge tour. Forget-About-It! Most of the senior tour players don’t even seem to be taking a full cut at it, even on the wide-open, 600-yard par-5’s. For them, it’s just balance, rhythm, tempo and contact. Length never seemed to be much of an issue, even on a 7300 yard course.

• The highball belongs in the bar.
I didn’t see any high, towering, shots — even with the short irons. Instead, a smooth, three-quarter swing produced consistently low trajectories that worked amazingly well in breezy conditions. It was a spectacular display of good, old-fashioned shotmaking. I could tell they were hitting it right smack dab in the middle of the clubface every time because their distance control was dialed in to the inch. And accuracy was never an issue.

• Short game. Short game. Short game.
In the rare occasion when the seniors missed an approach shot, they just took it as an opportunity to show off their skill around the green. Getting up and down is easier for them than reading the fine print on a scorecard. And putting… there are a lot of different methods being used on that tour, and they all seem to work. Every long put has a good chance to go in the hole. And the short putts seem to have no chance of missing. Wouldn’t that be nice.

• Scrambling is way overrated.
When I was young Seve Ballesteros was my hero. These days, it’s fun watching Tiger make superhuman recovery shots from the trees at Torrey Pines, and I pride myself on being able to scramble pretty well. But the old guys proved that boring golf is good golf.  If I want to score better, I need to follow their lead… Straight down the fairway every time. Stick it on the green. Roll it in. Or — worst case scenario — you leave yourself eight inches coming back for a routine par. It’s not the least bit exciting, until you add up all the numbers at the end.

All in all, I’d say the big difference is experience and wisdom. You just don’t see the players on this tour making rookie mistakes. They don’t compound their problems, like club players do, and they never seem to get too up, or too down. They just go about their business, post a score of 15 under, collect their six-figure check, and move on to the next venue.

Welcome to the Forget-About-It Golf blog. This is the first in a series of articles  written with one objective in mind… to help you have more fun with the game of golf.  If you’ve ever been frustrated with your game, or if you feel like you’re constantly working at it and grinding away on the course, we think you’ll enjoy our approach. So come back often. And, of course, read the book. 

Normally, we’ll keep the topics lighthearted and helpful. Even humorous at times. But this week, I’m compelled to touch on an incident that was downright depressing.  

Here’s what happened, according to the Seattle Times: Seems somebody was playing too slowly at a municipal course in Auburn, Washington. After 15 holes, a guy in the group behind got so infuriated, he attacked the guilty player with his 6-iron. Hit him in the head so hard, it bent the shaft of the club and caused serious brain damage.

Our thoughts go out to the victim, and to his family. He was just trying to enjoy a nice, leisurely round of golf like all the rest of us. Even if he was on a 6-hour pace, he didn’t deserve that. 

And what about the guy who was enraged enough to commit assault with a deadly weapon? Chances are, he’ll have plenty of time to work out his anger management issues while he’s in the slammer. Maybe we’ll send him one of our books. 

I hate slow play as much as anyone. I once walked off the course, miles from the clubhouse, after fourteen holes in four and a half hours. And in later posts, we’ll touch on some solutions to that problem. 

But what can you say about that incident up in Seattle?

Forget-About-It. I’m at a loss.