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Golf is an overwhelming game. The quickest way to find this out is to qualify for a PGA Tour event, play the course for the first time on Sunday, then spend the next three days trying to perfect all the shots that will be needed come Thursday when the first round commences. Among these shots are included long, straight drives, precise irons, deft chipping and pitching, and, of course, good putting. This list sounds as though it came straight out of one of the major golf magazines. You know, the 10 page spreads on “How to Break 90” that provide you with absolutely everything you need to know about improving, until the next such article in next month’s edition. But I’m not going to leave it at that. I know that what you are really looking for are the details, the inside scoop on just what’s going on out here where the best players play.
This article is about my week competing in the GGCC, or the Greater Greensboro Chrysler Classic. I chose this as one of my 6 PGA Tour exemptions that I earned by winning the National Club Pro Championship in 2001 mostly because it fit into my schedule (I wanted to spread my events through the year) and because I went to Wake Forest, only 40 minutes away in Winston Salem, for the first two years of college. It’s also nice that the course suited my game, since at 7,060 yards it was one of the shortest on the schedule. The tournament lacked many of the biggest names in golf because it was positioned two weeks after the Masters and one week after Hilton Head, one of the Tour players’ favorite courses. Thus, earning the moniker “weak field”, as if the price of admission should go down because Tiger, David, Ernie, Phil, and Sergio weren’t there.
If you ever want to get my dander up just call a PGA Tour event field “weak”. There is no such thing as a weak field. At that point in time almost every player out there was better than I am. If I play in a tournament against only club pros I am better than almost every player. That’s quite a difference, wouldn’t you say? Every time I’m out on Tour I got a better idea of how I have to improve in order to be competitive and not be one of the worst players on the course.
Most golf fans have no idea how hard the average Tour event course is. Watching on T.V., the only players being shown are playing the best out of all the great players who started the tournament. The telecast is filled with 6-irons from 200 yards to five feet, or 260 yard 3-woods that land on the green and stop. Putts go in and pitch shots lip out. The winning score is around 15 to 20 under, and by not being there personally the viewer has every reason to think that the course is not all that hard. Well, they would be wrong. Greensboro was a very “average” Tour tournament. The private country club course winds through a modest housing development and, playing to a length of 7,067 yards, is regarded as one of the shorter Tour courses, certainly not one that favors “the bombers” as the long hitters are referred to, although it quickly becomes obvious to the player that the course has other defenses.
Let’s start with the rough. The furthest I could get out of an average lie in the second cut of rough was 100 yards. Basically, if I missed the fairway and the first cut, usually about 30 yards across, I was in the hay and could not reach the green. Hacking out was no bargain either, as the fairways narrowed in up by the green and if the hack out happened to end up back in the deep stuff it was quite difficult to pitch the ball close enough to have a good look at par. The premium, obviously, was on hitting the driver, or the 3-wood, straight off the tee. If you were going to miss a fairway, however, it definitely paid to be closer to the green, which is one of the ways distance always factors into how you can play the course. A 300 yard drive on a 420 yard par four leaves a wedge to the green. Even played out of the deep stuff a strong hitter can slash a wedge that far and has a chance to hit the green in regulation. I drive the ball closer to 270, and most drives that end up in the rough don’t go quite that far since you get little of the roll-out at the end of the drive that you do when the ball is skittering down the fairway. So if I’m 260 off the tee in the heavy rough I’m going to have 160 left, and there’s no way I can hit it that far out of the hay. Of course, the best of all worlds is to be both long and straight, which is what far more players are on today’s Tour than ever before.
I saw another example of this, and a glimpse into golf’s future, when I played a practice round on Tuesday with Jay Haas and his son Bill, who, at the time, was a 19 year old sophomore at Wake Forest and is one of the top rated collegians in the country. Jay and I played for a year on the same Wake Forest team which in 1975 was 2-time defending NCAA champions. Jay and Curtis Strange were the big guns back then and I was a freshman with no chance of playing on the first team. I like to play with Jay because our games are somewhat similar, and I always feel that I can learn from someone who is better than I am. Jay hits the ball normal distances, averaging close to 280 yards off the tee, and is as smart and solid a player that you can find. He hits the ball plenty far and very consistently, and is wonderful around the greens with his wedges and his putter.
Bill Haas, on the other hand, is as “new generation” as Jay is a throw-back. Tall and lanky, Billy was not physically impressive on first sight, although he did look “built for the game”. We teed off on the first hole at Forest Oaks, straightaway 420 yards with fairway bunkers on the left side from about 250 to 280 out. Jay knocked one in the far bunker, then I hit one down the middle just past the 150 yard marker. Bill got up and hit a line-drive pull with a little draw up the left side. It was apparent when the ball came off the club that the kid could hit the ball hard, but I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw when I got up to my ball. I had 143 yards to the middle, a nice drive for me, and Jay was the same yardage over in the bunker. Up ahead, way up ahead, was Bill. It was so amazingly far up ahead that once I hit my shot I began to walk off the yardage up to his ball. I counted up to 67 yards, and when I got there he was in mid-swing with his 75-yard lob wedge. Later in the round we got to the 9th tee, a 586 yard par five with a cross bunker out about 80 yards from the green. Jay and I both hit nice drives and decided to lay up short of the trap with 5-irons, mainly because the area past the bunker was narrow and flanked by heavy rough, while the green was tiny and unreceptive to short pitches. Bill had taken his drive down the left side, again with a hard, slightly drawing pull, and seemed destined for the left rough. When we got up there his ball was perhaps 80 yards further up the left side of the fairway, and he had 215 yards to the middle of the green on a 586-yard hole. To save you the math, that’s a 371 yard drive, in the fairway. He blew my mind completely on the 13th, when on a whim he took a driver over some trees directly off the tee and over a huge lake, a 320 yard carry. I asked him if there were any other players in college as long as he was, and he named a guy on his own team and a couple others just in his conference.
I keep trying to fly the ball 10 yards further. I have figured that the magic distance is 265 yards in the air. If you fly it that far it will roll out to an average over 280 yards, which is enough to make you not short compared to other Tour players. On most courses doglegs are guarded by bunkers on the corners at about 240 to 260 yards, and carry distance is everything if you want to attack the hole. Any par 5 of 550 yards or less can be attacked if your drive heads out close to 300 yards. While length is certainly a nice thing, you don’t absolutely have to hit it that far. Certainly many a tournament has been won by shorter hitters. Many courses, although their numbers are dwindling, are laid out so as not to reward length but position. That being said, however, there are so many players who are both long and straight that to be weak in either category is a huge deficit to begin with. It is also well to remember that one who can hit his driver 320 can probably hit a 3-wood 290 and a 2-iron 260. If the premium is on accuracy they have the advantage there as well by being able to hit a shorter, more accurate club to the correct position.
The great equalizer in the distance category is the rough and the greens. No one can play effectively if the rough is deep enough. Every now and then, mostly in the majors, you will see someone like Tiger wedging back out to the fairway. As strong as he is, you know for sure that no one can play from that lie. Most players can, however, slash it a few yards back into the fairway, although the stronger player may be able to advance it a bit more. All are then left with long shots to the green in three, and most likely a good chance of bogey or worse. Another “Tiger proofing” method would be to pinch the fairways in at 290 to 300 yards, repositioning fairway bunkers to make them impossible to fly. I’ve always thought that the idea was that if you hit the ball longer and straight at the same time you were better, and that the better players should win the tournaments. There should be an effort to mix up the bunkering and the necking of the fairways to make it even for everyone, with the advantage going to anyone who hits it long and straight. One thing’s for sure, short and crooked is going nowhere fast, and if you are short or even average you better hit it very straight.
Another thing apparent to me after playing in Tour events is the firmness and speed of the greens. If you’ve never played fast and hard greens you can’t really understand the demands on all approach shots and all shots from around the green. Also factor in the heavy rough that catches any shot missing the fringe and you have automatically difficult scoring conditions. At Greensboro the greens were quite small, with little necks on every green perfect for hiding pin placements. To add to the fun they were quite firm and generally sloped away from front to back, so that any shot hitting pin high with less than a wedge released 15 or more feet. If the pin was back the approach had to land short: there were times that this was not possible due to ridges in front of the pin or to general lack of room in front of or behind the pin. The par threes were particularly tough, with mid to long irons landing on brick hard greens sloping away. I may have landed on 70% of the greens, but I only stayed on half of those. Again, length plays a factor here as a full shot struck from a shorter distance with a higher lofted club has a much better chance of holding the green and getting at a tucked pin.
If you aren’t lucky enough to play the majority of your golf at a club with fast greens you probably know how it feels to suddenly go from slow or medium speed greens (8 or 9 on the Stimpmeter) to greens that roll significantly faster, say 10.5 to 12. Speed control is difficult on both long and short putts, and if your stroke is faulty or you have trouble gauging the speed you are going to be in for a long day. The thing about playing against the best competition is that you know you can’t be defensive and lag everything up to the hole. You had better make a few, because the cut is going to be anywhere from even to four under par, and being tentative is no way to score. And forget about missing from short range. The greens as far as conditioning are usually next to perfect, and the guys who are shooting the good numbers certainly aren’t missing 3-footers. The first time you have a downhill 3 ½ footer that breaks a few inches you’ll know what I mean when I say that speed control is key. You are probably used to banging those in by taking out most of the break, knowing that the ball won’t go more than a couple feet by the hole. On fast greens, however, you could have further coming back if you go for Tiger speed. Hitting 3-foot putts hard enough to go 5 feet past isn’t recommended unless you have a hundred million in the bank like some people.
When I arrived in Greensboro to play a few holes on Sunday evening I found I was driving the ball all over the place. I went out by myself and proceeded to lose 5 balls in the rough over 9 holes. I knew that a driving performance such as this would produce embarrassing scores, so I spent the greater part of the next 3 days searching for a driver I could hit straight and a swing that would produce a straight shot. Possibly the most fun in playing a Tour event is getting to sample the clubs made available to the players in the tournament. Just about every possible combination of head and shaft is there to be plucked out of the manufacturers bags and tried, and the Tour reps are more than happy to help you out, since their living depends on players teeing it up for real with their stuff. By Thursday I had a new putter (Taylor Made Rossa Lambeau model with a mid slant neck), a totally new driver, both head and shaft (Taylor Made 8.5 degree 320 Tour with a Penley E.T.A. x shaft), a new 3-wood (Sonartech 14 degree 0-3 model with a Fuji Vista Pro 90 x shaft), and a new prototype 17 degree fairway wood (Taylor Made 200 Series) to take the place of a 20 degree Baffler which took the place of my 2-iron. I already had a new 54 degree sand wedge, a Taylor Made RAC (not yet available to the public), and I had the guys in the Tour Van grind the leading edge a bit straighter. The only way to have any of these clubs is to play on the Tour. All the new technology hits there first, and the public is many months behind in getting their hands on these goodies. Not only that, but the testing equipment right there on the range enables the Tour player to not only try clubs but to see exactly what those clubs produce as far as launch angle, spin rate, and ball speed, and to factor that in with the feel of the club before choosing.
The strange thing about the tournament is that the most solid part of my game, and the equipment that I fool around with the least, my irons, were the worst performing aspect of my week. My short game and putting were world class, but I hit so few greens that I rarely had makeable birdie opportunities. I hit almost 80% of the fairways, saved par a bunch of times and had only 49 official putts for 2 days, but I still missed the cut by 3 shots. I had ended up with X shafts in all my woods, a first for me, so then I was thinking of getting stiffer shafts for my irons. This kind of tinkering goes on endlessly with the average Tour player. The difference now is that the equipment is all so good, and the testing equipment so exact, that a player really can’t go too awful wrong on his selections.
I learn an amazing amount every one of these I play in, and my hope is to translate the experience into better play for myself and better teaching so that I can better help my students.
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