It’s very important to plan your round. Before you play, go through every hole on the course. Where should you play your tee shot? What holes should you try and to play aggressively, and which one should you play more conservatively? Are there holes that you always have trouble with?
The first rule is to plan where I want to play my next stroke from. I want the next one to be as easy as possible. The second rule is to plan where I want to be if I lay up — whether it be yardage on the next shot that I like or a plan to leave the ball well short of any trouble. If you’re going to lay up, do it well.
If you make a poor score on a given hole, ask yourself if it was a result of a bad swing or poor shot selection. Mis-hit shots happen. Poor shot selection doesn’t have to happen. Playing smart golf means playing the shot with the best percentages for success.
We’re often faced with the choice of loft versus distance when we are selecting a club for a particular shot. In almost all cases, the more lofted club is the better choice. Simply put, the longer the ball stays in the air, the farther it goes. Choosing a more lofted club will also get the percentages in your favor. A mis-hit shot will still get in the air.
We are often faced with a choice, to play it safe or to go for it and gamble. Think about it this way: “If I take the chance, will it save me a stroke?” If the answer is no, don’t take the chance. If taking a chance by hitting the ball over a pond gets you on the green, it may make sense. If hitting the ball over a pond only shortens your next shot by a few yards, it probably doesn’t make sense.
I asked him once what he thought about when he was about to hit a shot. I expected a technical answer. He said he thinks about where he wants to play his next shot from and what type of shot he must play to put the ball in that position.
Have a plan for every shot. Make sure you have a strategy for each hole.
He suggested learning about all 18 holes of a golf course before playing the first hole.
Most of the amateurs adopt 1 of 2 strategies for their approach shots: They either aim for the green in general, hoping they’ll win up with a put for birdie. That strategy is much too broad. Or they aim for the flagstick every time without giving much thought to the consequences of an errant shot. That strategy is too 1-dimensional.
I always aim for a specific part of the green, which may or may not be right next to the hole. I take into consideration the kind of putt I’ll face from various spots on the green, and respect the trouble that will result if the shot doesn’t come off as planned.
Get in the habit of preparing yourself for upcoming tournaments and rounds. Part of my preparation for the challenges of Augusta National includes watching videos of past Masters. Knowing how the course plays in various conditions factors in to my overall game plan.
Never aim a tee shot toward trouble, hoping your natural fade or draw will bring it back into play. You never want to be penalized for a straight shot.
If you know the water hazard is 225 yards from the tee, use a club that when struck solidly will hit the ball short of the hazard. Also, if you have a “pet” distance for your approach, say 110 yards, hit the club that will leave you that yardage into the green. Manage the course; don’t let it manage you.
Managing my game means knowing when to forgo the driver off the tee. Often, the closer to the green you hit the ball on a short par 4, the more bunkers and water come into play.
This is an interesting sidelight to the Tour players. They really don’t work on their games during practice rounds. They study the golf course. They hit shots to see what kinds of reactions they’ll get from the greens, the fairways, and the bunkers, and they learn how to fit their games to the different courses they play. Watch the pros during a practice round; unless there’s some money on the line, they aren’t playing. They’re learning.
Management game: shot selection, skill evaluation, strategy, statistical analysis, risk-vs-reward balance, competitive situation.
You must realize that from the strategic point of view, golf is played in quantum steps. That is, you make either a 3, 4, 5, or 6; there are no one-half or partial-digit scores. You either get it close enough to make the next putt, or you don’t. You either make the putt, or you don’t. You save the stroke, or you don’t.
Remember, you get no credit or recognition for “almost” or “close” to making a score of one stroke less.
Never hit a shot if you have any anxiety about its outcome. If you haven’t practiced the swing sufficiently, if you don’t have the confidence to pull it off at least 90% of the time, then it’s the wrong shot and you shouldn’t try it.
That’s right — 90% of the time. I’m going to put 10 balls down and you’re going to bet me your paycheck that 9 of 10 will land near the target. If you can’t make that bet, don’t try that shot.
Another smart bit of self-management is to never gamble when there’s a penalty such as water or OB nearby. Penalties can’t be erased from the scorecard, so avoid them at all costs.
Whenever you have a wedge in your hands, fire at the pin. Don’t play conservatively unless there’s a potential penalty guarding the pin so tightly that your wedge skill can’t match up to the 90% rule.
If an 800m race comes down to a home-stretch sprint between 2 runners, that doesn’t mean the first 750m aren’t important.
An OB drive can lose a hole in match play before a putt ever has a chance to matter.
When it comes to strategy, most golfers don’t have a clue.
One good outcome doesn’t prove that a strategy was the best choice, and one bad outcome doesn’t mean it was a poor decision.
A good strategy is one that gives you the best chance of success.
The surprising result was that the average-scoring-minimizing target for a typical 100-golfer is a few yards into the left rough. That’s right, a typical 100-golfer should choose a target so far left that it’s not even in the fairway.
When there is a safe route to play the hole, hitting out of bounds should be avoided at nearly all costs.
Optimal strategies change with a golfer’s skill: More accurate drivers should choose a more aggressive target.
Many amateur golfers treat out-of-bounds and lateral hazards the same, and attempt to avoid both equally, but this wastes strokes.
Most golfers will score worse from 80y from the hole than from 30y, even if every layup to 30y lands in the rough, and every layup to 80y lands in the fairway.
The pro requires, roughly, between 70-90% chance of success to make the risky play worthwhile. Amateurs, however, are known to attempt the risky play with a slim chance of success.
Tee shots that land in the rough cost about 0.1-0.25 of a stroke; shots into a recovery situation cost about 0.5 of a stroke; shot into water or a lateral hazard cost a full stroke; and shots that land out of bounds cost 2 strokes.
3 key steps to lowering golf scores: measure, analyze, and improve.
Every round, good or bad, has lessons to teach us. Every round is an opportunity to learn more about yourself and your game.
Take 5-10 minutes after every competitive round to reflect and write the answers to these questions. Your future-self will thank you. Reflection and journaling is one “habit” of elite performers that separates them from “the average.”
Being able to reflect on what you were doing physically, mentally, and emotionally, during stretches of both good and bad golf, will help you understand your best formula for success.
What did I do well today? The positives (physically, mentally, emotionally).
What did I learn today? (Physically, mentally, emotionally).
What areas need improvement? What mistakes am I making and when?
What “worked” today? Swing feels or thoughts, mental approaches, strategies…
Winning is also about minimizing mistakes. He noted that most players are fortunate if they hit 3 perfect shots during a round. So our focus never was to try to hit more of those perfect shots, but rather to turn the shots that once went out of bounds or into trees or water into shots that at worst, wound up in the rough.
Watson says that the secrets Nicklaus and Hogan and Nelson know are not magical things only professionals can do. They are mundane, common things they always do, time after time, swing after swing, without fail. The first and most basic of those is to consider how the golf ball lies.
Many amateur golfers settle on what shot they will hit before they even get to their golf ball. If the ball is in the fairway, they calculate the distance to the green and choose their club accordingly. If the ball is in the rough, they choose a club that should get the ball out and closer to the green. Most of us see golf as a 2-dimensional sport, the ball being at Point A, the flag at Point B.
What Watson noticed most was how often Nicklaus would hit conservative shots. This was exactly the thing that turned him off as a youngster, when he preferred the risk-taking brilliance of Palmer. But once he reached the PGA Tour, he saw golf — and Nicklaus — in a whole different way.
Nicklaus told him, “More golfers lose tournaments than win them.”
Nicklaus was not thinking about great shots most of the time; he was thinking about avoiding big mistakes.
No golfer hit the right shot more often than Jack Nicklaus.
The first option was the safer shot. But in the moment, under golf’s most intense pressure, he decided to go for the riskier shot, the one he was not sure he could execute. “That,” he would say angrily more than 3 decades later, “created pressure.” He hit a poor shot and left the ball in a nearly impossible spot.
“That was the wrong time to play the shot that I wasn’t qualified to play.”
The 2nd step he sums up in 3 words: Overestimate the wind. “It never ceases to amaze me that even good players, when hitting into the wind, will come up well short. This is even when they hit a good shot. It’s because they don’t overestimate the force of the win in their face.”
“I will play a 2-, 3-, 4-club wind sometimes.”
The Golden Bear had not played well all week, but one of the things Nicklaus had come to understand was that he did not need to play well in order to win major championships. He needed only to play smarter than everyone else. With 3 holes to go, he found himself near the lead, and he knew precisely what was left for him to do.
“Par, par, par wins this tournament.”
Watson had watched Nicklaus enough to know that the way to win major championships was not to go chasing low scores but to wait for pressure to take its toll on everyone else.
I have won 18 majors and I can promise you that I didn’t play well in at least a dozen of them.
Watson says the day when he or Nicklaus or Tiger Woods play really well — when they feel in control of every aspect of their game — are rare. Playing well is not something even professional golfers can count on. “Winning golf does not come down to playing better than everyone else. It comes down to thinking better than everyone else.”
Funning thing is, Nicklaus says exactly the same thing: “I have always felt that the mettle of a player is not how well he plays when he’s playing well, but how well he scores and plays when he’s playing poorly.”
Forget about bad shots, don’t try for the hero shot, aim for the spots with the least trouble, take one shot of medicine here to save 2 or 3 strokes later. Think a shot a head. Think about what you are doing well and try to play to your strength that day.
If Nicklaus had been clear-minded, as he usually was under pressure, he would have hit precisely the same shot he had intended. But instead he decided to aim for the flag and try to match Watson’s birdie. It was exactly the sort of rash and cloudy thinking Nicklaus had inspired in everyone else.
Back when I started, I made an important rule for myself: Never follow a bad shot with another bad shot. Meaning if you had the option to play another risky shot after a bad shot, you better back off a little and take your lumps.
Most golfers want to fix their bad shots. That’s the natural reaction. But, as Watson often says, the natural reaction is often the wrong reaction. In golf, trying harder often leads to bad things.
When he was a young player, he hit many wild shots, and he understood that such wildness would not allow him to last long on the PGA Tour. He simply had to reduce and then, as best he could, eliminate double bogeys.
He realized that the way to avoid double bogeys was to be sure he didn’t hit 2 bad shots in a row. More to the point, he had to make sure not to hit 2 stupid shots in a row. Some nutritionists suggest that dieters give themselves one meal to splurge on anything they want: pasta, ice cream, chocolate, whatever. The key, they say, is that it must be one meal. There’s only so much weight gain with one meal.
Watson applies this theory to golf. One bad shot can hurt you only so much if you surround it with smart ones. Watson’s point is that scores are destroyed when golfers turn bad situations into worse ones. W/hen I point out that it’s more fun to try the risky shot than fix a mistake, he offers a sharp correction: “No. It’s more fun to get a lower score.”
“You don’t win golf tournaments by hitting miraculous shots that you are not capable of hitting,” Nicklaus says. “You lose golf tournaments that way.”
“Remember, most golfers self-destruct.”
Five days before the 1st round, his game was so ragged it forced me to suggest a limited swing that has cost him distance and shot-making versatility but kept his misses playable.
It’s been a theme of my work with Tiger for much of our time together. Although it’s commonly thought that Tiger plays go-for-broke golf and tries the most difficult shots with no fear, it’s a false image. Tiger is, above all, a calculating golfer who plays percentages and makes sure to err on the safe side. What he abhors, and has built his career on avoiding, are the kinds of mistakes that produce boys or worse and kill both momentum and confidence — wild tee shots that produce penalty strokes, loose approaches that leave no chance to save par, blown short putts. These blunders are the stuff of high scores, and after such a round, a tour player or caddie will often lament “the big miss.” Avoiding the big miss was a big part of what made Ben Hogan and Jack Nicklaus so great, and it’s a style that Tiger has emulated. Until recently, his entire life seemed free of the big miss.
The Nine Shots did a lot for him. First, it gave him a mental leg up. He knew other players didn’t practice that way, and he believed that such an elaborate and demanding practice template gave him an edge. His thought was, “I’m better, so what I do has to be different and better.” It matches his self-image and satisfied his ego.
In practical term, it helped him believe he could hit the proper shot under the gun. And the right shot wasn’t just the one that gave him the best chance to get close to the pin. More important, it was the shot that let him most easily play away from trouble either on or around the green. He just wanted the fullest toolbox possible.
With the tools at his disposal, he became a more thoughtful shot maker and thus a better course manager. He steadily began eliminating mistakes because he almost always had the right percentage shot for the situation. As a younger player, Tiger might have forced shots at the pin, but as he gained more ways to work the ball, he could start it at the middle of the green and move it toward the pin. It’s the shot that allows the most room for error because it reduces the chance of missing the green on the “short side” of the pin, from where a recovery is almost always more difficult.
Having more control got Tiger away from trying to blow fields away. When he had fewer shots in his arsenal, he played more aggressively. When he was “on,” it could lead to double-digit victories, but more often it led to mistakes that cost him wins. The Nine Shots helped Tiger understand that he was good enough to never really take a chance and still win. It would mean he’d much less likely to win by 10, but he’d be more likely to simply win. It was Tiger becoming more of an expert at “getting the W.”
Do not try to punch the ball through the tiny gaps in the trees or go for broke. Just play the simplest shot available to you. That way, your mistakes only ever cost you 1 shot.
Hit the shot you know you can hit, not the shot Arnold Palmer would hit, nor even the shot you think you ought to be able to hit.
I teach a conservative strategy and a cocky swing. You want to play each hole in such a way that you’re confident you can exec each shot you attempt. That gives you a cocky swing, which is another way of saying that you swing aggressively, that you swing with trust. It produces your best results.
The opposite approach would be a bold strategy and a tentative swing.
No football or basketball coach whom I’ve ever heard of would send his team into competition without a game plan. Coaches in those sports recognize that an intelligent game plan can take advantage of a team’s strengths and camouflage its weaknesses. More important, a good game plan makes the mental side of the game easier. Players don’t have to make as many impromptu, possible emotional decisions. They can instead execute decisions made in advance, calmly, outside the heat of competition.
The best way to prepare a plan is to walk or mentally review each hole backward. Standing on the green and looking back toward the tee usually reveals much more about a hole than standing on the tee and looking at the green. It shows more of the tricks and deceptions that the architect may have built into the hole. And it forces you to think strategically about where you want your ball to land on the green, what club would be best for landing it there, and what kind of tee shot will set this up.
Sometimes, aiming for a bunker actually makes sense — on a long, difficult approach shot, for example. The pros know that the “up and down” from sand can actually be easier than from the surrounding (usually long and thick) grass.
It’s better to be in a spot where you can hit the ball cleanly than in a tough spot — even if the clean shot is longer.
Elite pros often avoid making shots with particular clubs they don’t trust. They understand that the object of the game is to shoot the lowest score, not show off their ability to hit every shot with every club. That’s one reason they’re elite.
There’s no trophy for the player who worked the hardest; the trophy goes to the player who used the fewest strokes, regardless of how he made that happen.
The more he knew about a particular course — his true opponent — the better his chances of making the right offensive and defensive moves, minimizing mistakes, shooting low scores, and winning.
Other players who arrived just before the tournament often didn’t feel comfortable with the course until the 3rd round, when it was too late.
During practice rounds, Nicklaus walks the course, mapping out each hole. On his memo pad, he uses circled areas to designate the best areas to land a tee shot, darkened areas to designate dangerous hazards to the side of the fairways or green, and tiny Xs to represent the course’s subtle and treacherous slopes in the greens.
The way Nicklaus scopes out the course during practice rounds, noting in a pad what clubs he hit off certain tees and onto greens in certain conditions, as well as designating what greens are particularly slow or fast or what sand bunkers feature firm or soft sand, is very reminiscent of Hogan’s preparation process.
After a practice round, Nicklaus, like Hogan before him, returns to the practice range to work out any kinks in his swing. Hogan was actually the first player to start the post-round practice trend.
Nicklaus’s pre-round practice sessions, like Hogan’s, were all business, and included mental and physical rehearsals of the shots that were likely to be played on the course.
- Prepare intelligently for a championship.
- Plan out a shot strategically.
- Pick the proper club.
- Picture the perfect shot.
- Play the highest-percentage shot.
- Persist for the entire round.
- Preserve strokes by not playing stupid shots.
- Play patiently.
- Put himself in front in a tournament and stay there.
A good drive is not measured according to how far you hit the ball. The shot you hit off the tee, more than anything else, must be hit in a strategic area of the fairway that allows you to attack the hole on your approach shot.
The game of golf is a lot like chess. The only difference being that your true opponent is not your fellow competitor but the course itself. Therefore, rather than having checkmate as your goal, you should concentrate on hitting fairways and greens and keeping double bogeys off your scorecard.
Nicklaus has always been able to swallow his pride when hitting into trouble. Instead of gambling and compounding a problem, he is so mentally disciplined that he sensibly plays a shot back to the fairway.
You must also be prepared to spend some quality time alone after the game, analyzing your round. That’s the only way you can pinpoint strategic error patterns and correct them.
From his youngest days, Jack Nicklaus was well known for his attention to details of 2 things: the mechanics of his golf swing and the most minute distinctions of each golf course. Jack carefully measured distances of the courses on which he played. He studied them closely and meticulously. He never misunderstood the unalterable truth that golf is always a game between just 2 players: a golfer and the golf course.
Jack was not interested in the rumor mill, predictions about who would win, or the personal affairs of other golfers. He was not really caught up in the people, prestige, or history of tournaments called The Masters, the US Open, and the US Amateur. His mind was squarely focused on the grass fairways, greens, and conditions of golf courses called Augusta National and Pebble Beach.
Among Nicklaus’s great traits was his relentless focus on the golf course as his primary opponent. Nicklaus was so intent on studying the course that he became relatively oblivious to everything else around him. Make a concerted effort to study the course hole-by-hole. Attempt to plan out the round shot by shot, deciding which par 4s absolutely require a driver, where the safe misses are on par 3s and whether there’s a par 5 you can attack.
Through learning how to read a golf course came an ever sharpening awareness that one’s true opponent in every golf contest is never another player, or even the entire field, but always the course itself.
When you have a bad lie always remember to play the safest shot you can to give yourself a chance to make the next shot.