Confessions of a Hacker – Learning from low markers

For many club golfers, trying to study and emulate the actions of your playing partners out on the course would be a recipe for disaster. On rare occasions though, it can be a beneficial exercise. This is particularly true of cases where you are paired up with a very low handicapper (for the sake of putting some point of reference around that phrase, let’s say a handicap of four or lower) – someone whose good habits on the links far outweigh their bad ones.

I had the fortune of playing last Saturday with a former club professional named Ian whose handicap is now +2. For the uninitiated, that means he expected to shoot two under par merely to play to his handicap. Or in other words, he is expected to beat me (a 17-handicapper, to my ongoing chagrin) by 19 shots.

Even though his game wasn’t quite on song (he shot over par for the day and thus fell a few shots short of playing to his handicap), there were plenty of lessons to be taken from watching him go about his business, including the following:

The importance of a smooth tempo to your swing: Note here that ‘smooth’ doesn’t necessitate ’slow’. Rather, it is simply a matter of swinging within your own limits. Ian never appeared to be over-exerted himself or really ‘ripping it’ at any stage, yet was still able to get plenty of distance along with good control.

A focus on ‘getting it in play’ off the tee: This may seem a trite comment when you’re talking about someone who can knock it 250 metres-plus with the driver, but he never stopped emphasising the importance of finding the fairway or at the very least, hitting your tee shot to a spot when an unimpeded shot to the green was possible. It’s an obvious point perhaps, but one that always rings true. Would you rather be 150 metres from the green in the middle of the fairway, or 100 metres from the green with overhanging tree branches restricting the type of approach shot you can hit?

The value of distance control with short irons: It is already been said many millions of times by golfers more learned than I, but allow me to repeat it – for the majority of golfers, more than half of their shots are played within 100 metres of the hole. Therefore, it stands to reason that anyone who is a master with their wedges and putter will have a decided advantage of anyone who isn’t.

I wasn’t marking Ian’s card and thus didn’t know his handicap at first, but when he hit a neat little sand wedge from about 90 metres out on our second hole of the day that checked and spun back to about five feet from the hole, I knew he was a really low marker. You can’t hit the ball close to the hole without distance and direction both being on song; a 10-handicapper should hit their wedges pretty straight, but it’s the low markers who can also dial up the right distance consistently and save themselves a couple of shots per round in the process.

Keeping your swing thoughts simple: Often us higher handicappers get stuck in a rut of ‘paralysis by analysis’, trying to think of too many things at once during the swing. At one point Ian was talking to the third player in our group (a mate of mine who had received a lesson the previous week) and was picking his brain about the swing thoughts he had whilst trying to implement the lessons. His view was that you can’t really focus or more than one, or two at the most, at any point in time.

I chimed in at this point and noted that after seeking help over Christmas while up in Coffs Harbour, lateral weight shift had been identified as my key problem; my backswing was now starting to look okay, but I still had a distinct tendency to ‘slide forward’ on the downswing and get into a cramped position at the point of contact. Therefore, my current swing thought was to try and feel like I ‘hit from behind it’ on the downswing. Ian nodded in agreement at both the diagnosis and simplicity of the idea. Not that it helped me much; bad swing habits are tougher to get out of than I had hoped….

There’s nothing revolutionary about keeping your thoughts simple and your swing smooth, hitting your ball in play and using the short clubs to really make your score a good one, but it’s nice to see such things play out right in front of you from time to time. As long as you can find a low marker who is understanding and sympathetic to those with much higher handicaps (my experience is that most are, albeit there are always a few indignant ones around), playing the occasional round with such a player can be an excellent learning exercise and help to improve your game.

Previous ‘Confessions of a Hacker’ columns:

(1)  Seeking help, (2) Racking them up, (3) Holding your nerve, (4) Five-foot putts, (5) Letting the Big Dog eat, (6)  Slow play, (7) Trust the yardage