Graham Averill is turning 50 this year and he’s crazy. Instead of buying a motorcycle or getting a tattoo, he’s decided to try to get really, really good at golf. He is a 13 handicap trying to get to zero in a year. Welcome to his midlife crisis.
“Focus on the short game.”
Everyone says it. Do you want to give up your handicap? Understand how to score within 125 yards of the hole. It marks there. Many people reached out through the comments and said this very thing when I started this project a few months ago. My coach, Sam Hahn, told me the same thing when we started working together. He took one look at my natural swing and all its flaws and said, “I bet you have trouble getting to the green.”
“Problem” was an understatement. My swing produced inconsistent contact that resulted in chipped shots and numerous two-chip scenarios at distances that top players consider easy layups. You know the script: Nice drive, tighten the chip. Sometimes, I would shake it twice just for good measure.
“Short game” is a broad term that encompasses many different strokes. It’s everything from 150 yards to two-foot putts, I find myself shaking every time. But thanks to a month of data collection, I know where I’m taking the most photos. When I started tracking my rounds, I was losing 3.5 strokes per round to a golfer with putts within 50 yards of the hole. Move that distance past the 50-yard marker and you can add four more shots to the count.
Those 7.5 strokes per round make up more than half of my handicap. You can’t argue with math. Fix the short game and I can make up some ground.
The dedicated work I’ve put into my swing has helped with contact issues and I’ve incorporated a lot of short game simulations around the practice green that have improved my chipping near the hole. I don’t always get up and down, but it happens more than before. When I’m 25 yards from the hole, I get up and down 28 percent of the time. Ideally, I’ll get this number closer to 60, but I’m happy to be making some progress. I’ve even reduced my missed shots on longer shots to 2.9 in my last 10 rounds.
But there is still a lot of room for improvement. I’m only hitting 50 percent of the greens from 50 to 125 yards out. This is the distance that scratch players put their foot on the gas and score, but I’m getting stuck.
Sam thinks I’m having trouble with these approach shots because I’m relying on full swings. If I’m looking 115 yards to the pin from the fairway, I pull my sand wedge because my full sand wedge distance is about 115 yards. It’s fun to watch when I fly it high and long, but the truth is that I have less control over the distance and trajectory of a full swing shot, so Sam wants me to incorporate more partial wedge shots.
“We’re not looking for wedge power,” says Sam. “We’re looking for a good shot that gets you good spin. We want the ball to fly low with a lot of spin, unless you have to hit it high over a bunker.”
Low-flying partial wedge shots are more predictable and the ball controls better on firm, fast greens. In a game that seems to have succumbed to chaos, I’m eager to find some predictability, so I jumped right in.
According to Sam, hitting a flying wedge is pretty simple. Plant most of your weight on your left foot, set the ball slightly back in your stance, and set up with a slanted shaft over the ball. Turn it halfway, hang early, and then swing the butt of the club toward the ball, keeping the angle and pulling the butt through the ball to the left of your body. Keep the conclusion.
This motion is basically how you iron the ball and I have found it to be my favorite shot to practice. It looks cool and the clear contact and low flight are totally addicting.
It’s also a lot of fun to play on the course. Recently, I was facing 125 yards to the middle of the green and decided to try two shots: a full gap wedge and a partial wedge. I flew the fairway wedge up 130 yards, but right on the green. He hit the fair side of a grass bunker and spun another 15 yards in the wrong direction. Then I hit a low, three-quarter-foot wedge straight into the front third of the green and chipped it to within eight feet of the hole.
I’d like to tie this on a bow and tell you that after a week of working on these partial wedge shots, I’ve dialed it in and I’m hitting 75 percent of the greens from 100 yards. But this is not a Disney movie. This is golf.
The actual movement feels good and my contact is clear, but I’m still trying to dial in my distances. The truth is, I don’t know how far a three-quarter shot goes. I don’t know how far a 50 percent wedge shot goes. This knowledge gap is why I often rely on full throttle kicks: mostly I know how far they will travel. I’ve started incorporating a launch monitor into my range sessions to get some hard data, but I still have a hard time trusting my distances on the course.
Sam says it just takes time. “There’s no way to avoid working on that. You have to spend time practicing on the range and, with a launch monitor, to figure out what swing equals that distance.”
Practice, believe, feel … the better I get at golf, the harder golf gets.
Dig deeper into one golfer’s struggle to improve at golf in middle age and read last week’s Scratch By 50 featuring the current state of Graham’s game.
