Let me take you all back a little bit.  I know I’ve asked you to do this many times but once again I think that it is time to indulge in the past just a little. 

Back in 2008, as most of you know, I posted a bunch of videos on YouTube. That in turn led to the development of the longest thread in the history of golf forum site GolfWRX.com.  I don’t know if that thread is still the biggest there but at the time it was a fairly big deal.

Anyway, the reason that I bring it up is that the whole point of that thread and the development of the YouTube videos was to help people with the full golf swing.  The swing is something that I worked very hard at and studied diligently.  In the process I developed a high level of personal proficiency at it.  Through time much of what I had learned and developed remained with me.  Surprisingly, in spite of me essentially abandoning what was previously a fairly extreme practice regimen and after years out of the game the hitting balls part deteriorated very little .  I loved to practice.  Looking back I realize now that I loved to practice because I had locked down a technique for myself and hitting the golf ball well gave me great satisfaction.  I had studied, I had practiced and I knew what I was doing and because I was doing it well I enjoyed doing it whenever I could.  To my own mind and within the standards that I’d set out for myself I had mastered an important element of the  game.  The same could not be said of other elements of my game.  My chipping, pitching and general wedge play were always mediocre and my putting was generally bad even when I carried a handicap 2 better than par.

Why was I so good at hitting full shots?  Primarily, I had acquired the necessary “know how” and I had diligently put it into practice.  More importantly I held the long game in very high personal regard.  It is the part of golf that I truly loved.  As I grew in the game, however, I came to view the long game with less and less regard.  The reason for this is that I was being beaten by  players who hit full shots with far less precision than I did and yet beat me and sometimes soundly.  One of the most painful was during the first round of the 1997 Ontario Match Play Championship.

The previous year I had played a practice round prior to the Ontario Amateur with two very good players.  I’m sorry to say that I can’t even remember their names.  The practice round was a 17 greens in regulation affair for me and these guys appreciated what I had done tee to green.  The next year, I had qualified for the Ontario Match Play with a pretty low score at Wildewood (67 I think) and that put me pretty high in the bracket so for my first round I should have enjoyed a fair advantage in my first match.  The guy I faced was one of the fellows that I had played that practice round with in Bellville.   He demolished me and closed me out on the 14th.  I was going home after my first match.

Although I did not play to the level that perhaps I was capable of, the guy who beat me I have to admit was a better golfer than me.  Not a better ball striker, but a better golfer.  He beat me soundly with a scrappy game that demanded my respect.  He was good off the tee, decent from the fairway and he was great on and around the greens.  I was no match for him. He was a more rounded and complete player.

What was more interesting than the match was the conversation we enjoyed over beers after the round.  He confessed to me that after having seen first hand the practice round that I had played with him at Bay Of Quinte the previous year that he actually held out little hope for himself in our match.

What the match proved is that a player with a good short game is a match for anyone.  It also illustrated the power of playing as if you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Anyway,  back the GolfWRX.com thread that I started with.  At a certain point in the progression of that thread the people that were learning about hitting full golf shots wanted me to delve into the short game.  The problem was that I considered myself wholly unqualified to help them.  I knew how to play a lot of cool shots but my short game lacked structure and discipline and I lacked the required know how. Apart from the very basics, I just had no business providing anyone with short game instruction and I knew it.  Since there was a playful aspect to the goings on in that thread I did put up a short game video, but it was something that I had hoped would simply be fun and put an end to any serious talk of the short game in the thread.

It was not until I spent time with Elk and Terry that I actually came to know that the short game could be quantified the same way that the full swing could be and that structure and a certain logical and pragmatic approach could be applied and that it was in fact a pre requisite to the creative part that I had assumed was the whole of the short game.

I’ll get into that in Part 2.  For now at least we've gotten my short game video out of our systems ;-) and in the next blog I can move on and get into what I‘ve learned from Elk and get a little deeper into what is coming in the new Tour Quality Short Game Video.  And now that the kidding is aside why don’t we watch some truly great short game shots.

Hit 'em straight,

 

Sevam1.