jaster
14th May 2004, 03:46 PM
I am a big fan of Bob Rotella, got all his books and have read them several times but this is the best advice I have ever read. Sorry it is long but if you take your time and have a few drinks and a wee break you could really get something out of this...I know I have.
Here's something I pulled off GEA last year that Rotella says you need to shoot a -6 with only 6 greens in regulation. Thought you would enjoy the read.
I spent a day with Bob Rotella last December. One of those late-year, warm lovely days, great for golf. It was quite an experience.
He started out wanting to know why I was there, what my goals in golf were. I told him that I had played between 2-5 handicap for 30+ years, was stuck around a 3.5 index or so at present, wanted to get to scratch, and wanted to get back into at least some competitive golf, after not having done so since college (graduated '71).
He wanted to know what kind of game I played: how often did I play and practice, how far did I hit it, how many fairways hit per round, GIR, putts, up-and-down, scoring average, all of that. I told him I averaged playing twice/week, practiced for maybe an hour three other times per week. I told him I hit it 260-280 off the tee in normal conditions, depending on how well I made contact. At the time, my average for the year (1999) was 9.5 FW, 10.5 GIR, 35.1 putts/round, with a scoring average of 80.1, always from the tips, over maybe 15 different courses. I wasn't at that time keeping track of up-and-downs. I told him all this, and his reaction was both interesting and lengthy. Summarizing, hopefully without missing the essence of his thoughts, he made the following points, which I will offer in "quotes", even though they are not quoted exactly:
1) "Fred Funk leads the tour in fairways hit, with 11.2/round. David Duval is one of my guys, and he's leading the GIR category with 12.5/round. These guys play or practice every day. You have a regular job. Statistically, your long game is within a couple or three shots of theirs. How good do you logically think you can expect to get at ballstriking?"
2) "David Duval misses 5 or 6 greens per round and his scoring average is under 70. You're missing 7 or 8 greens per round, but your scoring average is 80. If you were as good around the greens as David, you'd be averaging 72. What part of your game do you think you should be working on?"
3) After watching me hit putts on his basement carpet (to a hole in the floor), he said: "You're not a bad putter. You have a good stroke. I can tell you what I'm going to see when we go play; you're putting from the wrong places. Statistically, every time you miss a green, you make a bogey. Sometimes you may get up-and-down, but you cancel that out by three-putting a green you hit in regulation, or by chunking a wedge and not even getting it on the green when you're trying to recover. You must have a lousy wedge game."
4) "Brad Faxon is one of my guys. Brad is a great putter, but not the way everybody thinks. He's not a great putter because he sinks long bombs all the time. He doesn't. He makes more of them than you do, but not enough to really matter. Brad Faxon is a great putter because most of the time, when he misses a green, which is often, his first putt is from inside 3 feet. Wouldn't you be a great putter if over half the time you were putting from inside 3 feet?"
5) "You came here because you think your mind is screwed up. It's not. You're playing as well as you can play with the short game you have. To have a better mind, you have to have a better short game. There is no way that you, personally, can improve your game by thinking better, or by having more confidence. It's true, you have no confidence in your short game. But you have no short game skills, either. You're completely rational in your thinking at this point. You would be irrational and dishonest with yourself if you thought otherwise. You have to improve your short game to have a better mind for golf."
6) "You don't understand the game of golf. You think it's about hitting great drives and long irons. It's not. It's about hitting great wedges and recovery shots. I tell my tour players that the purpose of the long game is avoid disasters, to avoid high scores. Your long game should put you into position to make par, and should be consistent enough that you never make more than bogey. The wedge game is where you make birdies and save pars. Your long game is doing its job for you. Your short game is not."
There was a lot more discussion along this line of thought. I told him that I knew I was a lousy wedge player, that I had always been so. I told him I just didn't think I had good "touch", that I preferred full shots, where touch isn't required. Rotella strongly believes that touch is innate, that most people have it, but that they don't swing properly so that it can "come out". He told me this, and more, over and over again. He asked if he was "getting through to me". Then we went out to his club, to play.
We first went to the practice tee, where he worked with me, watching me hit wedges. He was pretty disgusted. He said, "I don't know how you've missed this all these years, but you don't know how to play a wedge shot. It's not that your touch is poor; it's that you don't know how to hit the shot. You have too much hand action. You're trying to hit wedge shots as if they were drives. I'm going to show you how tour players hit wedge shots." We then spent about 2 hours working on the basics of wedge shots as he teaches them: Ball center-to-back of stance, weight on left foot, club sharply up on the backswing, then pull the hands through, absolutely minimum hand action. All of this was very new to me. Then we went out and played.
I shot my typical 80, from the tips, hitting 12 greens, playing pretty much my usual game. Most of the long shots were good, most of the short ones were poor. I was not able to apply his wedge lessons at first, on the course, except on one shot that I executed really well, to get up-and-down for par after a poor tee shot on a really long par-3. When we got done, we went back to the practice tee for another two hours of wedge work, quitting at dark.
His final advice was to work constantly on my wedge, in the ways he had shown me, and that as it improved, so would I. He told me that, given the statistics of my game, he didn't see how I could get better otherwise.
It was an excellent day, very much an eye-opening experience.
In the 8 months since, while I have not worked "constantly" on my wedges, I have greatly increased the amount of time I do spend with them. I'm still not where I want to be, but I'm getting better. My last-20 scoring average is 77.9, with a 3.1 index. I have become much more conscious of the truth of his analysis and remarks. But improvement is gradual, not sudden. I'm still taking too many putts, 34.1 per round at present, because I'm still not putting from close enough!
Thanks guys. I thought a first-hand account might be interesting to folks. It sure was an interesting day for me. Bob is very direct, certainly not one to cajole or mollycoddle a student. He tells you to your face that you're an idiot, if that's what he thinks. I told him I thought he was an obnoxious SOB. He laughed. I liked him.
Bill, I do have a 60* wedge, the Cleveland 588, which I like. But usually I carry a 53* and 57*, again the Cleveland 588. The 60* just seems like more loft than I need. It may be of interest to note that Rotella himself carries only a 56* wedge (a Vokey). He thinks -- and I am quoting exactly here -- "60* wedges are for guys who can't open the face of the club a little bit to get more loft." He thinks -- or so he said -- that the gap wedge is more crucial to have in your bag. His comments are the reason I ditched the 60* wedge in favor of the 53* model.
Rotella carries 5- and 7-woods; his longest iron is a 4-iron. He asked why I carried the 2- and 3-irons. I told him I'd always hit them pretty well, and that I tended to be a bit wild with the lofted woods. His course is fairly long, and of course in December in central Virginia there isn't a ton of roll in the fairways, so I had a couple of opportunities to hit 4-irons and one chance to hit a 3-iron during our round. I hit all three of those greens. The 3-iron shot was 200 yards into a light breeze to an elevated green with a bunker in front, steep slopes to either side. I nailed it to 20 feet, a lovely high draw. He looked over at me and said "don't change". I said, "Only when I can't do that any more." Which could happen any day, I guess!
Although he didn't have any problems, he said, with things like my pre-shot routine and my course management, he did take the time to lay out some course management strategies for me that he claimed were exactly the same as he used with his tour players. He told me that he thought I should adopt them. Here they are:
1) Inside 130 yards (i.e., PW range), always go for the pin. Learn to use your wedge well enough that they can't hide a pin from you when you're inside wedge range.
2) Outside 160 yards (7-iron range), never go for the pin, unless it happens to be in the safe part of the green. Always go for the safest part of the green. Rely on a two-putt for par if you hit the green, rely on getting up-and-down from the safe side if you miss. If you hit the ball close to a tough pin, it should be an accident.
3) Between 130-160 yards, go for the pin if (a) it is located where your natural shot shape takes it, and (b) there's not too much trouble there. This is the judgment situation. Rotella says that there's no judgment in the other cases; there's a rule, and we always follow it.
Bob went on to say that he knew, in my case, that I had not been playing like this. He said "I'll bet you always go for the pin." I said, yes, I basically did, unless it was obviously impossible. He said, "Yes, I thought so. That's the rational choice in your case, because you have no short game. It doesn't make any difference to you whether you miss the green on the easy side or the hard side. There is no easy side, because you can't play even the easiest wedge shots. And there is no hard side, because you're not likely to be outside 30 feet with a wedge, no matter where you're playing it from. But if you do what I say, and work on your wedges, you will start to get a reward from missing the green on the easy side, and then these rules will work for you."
He was so right about this. I now play much more conservatively than I used to do, and in consequence have just about taken the ugly hole off my card.
One other possibly interesting thought from Rotella: He mentioned to me that he had frequent conversations with college players about whether they were good enough to join the Tour. I asked what he told them. His answer was that on a good day, they should be able to hit 6 greens and shoot 66 at their home course. When I asked him how, he said that on a course they know, they ought to be able to hit a couple of par-5s at least, and make birdie there. The 6 greens they hit ought to be from short range, and they ought to be able to convert two-thirds of the time. The 12 greens they miss, they should be able to get up-and-down every time. Rotella thinks that if they can't do this, or see themselves learning to do it, they won't survive on Tour.
Another interesting Rotella thought: Winners on any tour you care to name (men's, women's, senior, buy.com, European, whatever) average about 27 putts/round. Sometimes a bit fewer, sometimes a bit more, but that's typically what it takes to be a winner in any given week. Therefore, 50% of the time a winning pro walks onto a green, he or she makes their first putt! Is that awesome, or what? Anyway, his point was, if that's what you have to do, and it is, then you better plan on having a lot of pretty short putts waiting for you when you get to the green, and the only way to do that on a regular basis is to have a great wedge game.
Before I left at the end of the day with Rotella, he made me write down -- verbatim -- several things. I carry them on a 3x5 card in my bag, which of course is not with me at the moment. But, among other things, he left me with the direct quote: "You have to have a great wedge game to have a great mind."
I think of it every time I play. I get lots of examples in case I forget.
In retrospect, some of what he told me should have been obvious to me. But I guess most of us have an extraordinary talent for missing the obvious.
As one example, I mentioned in a previous post that Rotella said, in effect, "On the average you NEVER get up and down." His point being that, on the average, I miss 7.5 greens per round and, on the average, I was shooting 8.5 over par. I had never thought about it in that way before. He went on to say, "David Duval misses, on the average, 5.5 greens per round, and scores, on the average, about 2 shots under par. So, on the average, he's getting up-and-down EVERY TIME, plus he's making a couple of extra birdies when he hits wedge shots close to the pin in regulation. So David is saving strokes with his short game, and you are giving extra strokes away with yours."
Oh, speaking of that, I just recalled another little soliloquy of his. At one point, he said (or words to this effect): "Okay, you're a 3.5 index and you want to be scratch. Let's say you really, really work on your long game some more, and let's say you get to where you too can hit 12.5 GIR average for the year. For the sake of argument, let's just say that. So, where does that leave you? You've gained TWO LOUSY STROKES, now you're a 1.5 index. You still haven't reached your goal! Meanwhile, you're leaving 7 or 8 short game strokes laying on the table, ripe for the picking. If you got even half of them, you'd make it to your goal! Which path do you think has a better chance of working?
Here's something I pulled off GEA last year that Rotella says you need to shoot a -6 with only 6 greens in regulation. Thought you would enjoy the read.
I spent a day with Bob Rotella last December. One of those late-year, warm lovely days, great for golf. It was quite an experience.
He started out wanting to know why I was there, what my goals in golf were. I told him that I had played between 2-5 handicap for 30+ years, was stuck around a 3.5 index or so at present, wanted to get to scratch, and wanted to get back into at least some competitive golf, after not having done so since college (graduated '71).
He wanted to know what kind of game I played: how often did I play and practice, how far did I hit it, how many fairways hit per round, GIR, putts, up-and-down, scoring average, all of that. I told him I averaged playing twice/week, practiced for maybe an hour three other times per week. I told him I hit it 260-280 off the tee in normal conditions, depending on how well I made contact. At the time, my average for the year (1999) was 9.5 FW, 10.5 GIR, 35.1 putts/round, with a scoring average of 80.1, always from the tips, over maybe 15 different courses. I wasn't at that time keeping track of up-and-downs. I told him all this, and his reaction was both interesting and lengthy. Summarizing, hopefully without missing the essence of his thoughts, he made the following points, which I will offer in "quotes", even though they are not quoted exactly:
1) "Fred Funk leads the tour in fairways hit, with 11.2/round. David Duval is one of my guys, and he's leading the GIR category with 12.5/round. These guys play or practice every day. You have a regular job. Statistically, your long game is within a couple or three shots of theirs. How good do you logically think you can expect to get at ballstriking?"
2) "David Duval misses 5 or 6 greens per round and his scoring average is under 70. You're missing 7 or 8 greens per round, but your scoring average is 80. If you were as good around the greens as David, you'd be averaging 72. What part of your game do you think you should be working on?"
3) After watching me hit putts on his basement carpet (to a hole in the floor), he said: "You're not a bad putter. You have a good stroke. I can tell you what I'm going to see when we go play; you're putting from the wrong places. Statistically, every time you miss a green, you make a bogey. Sometimes you may get up-and-down, but you cancel that out by three-putting a green you hit in regulation, or by chunking a wedge and not even getting it on the green when you're trying to recover. You must have a lousy wedge game."
4) "Brad Faxon is one of my guys. Brad is a great putter, but not the way everybody thinks. He's not a great putter because he sinks long bombs all the time. He doesn't. He makes more of them than you do, but not enough to really matter. Brad Faxon is a great putter because most of the time, when he misses a green, which is often, his first putt is from inside 3 feet. Wouldn't you be a great putter if over half the time you were putting from inside 3 feet?"
5) "You came here because you think your mind is screwed up. It's not. You're playing as well as you can play with the short game you have. To have a better mind, you have to have a better short game. There is no way that you, personally, can improve your game by thinking better, or by having more confidence. It's true, you have no confidence in your short game. But you have no short game skills, either. You're completely rational in your thinking at this point. You would be irrational and dishonest with yourself if you thought otherwise. You have to improve your short game to have a better mind for golf."
6) "You don't understand the game of golf. You think it's about hitting great drives and long irons. It's not. It's about hitting great wedges and recovery shots. I tell my tour players that the purpose of the long game is avoid disasters, to avoid high scores. Your long game should put you into position to make par, and should be consistent enough that you never make more than bogey. The wedge game is where you make birdies and save pars. Your long game is doing its job for you. Your short game is not."
There was a lot more discussion along this line of thought. I told him that I knew I was a lousy wedge player, that I had always been so. I told him I just didn't think I had good "touch", that I preferred full shots, where touch isn't required. Rotella strongly believes that touch is innate, that most people have it, but that they don't swing properly so that it can "come out". He told me this, and more, over and over again. He asked if he was "getting through to me". Then we went out to his club, to play.
We first went to the practice tee, where he worked with me, watching me hit wedges. He was pretty disgusted. He said, "I don't know how you've missed this all these years, but you don't know how to play a wedge shot. It's not that your touch is poor; it's that you don't know how to hit the shot. You have too much hand action. You're trying to hit wedge shots as if they were drives. I'm going to show you how tour players hit wedge shots." We then spent about 2 hours working on the basics of wedge shots as he teaches them: Ball center-to-back of stance, weight on left foot, club sharply up on the backswing, then pull the hands through, absolutely minimum hand action. All of this was very new to me. Then we went out and played.
I shot my typical 80, from the tips, hitting 12 greens, playing pretty much my usual game. Most of the long shots were good, most of the short ones were poor. I was not able to apply his wedge lessons at first, on the course, except on one shot that I executed really well, to get up-and-down for par after a poor tee shot on a really long par-3. When we got done, we went back to the practice tee for another two hours of wedge work, quitting at dark.
His final advice was to work constantly on my wedge, in the ways he had shown me, and that as it improved, so would I. He told me that, given the statistics of my game, he didn't see how I could get better otherwise.
It was an excellent day, very much an eye-opening experience.
In the 8 months since, while I have not worked "constantly" on my wedges, I have greatly increased the amount of time I do spend with them. I'm still not where I want to be, but I'm getting better. My last-20 scoring average is 77.9, with a 3.1 index. I have become much more conscious of the truth of his analysis and remarks. But improvement is gradual, not sudden. I'm still taking too many putts, 34.1 per round at present, because I'm still not putting from close enough!
Thanks guys. I thought a first-hand account might be interesting to folks. It sure was an interesting day for me. Bob is very direct, certainly not one to cajole or mollycoddle a student. He tells you to your face that you're an idiot, if that's what he thinks. I told him I thought he was an obnoxious SOB. He laughed. I liked him.
Bill, I do have a 60* wedge, the Cleveland 588, which I like. But usually I carry a 53* and 57*, again the Cleveland 588. The 60* just seems like more loft than I need. It may be of interest to note that Rotella himself carries only a 56* wedge (a Vokey). He thinks -- and I am quoting exactly here -- "60* wedges are for guys who can't open the face of the club a little bit to get more loft." He thinks -- or so he said -- that the gap wedge is more crucial to have in your bag. His comments are the reason I ditched the 60* wedge in favor of the 53* model.
Rotella carries 5- and 7-woods; his longest iron is a 4-iron. He asked why I carried the 2- and 3-irons. I told him I'd always hit them pretty well, and that I tended to be a bit wild with the lofted woods. His course is fairly long, and of course in December in central Virginia there isn't a ton of roll in the fairways, so I had a couple of opportunities to hit 4-irons and one chance to hit a 3-iron during our round. I hit all three of those greens. The 3-iron shot was 200 yards into a light breeze to an elevated green with a bunker in front, steep slopes to either side. I nailed it to 20 feet, a lovely high draw. He looked over at me and said "don't change". I said, "Only when I can't do that any more." Which could happen any day, I guess!
Although he didn't have any problems, he said, with things like my pre-shot routine and my course management, he did take the time to lay out some course management strategies for me that he claimed were exactly the same as he used with his tour players. He told me that he thought I should adopt them. Here they are:
1) Inside 130 yards (i.e., PW range), always go for the pin. Learn to use your wedge well enough that they can't hide a pin from you when you're inside wedge range.
2) Outside 160 yards (7-iron range), never go for the pin, unless it happens to be in the safe part of the green. Always go for the safest part of the green. Rely on a two-putt for par if you hit the green, rely on getting up-and-down from the safe side if you miss. If you hit the ball close to a tough pin, it should be an accident.
3) Between 130-160 yards, go for the pin if (a) it is located where your natural shot shape takes it, and (b) there's not too much trouble there. This is the judgment situation. Rotella says that there's no judgment in the other cases; there's a rule, and we always follow it.
Bob went on to say that he knew, in my case, that I had not been playing like this. He said "I'll bet you always go for the pin." I said, yes, I basically did, unless it was obviously impossible. He said, "Yes, I thought so. That's the rational choice in your case, because you have no short game. It doesn't make any difference to you whether you miss the green on the easy side or the hard side. There is no easy side, because you can't play even the easiest wedge shots. And there is no hard side, because you're not likely to be outside 30 feet with a wedge, no matter where you're playing it from. But if you do what I say, and work on your wedges, you will start to get a reward from missing the green on the easy side, and then these rules will work for you."
He was so right about this. I now play much more conservatively than I used to do, and in consequence have just about taken the ugly hole off my card.
One other possibly interesting thought from Rotella: He mentioned to me that he had frequent conversations with college players about whether they were good enough to join the Tour. I asked what he told them. His answer was that on a good day, they should be able to hit 6 greens and shoot 66 at their home course. When I asked him how, he said that on a course they know, they ought to be able to hit a couple of par-5s at least, and make birdie there. The 6 greens they hit ought to be from short range, and they ought to be able to convert two-thirds of the time. The 12 greens they miss, they should be able to get up-and-down every time. Rotella thinks that if they can't do this, or see themselves learning to do it, they won't survive on Tour.
Another interesting Rotella thought: Winners on any tour you care to name (men's, women's, senior, buy.com, European, whatever) average about 27 putts/round. Sometimes a bit fewer, sometimes a bit more, but that's typically what it takes to be a winner in any given week. Therefore, 50% of the time a winning pro walks onto a green, he or she makes their first putt! Is that awesome, or what? Anyway, his point was, if that's what you have to do, and it is, then you better plan on having a lot of pretty short putts waiting for you when you get to the green, and the only way to do that on a regular basis is to have a great wedge game.
Before I left at the end of the day with Rotella, he made me write down -- verbatim -- several things. I carry them on a 3x5 card in my bag, which of course is not with me at the moment. But, among other things, he left me with the direct quote: "You have to have a great wedge game to have a great mind."
I think of it every time I play. I get lots of examples in case I forget.
In retrospect, some of what he told me should have been obvious to me. But I guess most of us have an extraordinary talent for missing the obvious.
As one example, I mentioned in a previous post that Rotella said, in effect, "On the average you NEVER get up and down." His point being that, on the average, I miss 7.5 greens per round and, on the average, I was shooting 8.5 over par. I had never thought about it in that way before. He went on to say, "David Duval misses, on the average, 5.5 greens per round, and scores, on the average, about 2 shots under par. So, on the average, he's getting up-and-down EVERY TIME, plus he's making a couple of extra birdies when he hits wedge shots close to the pin in regulation. So David is saving strokes with his short game, and you are giving extra strokes away with yours."
Oh, speaking of that, I just recalled another little soliloquy of his. At one point, he said (or words to this effect): "Okay, you're a 3.5 index and you want to be scratch. Let's say you really, really work on your long game some more, and let's say you get to where you too can hit 12.5 GIR average for the year. For the sake of argument, let's just say that. So, where does that leave you? You've gained TWO LOUSY STROKES, now you're a 1.5 index. You still haven't reached your goal! Meanwhile, you're leaving 7 or 8 short game strokes laying on the table, ripe for the picking. If you got even half of them, you'd make it to your goal! Which path do you think has a better chance of working?