Golf is a game of misses. Yes, you might hit a handful of shots that feel perfect and come off just as you envisioned, but the vast majority of shots are going to be off – sometimes just a little, sometimes severely. What separates great players from good players is that misses from great players tend to be very functional shots. They rarely miss so badly that they can’t recover and salvage a par or, at worst, bogey. Eliminating those big numbers is a key to their ability to shoot the low scores they do.
Missing shots well begins with a thorough understanding of your own game and tendencies. If you slice the ball or hook the ball, the news isn’t all bad. As Titleist staff member Trillium Rose shares in this video, you can score well if you know that your ball is always going to curve one way or the other.
If you fade the ball consistently (the ball curves left-to-right for a right-handed golfer), you can aim left of your target and know that your ball will never miss left of where you aimed. This essentially erases all the trouble from the left side of the golf course for you. Someone with a two-way miss has to worry about trouble everywhere. They must aim down the middle of every fairway and hope for the best. In order to hit the fairway, their miss (left or right) had to be extremely small. If the fairway in 30 yards wide, anything more than a 15-yard fade, draw, push or pull puts them in the rough, or worse.
Conversely, the player with a one-way miss can aim down the left edge of the fairway. If they hit it straight, they’re in the fairway. If they hit a 15, 20, even a 29-yard fade or push, they’re still in the fairway. Their room for error is effectively double that of the golfer with a two-way miss.
In Trillium’s tip, she shows how developing a consistent draw (the ball curves right-to-left for a right-handed golfer) thieves the same goal – in this case eliminating all the trouble on the right side of the golf course. Give her keys a try to hit a powerful draw with confidence and see how much easier the game gets when even your missed shots are playable.
For more tips and drills from Trillium and other Titleist Staff Members, visit Titleist Instruction:
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