Five under, 7 birdies...

Had the pleasure of playing in an LPGA Australian pro-am earlier this year with French pro golfer Joanna Klatten. Jo's a regular visitor to Aus and a few weeks later blitzed the field to shoot a course record 63 in the last round to win the NSW open.

Jo's a star in the making and delightful company to boot, but I wanted to share and recommend the opportunities to observe great golfers at work by playing in pro-ams like these. 

For the newbies, every pro tournament has a pro am where the top pros play with three enthusiastic amateurs, mostly celebrities or sponsor invites in an 18 hole tournament on the eve of the tournament proper. Most of the male pros detest pro ams and would rather be anywhere else, but the sponsors need looking after and so they're happy (ish) to spend five hours with a groups of 24 handicappers who want to know what club they hit on the par three. Despite the fact that the pros tees are usually in a different postcode.

Women's pro ams are an altogether different affair. Whether it's because the money isn't so plentiful or whether it's because they are, well, women, all of the women's pro ams I have played in have been an absolute delight. And if anything you learn more, far more compared to playing with a tour pro. 

The last few times I've played in Pro ams on the men's circuit I've been teeing off with people who hit it easily 100 yards further than me off the tee. People who hit wedges into long par fours when I'm tossing up between hybrid or 3 wood. People, to be frank that I have little in common with. Not great conversationalists either, if I dare generalise. 

The women's game is different. Whilst many of them hit it a long way, few of them ever hit shots at full strength. The pace of their game seems more measured. And best of all...they seem to be having a great time.

Here's a couple of things I learned last week. 

1. Leave the driver in the bag. In 18 holes, she hit driver once. It's a fact that she hit is so far that it took us ten minutes walk to get there, but despite that power and potential she hit driver once. She hit a four iron off the tee on a par five (you ever done that?) because getting on in two was impossible. And guess what...yes, she hit every fairway. 

2. Have a really good look at the line. Nobody wants club golfers to follow the lead of Jim "hang on I will have another look" Furyk but I noticed that while everyone else was putting she was studying the line like a hawk. Standing six feet away, just to the side of the line of the putt looking at what it would do as it ran out of pace, looking at the low side of the putt as Dave Stockton tells his pros Rory and Baddeley. And then best of all, having done the prep, when it was her turn to putt, it was one look at the line, aim and fire. Usually followed by the sound of ball hitting the bottom of the cup. 

3. Swing smooth. The key lesson from playing with or just watching lady professionals on the TV. Take it back smoothly and swing it smoothly. Not soft. Smooth. As Sevvy famously said, don't worry about swinging slow or fast, just think of keeping a constant speed from backswing to follow through. 

If you'd like to enjoy a round of golf under tournament conditions in great company where you'll learn more than a month of lessons, find a ladies PGA pro am near you and turn up and play. You won't regret it.  

Add yards to your drive!

Shopping in a golf store is a bewildering experience. When I first started in golf, you could buy a 1,2,3 or 4 wood. 5 woods hadn't been invented yet. And those woods, well they were made of wood. You know, the stuff that trees are made of. Nowadays, drivers are described in cubic centimeter sizes and not only can you buy an Eleven wood (made out of steel, naturally) but one of the worlds top pro golfers K J Choi has more woods and hybrids in his bag than traditional irons. 

It's the same with balls, putters, even tees for goodness sake. Wherever you look, there's a product that will shave shots off your game or help you hit the ball yards further. Yards. 

There's a couple of really important pieces of advice to help any golfer choose his best equipment. Unfortunately the one piece of advice NOT to follow is to ask the bloke in the golf shop. 

The most important club you will buy is the one that gets you on the fairway off the tee as often as possible and as far down the fairway as possible. While getting personally fitted for every club is ideal, I strongly recommend you spend most of your time finding that club. 

Firstly, find a driver that looks good to your eye when it sits behind the ball. Does it naturally point down the right line? Is it easy to line up. Does it make you feel like it's just a matter of swinging it? Yes? That's the first decision made. 

When choosing loft for a driver, the current industry view is that the higher the loft the better. For certain, don't be choosing anything lower than 9.5 degrees of loft. The forgiveness that you sacrifice won't be paid back in length. Life's not that simple. 

Choosing a shaft is more difficult. But if you're not able to get yourself fitted, watch out for the trap of thinking that good players play a stiff shaft. It's absolutely the stupidest decision golfers make. In fact, rather than choosing between stiff and regular, it's much more important to think about quality. A shaft in an off the shelf model will be a mass produced, mass assembled component that will have been produced as cost efficiently as possible. Here's a secret. It's the same for stiff shafts cause guess what. Most amateurs choose stiff because that's what their ego says is right for them.

Don't make the same mistake. Instead look for a regular shafted driver that is not one of the standard off the shelf model. If you're buying an R9 or Razr, you can easily pop your own shaft in by a couple of quick turns of the tool they provide. The best investment you can make is on a better quality shaft. Read online forums and magazines to find out what the good names are, consider people like Grafalloy, ProForce and Matrix and search ebay and second hand stores for good deals.

The big manufacturers have got wise to this over the years and now every big driver launch seems to use a shaft that is produced in partnership with one of the big names. Trouble is, the shaft in those clubs, even if it says Matrix or Ozik, is a mass produced version of the original. And it's the original you want. No substitutes. 

Choosing a putter is the exact obvious. Choose the one that gets the ball in the hole. Full stop.

Apart from the above, my best advice on buying clubs is to play the equipment manufacturers at their own game. In the last year, Taylor Made have released at least three new drivers. They're all top drawer and all have their own strengths. The best buy of all of them will be the one that came before, especially if you can find it in packaging and with the shaft you want. 

Golf clubs do not wear out, especially those that are "old stock" and it's common to see $500 drivers being knocked out as floor stock a year later for under $200. Same with irons. Shop around. Forget the new. Buy well known brands that feel good. 

And forget stiff shafts! 

Do you wanna be in the movies.

Jack Nicklaus has won more important golf tournaments than any golfer. His career straddles the semi-amateur age and the era of the millionaire golfer. During the 1960's the Golden Bear played John Lennon to Arnies "Macca" as between them they saw the world of golf, particularly in the USA transform into the multi-media, sponsor friendly juggernaut it is today. 

Jack's style was different to the flamboyant Arnie. As a golfer, Jack was a prize fighter, slugging the ball further than anyone. Strongly built especially in the upper body, Jack hit the ball hard and long. Around the greens, he developed his own style, a sort of awkward flamingo like stance with elbows splayed and feet aligned way left of the target. 

But despite a personal and unorthodox approach to the swing and his putting, Jack was one of the first professional golfers to truly embrace the idea of the mental game. He understood that spending time on the range was important but also that, as they say, the most important three inches in golf is the space between the ears.

In the mid 1960's  Timothy Gallwey was still to publish The Inner Game of Tennis, a seminal work on sports psychology that would be republished a few years hence with the world Golf in the revised title. Promising British 400m hurdler David Hemery was experimenting with sports psychology at Loughborough College, Britains leading sports college. Hemery would go on to win gold in Mexico and credit "visualisation" as one of the keys to his success. 

So it was early days for golfers to think about such new fangled ideas. Ben Hogan's view that "the answer lies in the dirt" his justification for hitting hundreds of balls to find the perfect swing was seen as the only route to success. In keeping with the times, the only way to be successful was hard work, repetition and dedication. 

Nicklaus however was different. By the time he wrote his life story, he was describing his method as much, much more than the endless pursuit of the perfect swing. Well kind of. For Nicklaus, his perspective was an interesting mix of spirit, competitiveness and the hard work ethic. 

The great man has gone on record as saying that he believes that one of his secrets was his commitment to trying his hardest on every shot. No matter whether it's a putt to win the Masters or a chip shot at the practice green, jack's approach is to say "I'll only get one go at this shot in my life. May as we'll make the best possible effort. I can." 

From the side of the green he was trying to hole out, every putt was aimed at the cup and every fairway was like an archery target. And more than just being determined to do his best,  Jack had a secret. 

He had discovered "visualisation". 

In interviews he describes how before he plays a shot he imagines himself in action, sees how high the ball goes, where it bounces, how the wind might affect it. He once said "it's like I'm watching my own home movie" 

And once he'd watched the movie, he'd get on and hit the shot. 

Experts in the area of visualisation believe that it's not a skill that everyone has, well not the seeing your home movies skill anyway. Some people see movies, some need to talk it through, some just zone in on target. 

It all adds to the same thing. The one thing that every one of the mental side of golf books agrees on (and I have read most of them!) is that before playing a shot you must have a really clear image of precisely what you are trying to do. 

Once you've got it, all you have to do is step up and trust your swing. Imagine. 

A book at bedtime

My current book of choice is Anneka Sorenstam's "Every shot must have a purpose". It's a good read, once you get past the "why can't you birdie every hole" nonsense.

Like most golf instruction books, there's a couple of key learnings that might help in my quest to make each shot add up to less.

One of my greatest weaknesses is the constant mental arithmetic that follows each shot. "Make par on the next three and I'll be back to level", you know the kind of thing. This book suggests an interesting fix to that, which is simply to con your brain into forgetting par and instead thinking of each shot as a separate challenge in itself. So on the tee, the only challenge is hitting the fairway. From there, it's all about getting on the dance floor in regulation. You get a "point" for each, as you do for a par. Two for a birdie. My best score for a round so far is twenty something. I'm working on it.

But the best thing about this system is the point you get for an up and down, irrespective of your final score. I've already noticed an improvement in my concentration when I've knuckled down to "knock this close and hole the putt for a point". I'm going to award myself a double bunger every time I knock it close enough to tap in. In fact, that's the thought I'll take to the course with me this weekend.

The rest of the book is a rehash of basic visualiation stuff, e.g. decide on the shot, picture it, commit and then go into the zone and hit it. We'll no doubt talk Galwey another day.

Woosie and the Killer Whale

Measuring five foot nothing and armed with forearms that actually were hewn from spending his teenage summers down on the farm, Ian Woosnam sure knew how to hit a golf ball. Using a driver fashioned, incredibly, from a lump of wood, the pint sized taff outdrove virtually everybody on the tour, sometimes hitting it over 250 meters. Wow.

And then along came John Daly and his Wilson Killer Whale. Resembling a thimble now compared with modern clubs, the Killer Whale was huge. And it came with a bright red Firestick shaft. When we heard the price tag (nearly 80 quid!) all the guys on Today's Golfer agreed that Wilson were out of their tiny minds. Nobody would ever pay that for a driver!

The Killer Whale was soon followed by the Big Bertha (299 quid), and then the biggest Big Bertha (499 quid!) each hewn out of a space age material called titanium. You probably know the rest. In 1996 over 70% of all new drivers sold were made by Callaway. A company that didn't exist in 1986. Because they worked. Golfers everywhere soon learnt that the hardest club to hit had just got easy (er) and best of all, the new weapons of mass destruction were long, scary long, reducing par fives to two just good Woosnam like smacks. Happy days...

Now I don't know what happened since to make golf hard again (and I do know that the average club handicap now is the same as it was 20 years ago), but all my stats reveal that despite the best clubs man can buy, I still don't hit many fairways. If I don't include near misses, it can be less than 50%. Ouch.

In my most recent round, I hooked my first tee shot 40 yards right, blocked the next one stone dead and found the trees on 10. Luckily, from there the course opens up...

Thing is, I also missed the cut stuff on 7, 8, 11, 13, 14. Six out of fourteen fairways hit for 38 points! So was it worth striving for distance? Not really. On 6 I couldn't get down in two. On 16 I missed right with a 6 iron. On 18 I missed right with a 4 iron.

So no then. Distance not the key.

Best round ever at St Michael's was the day after buying the hybrid. 45 points off 12 after a blob at the first. When I played off 6 I used a 3 wood. When will I learn?

Tee it up right.

The only time you get to place the ball where you want it in a normal round of golf is on the tee box. It's easy to forget that you have a heap of choices, all completely within the rules, of how you tee it up, and you may as we'll make the most of them. 

The first and most simple is to tee the ball so that you are hitting away from the trouble. If there is out of bounds down the left for example, teeing the ball up on the right means you are aiming straight at the place you really don't want to go, putting more mental pressure on an already tough shot. 

As soon as you arrive on the tee, picture the shot you want to play and the safe landing area before choosing the best place to put your ball. It might mean that you have to ask your partners to move themselves or their bags, but do it, they will respect you for it. 

Be certain also to choose a flat spot to tee the ball up. It sounds stupid but I've lost count of the times I've seen people standing below or above the ball, or with their feet near to a sprinkler or other obstacle. You are allowed within the rules of golf to tee the ball up anywhere behind the markers up to two full club lengths. You can stand outside the markers if you wish as long as your ball is within them and not less than two clubs length behind so make the most of what you have.

If you still can't find a flat spot, maybe it's time to join another club!

The most important tee box tip is also the most obvious and simple. Many years ago, I was paying in an Australian PGA event and my playing partner Justin Cooper pointed out to myself and the other amateurs on his team how he used the green keepers cutting lines to help him line up. The tournament was held at Royal Queensland and the course was in majestic condition in peroration for the Queensland Open, with the fairways symmetrically mowed with clear lines pointing straight down the fairway. Following the pro's tip. We each teed the ball up with one of the lines directly in line with our ball and took aim. 

It's a key secret of golf that if you have a very clearly defined target like that, especially on a long hole, you can usually miss by quite a large margin and still find the fairway. The secret is to have a clear target in your minds eye and there's no easier target to visualise than one that the green keeper has marked out for you. 

Similarly, when choosing your spot for teeing it up, it does no harm to pick a spot, divot mark or something similar on the line to the hole that you can use to check your alignment. Again, as you have the choice to tee it up anywhere, the opportunity to use an existing mark to check your alignment is just too good to miss. And it's in the rules! 

Line them up.

A few years after winning the US Masters in 1988, Sandy Lyle was going through the slump of all slumps. 

A prodigious talent as a youngster, Alexander William Barr Lyle had been English boys amateur champion, youth champion and a host of other titles. If it had not been for the presence of his semi namesake Nicholas Alexander Faldo, he would have dominated the game as a young man in Britain. 

He won the Brabazon trophy twice and played on two Walker Cup teams while still an amateur. 

When he won the Open in 1985, the first British golfer to do since Tony Jacklin, Sandy had become one of the worlds greatest players and his promise was crowned on that day at Augusta when, despite hitting the ball into a fairway bunker at 18, he managed to birdie the last to win the coveted green jacket, this time becoming the first Briton to do so. 

So it was a symptom of how bad things had become when at a press conference some years later after missing yet another cut at the British Open, Sandy's honest answer to a journalist who asked him what he thought had gone wrong is an answer I will never forget. You should know that Sandy is one of life's gentlemen and unlike many of his contemporaries before and after, has a reputation for taking the time to honestly answer any journalists questions. On this day, however perhaps he was a bit too honest even for Sandy. 

When the bloke from the Daily Mail, who should have known better by the way, asked Sandy where it was going wrong, the incredible answer from one of the best amateurs the golfing world has seen, Open and Masters champion was, and I quote "When I stand on the tee I have no idea where the ball is going"

In an interview later, a more grounded Sandy offered his take on the best tip for the weekend golfer. For Sandy! the secret lay in alignment. Ironic, given his press room quote, Sandy's tip for all amateurs was that they should work on their alignment. Using the analogy of the archer, there's no point firing your arrows straight if you're not pointing at the target. 

The easiest way to get aligned properly is one of the commonest tips in golf. Spend a moment closely watching the greats like Nicklaus and Norman in play and you'll quickly see a studied movement as they settle over the ball. Watch closely as their eyes shift from the ball to the target, stopping at an intermediate point to ensure they are lined up with a twig, divot or leaf that's on the line. 

The margin of error with a medium to long iron means that having the club face a few degrees off line can be the difference in hitting or missing the green, however well the shot has been hit. To get alignment right and to follow the top pros, before taking any shot, you should stand behind the ball and pick a mark some three to ten  feet I from of your ball that is on line with where you plan to aim. The mark can be a divot, leaf, even a slightly different coloured blade of grass, anything that is easy to fix your gaze on. 

Once you have picked the spot to align to, and before you take up your final stance, place your club on the ground in line with that spot. Keeping the club steady, move your feet into position before one final check that the club face is still aligned to the point of aim. 

It's really important to do this by lining the club up first. Too many golfers add to their golf handicap by planting their feet first, especially with the driver, before considering the line they want to hit it on. Having planted their feet first, the likelihood of being perfectly aligned is slim at best and from that point making good contact becomes a matter of luck. 

Having lined up correctly, with the spot in between you and the target and your club aligned to it, all you have to do is remember the words of one of the best selling golf authors of all time, Harvey Peninck, who summed golf up in three little words. 

Take. Dead. Aim. 

I can't put it better. 

Take more club

Pin high!

Probably the most obvious difference between the pro game and the weekend golfer is the ridiculous distances that the top players hit their irons nowadays. Even swinging at 80 percent of their speed, we get used to seeing a caddy pull an eight or nine iron out of the bag when his master is still 160 meters from the green. 

Never mind that lofts of clubs have been surreptitiously changed by manufactures so actually our wedge nowadays is the same as an old time 9 iron, nevertheless for the average club player, that's nothing like enough club. 

In fact, most players would be better off hitting an easy swing with a five iron from that distance. But week in, week out, I see club golfers hitting far less club than they actually need! especially on par threes. 

It's one of the most common things you hear from professionals talking about their pro-am partners. Being pin high and having hit "the right club" is no good if you are thirty yards off line and short sided. 

As a rule, very few par threes have trouble beyond the hole. Most will be aggressively bunkered at the front perhaps with two or three positioned thirty yards short to give you a false idea of where the green starts, but few penalise you for being long. 

The simplest tip for playing any par three, no matter how scary looking, is this...

Take More Club. 

Golf magazines and me. It's been emotional.

The late 1980's, long before the internet and social media, were a golden period for the magazine business. 

Desk top computers were taking over from the traditional publishing arts of typesetting and composition and new printing technologies meant that magazines could for the first time be printed cheaply and in full colour throughout. 

Ten years before the launch of Loaded and FHM, the UK golf magazine business was dominated by two monthlies, Reed's long standing publication Golf Monthly and Golf Digest, published in the UK as a subsidiary of the New York Times. 

To my eye, both were relics of a bygone age. 

Virtually identical in format, the magazines had the stuffiness of a men only golf clubhouse, with long articles about the history of the Open, long interview with the players that revealed little if anything about the psyche of the subject and astonishingly virtually no information about equipment. 

Each had low sales and high readership, most of which came from them being available to read in those clubhouses I mentioned earlier. How many hours were spent on that Lee Trevino at fifty article I wonder...

It seemed to me that as golf was growing, with new pay to play courses springing up all over and a greater range of equipment appearing in the pro shop (this, lest we forget was the era of the golf ball with hexagonal dimples) the magazines seemed to,me to be out of touch with the regular golfer. 

Well me to be precise. 

My original idea for a new magazine was called golf answers. "Answers" magazines were much in vogue at the time. Golf Answers would feature a mix of content more aimed at the golfer like me. Hints and tips on how to play better, lots of equipment and course reviews and stuff about pro golfers that people would not know from watching TV. 

However we learnt very early on that the title was a mistake. "You can't learn golf from a magazine" we were told. A subtle shift of editorial focus and Todays Golfer was born. 

One of the key insights in developing the magazine that anyone interested in articles about the pros would already have watched every shot of the British Open on TV so a piece of reportage telling the reader that Faldo hit a six iron to the eighteenth was both something they already knew and had most likely already been covered by the same expert writers in their daily newspaper articles. 

What we discovered through research is that all of our likely readers knew that they would never hit the ball like Faldo, Seve et al. They had little if any interest in the technical aspects of the pro game. But what they did what to want to know was what we quickly christened the "inside the ropes" stuff. What ball did they play with, how much they pay their caddy, what football teams they support, that kind of thing. In fact what they most wanted to know is what happened before they get onto the first tee on the last day of a Major. Breakfast? Practice? Meditation?

One of my favourite true stories from the publishing of today's golfer is that on the morning of his last round at Muirfield Nick Faldo whiled away the long hours before his 2.30 tee time over breakfast with one of Britain's best loved comics Ronnie Corbett at his home by the side of the first fairway before walking through the garden onto the golf course. 

20 years on, I'm wondering if that story was true.  Hope so. 

The other things that we learned the public wanted were really simple ideas for improving their game. So much so, that launch editor Bill Robertson's popular Tee to Green series quickly became a unique and big selling point of the magazine. It must have been good, as our rivals tried in vain to invoke some PGA rule about amateurs giving lessons to golfers. 

The unique mix of courses to play, a dedicated equipment section and easy to follow instruction soon saw Today's Golfer overtake the established monthlies to become the UK's biggest seller. So much so, that a few years later, emap purchased Golf World and Golf Illustrated to become the UK's leading golf publisher. 

The magazine industry continued to grow in the early 1990's and as Today's Golfer quickly became the number one title! a gap started to emerge for a magazine for younger golfers. Emap were publishers of FHM, a magazine success story that rewrote all the rules on men's magazines with regular UK sales of over 1/2 a million copies. 

Inspired by the success of FHM, the idea for a new launch magazine for a new generation of UK golfers inspired by fashion and with more money to spend than any generation of golfers the world had ever seen, I developed FORE!, an entirely new magazine idea which focused entirely on the idea of getting more from the game. 

FORE! Was an overnight success, selling 165,000 copies of its first issue, setting new records for the category. It was truly, as the excellent advertising campaign put it, "a golf magazine worth shouting about". 

It remains a regret of mine that having left the magazine in my successors hands, it closed not long after, a shadow of its former self. You just can't trust some people. 

I also regret that in moving to God's country I left my magazines behind. Thanks to all the people on Ebay who were listing these for sale. Hope you dont mind me using the pics. Hey! Most of the IP is mine anyway!

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends...

Golf is a game like no other. No matter how many times you've played your home course, every round is different, from the moment you launch your first tee shot hopefully into the green yonder till the putt drops into the cup on 18.

You may know the layout of the holes back to front and understand the subtle borrows of every green, but despite all that, from the moment your first shot comes to rest, every round is different. A first hole birdie and your stomach is full of excited butterflies. A six or more and you're questioning your swing thoughts...

This blog is a collection of observations and lessons learnt in 40 years of playing the game, including many enjoyable years launching and publishing some of the worlds best known golf magazines. I reckon I've seen thousands of game improvement articles, heard tips and advice from the greatest players and teachers in the game and seen my handicap fluctuate from 5.7 all the way up to the high teens. 

The one thing I learned from my time in golf magazines was that every handicap golfer, no matter his skill or handicap all wanted to be a few shots better. Only 10% of the worlds golfers play off an elusive single figure handicap and most of them are either playing and practicing regularly or already possess a deadly short game. 

This blog is for the rest of us. 

A ten handicapper dreams of playing off single figures, while the 21 handicapper is working towards a handicap that no longer gives him or her two shots on the hardest hole. Whilst it might help to get 38 stableford points, no self respecting golfer wants to be that person who gets two shots on any hole. 

Veteran commentator Peter Alliss has long felt that the maximum handicap for any golfer should be 18, as in one shot per hole. I think I secretly agree. 

Two shots better?

It's a phrase from the research we did on Today's Golfer.

Very early on we learned that golfers didn't care about being a scratch player. They just wanted to be "2 shots better". It's a great phrase. So good, I decided to name my company in its honour.

Welcome.