How to instantly find your feel on the golf course
An Exclusive Club
This blog will largely be about how to improve in new and different ways. Today, let's talk feel.
Are you a feel player? Not me. I have a robotic swing. More Tin Man than Tin Cup.
For kicks, I'd always wanted to play a round using only one club for every shot. I had no illusions about shooting par with a single iron, like Kevin Costner does in the film. A 9-handicap, what I wanted was something south of 100. What I got was a fun, liberating, three-hour playing lesson in bending the ball to my will. My teacher: my 6-iron.
“Playing with one club changes your approach,” says Thad Daber, the Guinness World Records holder for lowest one-club score in competition (70), and the four-time winner of the One Club Golf World Championship. “You invent new shots—high, low, half shots, knock-downs. It forces you to develop your feel.”
Armed with only my 6 and Daber’s tips, my round started ugly, with back-to-back doubles. Cue the jukebox in my head: One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…
But something soon changed. When playing with one club, you rarely get your full-swing distance—for me, 175 yards with my 6-iron. So you improvise. OK, 105 yards to the pin? Here goes nothin’—a three-quarter-backswing knockdown. From 150 yards? Full swing with quiet legs. Eighty yards out, choke down, bump it… just…so. Pin high! Hmmm.
I’d flipped a switch. Off went my logical left-brain, preoccupied with swing plane and supination. On went my intuitive, creative right-brain, the hemisphere Da Vinci accessed to paint The Mona Lisa, that our spear-wielding ancestors summoned when a mastodon moseyed by. Cro-Magnon Man didn’t think weight shift and shoulder turn. He thought, See food. Throw spear. Eat.
Playing with one club awakens the shot-maker within. Says mental-game expert and Zen Golf author Joe Parent, who has worked with Vijay Singh and David Toms: “Tour pros come to me and say, ‘I can fade it from the rough under a branch and over a bunker to a tucked pin, but I can’t hit the green with a 9-iron from the fairway. Why?’ Well, when you create a shot, you use your feel, your imagination, instead of swinging on autopilot. Playing with one club helps you access that creative side.”
Around the greens, bunker shots came out fine with a 6-iron, just lower. As for putting, one-clubbers fall into two schools: Blade it or chip it. If you tend to decelerate through impact with your putter, try the latter. Chipping made me assertively strike the ball toward my target, not simply steer it and say an "Our Father," and led to a respectable 36 putts (down from my 40-putt norm).
Be warned. You will make big numbers. But that’s dandy. One-clubbing is not about scoring. You’re free from the chains of expectation. It’s counter-intuitive: You relax because you have permission to make a snowman, which helps eliminate snowmen because you’re relaxed. The score’s not the thing. The play’s the thing.
Case in point: I made a quadruple-bogey on a par-5, which would normally toast me mentally. No biggie—I’m using a friggin’ 6-iron! Freed from self-flagellation, on the next hole my right-brain feels that the 150-yard par-3 demands a sawed-off punch-cut. See food. Throw spear. Eat. I hit the green and “chip” in for birdie. Nice bounce-back, though it looks odd on the card. I haven’t seen a 9 with a 2 since Christie Brinkley dumped Billy Joel.
I shaped more shots in 18 holes than I had in the last year. I shot 95. That’s no Mona Lisa. Dogs Playing Poker, maybe. But hey, it’s still art.
So this is how feel feels.
OK, now it's your turn. Have you ever one-clubbed it, either for a whole round or a few holes? What club did you use? How did you putt? Did you get in better touch with your feel? Tell me your stories and thoughts and we'll get a conversation started. (Cue: Bono. One love, with each other. Sisters, brothers...)
(Photo: AP)
