Speaker 1: Golf Smarter number three hundred and fifty three, published on
October sixteen, twenty twelve.
Speaker 2: Welcome to golf Smarter Mulligans, your second chance to gain
insight and advice from the best instructors featured on the
Golf Smarter podcast. Great Golf Instruction Never gets Old. Our
interview library features hundreds of hours of game improvement conversations
like this that are no longer available in any podcast app.
Speaker 1: Sports marketing was a very different beast in nineteen fifty
five than it is in twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: It was and a lot of these players made their
money and made it from countcown to tournament to tournament
by playing money games in between the tournaments, playing the
best player in that area, the best player at the club,
and they'd play in some big money games, and some
of them made a lot more money when they weren't
playing tournaments than when they were. I went down to Hickory,
North Carolina, just last week to see Jack Pluck and
some of these other legends because they were up there
playing a pro am at Hickory, which is where the
Champions Tour event was. But I was sitting next to
a guy he's a good friend to Doug Sanders. Doug
Sanders is a great player, a little later era than Black.
He came along one in the late fifties and early sixties.
He won a lot of tournaments and he very nearly
won the British Open. He missed a short cut at
Saint Andrews in nineteen seventy and he ended in a
playoff with Jack Nicholas and lost.
Speaker 4: Sounds like another book for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this though I met. He told me that Doug
Sanders made a lot more money playing Jen Rummy than
he was playing golf. She said, numbers like twenty five
thirty fifty thousand dollars playing Jen Rummy when he wasn't
out on the golf course.
Speaker 1: Golf's greatest upset at the nineteen fifty five US Open
with author Neil Sagabel.
Speaker 4: This is Golf.
Speaker 2: Smarter, sharing tips and insights from golfers and golf professionals
to help lower your score.
Speaker 4: It's worked for your host, Fred Green. Welcome to the
Golf Smarter podcast.
Speaker 3: Neil, good to be here, Fred, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 4: Thank you for reaching out and mentioning in LinkedIn that
you had.
Speaker 1: This book because it was kind of perfect for the
Golf Smarter podcast, and for some interesting reason, I thought
it was perfect for twenty twelve because this sports year
has had its own list of upsets, and we can
get into more about that in a minute, But most
recently in golf, the twenty twelve Ryder Cup. I don't
know if it was necessarily an upset, but it was
an amazing comeback and a long shot at best on Sunday.
But we also had the US Open in San Francisco
at the Olympic Club here in twenty twelve, and your
story talks about the US Open back in nineteen.
Speaker 3: Fifty Yeah, well, this year, this is the Open play
at the Olympic Club. The one in nineteen fifty five
was the first, and that's where Hogan and Fleck showed
up in all the other greats of that era. And interestingly,
it was only the second US Open plate on the
West Coast, so up until that time, the US Open
had been more or less an East Coast championship.
Speaker 1: Most sports are our East Coast centric, at least from
the writer's perspective. What was the first event played on
the West coast?
Speaker 4: Do you remember so?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the first US Open played on the West Coast
was at.
Speaker 4: Riviera, then Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then it was the first US Open that
ben Hogan won.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 4: Interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 1: So let's set this up because during the TV broad
cast of the twenty twelve US OPE, and there was
a lot of talk about Jack Fleck and you know,
like they love to go into the history of it,
but specifically Ben Hogan at the time was dominant.
Speaker 4: He was.
Speaker 1: It was just a given that Ben Hogan would be
there at the end, battling for the title or just
running away with it. And this was the case again,
but it had been for those who aren't familiar, it
had been a tumultuous time for Ben Hogan leading up
to this. Let's start with some background about the big Boy.
Let's give us some background about Ben Hogan.
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of people who followed GoF I've heard
of Hogan for sure, because he I think he revolutionized
the game in a few different ways. And part of
that was because I think it was not easy for
him to make it out there on the PGA tour.
We know of him as the great player now, but
he struggled. He was not as talented as as guys
like say Byron Nelson, who came out of the same
caddy yard as Hogan, so he really had to work
to hone his golf swing. He fought a hook as
a younger player, and he took him three tries really
to catch on. On the PGA Tour, he didn't win
his first tournament until nineteen forty, so he'd been out
there a while. And he didn't win his first major
until nineteen forty six. And I can't remember, so that
would have made him I guess almost Well, he's probably
about thirty four years old. So it took Hogan a while.
And there's that famous saying of finding the secret in
the dirt. He found his swing through a lot of
practice and no, and I don't know uptill that point
in time anyone had worked harder to develop his golf
swing or develop his game at Ben Hogan. So he's
famous for his work ethic. About the time that he
was really coming into his home Nelson Byron Nelson retired
in nineteen forty six, he was really considered the top
man in golf, but Hogan was coming along. Snead was
a great as well. Sam Snead. About the time Hogan
was really starting to get it, he won the PGA
Championship in forty six. He won his first US Open
in nineteen forty eight at Riviera in Los Angeles. He
had that terrible car accident in early nineteen forty nine.
He was coming back from Arizona, I think it was
the Phoenix Open with his wife and he was driving
home to Fort Worth and they were on a foggy
West Texas Highway and a Greyhound bus had pulled out
to pass a truck and Hogan and his wife in
their Cadillac had a head on collision that they were
just it was a miracle that they both survived in
and Hogan was in a hospital for two months and
almost died. And when he came out of that hospital,
his doctors never really thought he'd played golf again. He
was fortunate to be walking around, but he was a
very driven man and he made a comeback what some
I think to this day considered maybe one of the greatest,
if not the greatest comebacks in the history of sports.
Something less than two years after he had this accident,
he came back and he won the US Open in
nineteen fifty at Marion. And so we see this Hogan
who now because of his physical condition. He hasd to
go through this regiment just to play, prepare himself to play.
He'd soak himself, he'd soak in a hot tub with
epsom salts. He took asper, and he had to limen
on his legs and wrap his legs and elastic manages.
And after this accident he only plays in about six
or seven tournaments a year, but he becomes this machine
of a golfer who is incredibly tough and determined in
the major championships. So after Hogan has his accident, he
actually goes on to win more majors than he'd won
before that, And coming into the nineteen fifty five US
Open Olympic, he'd won four of the last six US
Opens he'd played in, which is pretty remarkable, and he'd
won nine majors total. And in nineteen fifty three he
had probably one of the greatest years in golf at
any professional golf or has ever had. He won what
they ended up calling the Hogan Slam. He won the Masters,
the US Open, and the British Open, and I believe
all by record scores amazing, and they called it to
Hogan Slam. And it was at a time when the
PGA Championship. Was it overlapped the British Open and you
couldn't play both, really, Hogan, he might not have been
played during the same week, but because of travel, I
can't remember if Hogan took a boat over to Scotland
or if he flew. But it was hard you really
practice from a practical standpoint, you couldn't play in both.
So he went and played the British.
Speaker 1: Right and right and they were the British and the
PGA Championship were happening at the same time that year.
Speaker 4: Is that true?
Speaker 3: And that's why he They were either happening at the
same time or they were so close together that it
wasn't practical for him to get back play the PGA.
The PGA was a match play championship at that time, okay,
And I don't remember how many matches he had to
play to win it, but he had to play several matches.
Speaker 1: Actually, just I just found it up on Wikipedia. And
that year in fifty three. First of all, Hogan was
forty at the time, which is amazing in itself when
you look at today's players. But in nineteen fifty three,
the PGA Championship was from July first to seven one
through seven, and the Open Championship played at Carnousti that
year was July six through ten, so they did overlap. Yeah,
so you know, getting the Hogan Slam, he wasn't given
the opportunity to get the Grand Slam.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that terminology I don't really know for my
research what they were saying, if that was something that
people were even talking about at that time, you know,
calling it the Grand Slam. But he won. He was
professional athlete of the year, not just golfer. In nineteen
fifty three, there was something called the hiccock Belt maybe
you've heard of or maybe some of your listeners have
heard of. He was awarded to the top professional athlete
of the year. And Hogan wanted in nineteen fifty three
to the end of this remarkable year where he won.
He won three majors and I think he won he
played in six tournaments and he won five. So and
he never went back to the British Isles. He played.
He went there once he won it, and that was
it was.
Speaker 4: It wouldn't been there done that.
Speaker 3: A lot of Americans didn't play in the British Open
in those days. It was it typically costs more to
go over there and play it. Then you got out
of it. And only some of Hogan's professional friends said,
then you need you need to go over there and
play that to be considered. You know, that's kind of
a full career, and as the great player you are,
you need to do it. And so he did, and
he wanted Carnousti.
Speaker 1: He really defies what we know today and just it's
amazing that he was able to come back with you
know way science and medicine is today, what they could
have done for him. But he was in a lot
of pain, he was limping, and he made it work,
I mean, and then he came back and played better
than ever.
Speaker 4: Truly incredible story. Truly an incredible story of a comeback.
Speaker 1: So here he is now, he's he won in fifty three,
he had the sl the Hogan Slam in fifty three,
fifty four, he doesn't win any majors. Nineteen fifty five
he is expected to dominate again and they come to
San Francisco, but there's something that gets in the way
of his victory. There there's another character. Give us the
background on Jack Fleck.
Speaker 3: Well, Jack Fleck is a totally different golfer in nineteen
fifty five. He's one of the guys that's in the
field playing these tournaments, but he is not well known.
He's never won on tour. He's mostly been what I
call a Winner Tour player, meaning he was a club pro.
He had two pros or two clubs he managed in Iowa,
and from late December to early April he'd go play
the Winner Tour out in California, Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana
up until the time when Golf SI's an open at
his home courses in the beginning of April, and there
were a lot of guys that did that. It was
tough to play the full tour. There just wasn't that
much money. So he had tournament experience, but he wasn't
really known, and he was i'd say a middle of
the pack player. He'd make cuts and he could finish
in the top twenty and he might make a few checks.
But he was trying to see if he was good
enough really to play out there. And at the beginning,
at the end of the nineteen fifty four season, he
and his wife had a talk and she said, why
don't you give it two years and see if you
can play the full tour and see if you can
succeed up there and make enough money make it worthwhile.
By this time, Jack's thirty three years old, so he's gonna.
Speaker 4: Make it sense.
Speaker 1: You know what, Neil, you make it sound so gentle.
Why don't you know his wife saying why didn't you
give it two years? I kind of believe anybody who's
married for any period of time's got to believe that.
It wasn't that simple of oh, why don't you just
give it two years? It was more like, all right,
you got two years. If you don't get it done,
then it's time to change course. Or I mean, did
your research show that she was that genteel about it?
Speaker 3: Well, it was all from Jack, because she's gone, now right, No,
you're you're right, I'm saying that in my tone, in
my style of speech. Yeah, I think it probably was
more of a challenge to him. Sure, but you know,
I think it was. In fact, When you read the book,
you'll see quote from her where she says, go out
there and find out if you can if you can
play tournament golf, full circuit, or and if you can't,
you'll at least get it out of your system, quoted. Now,
she ran the golf courses for him while he was gone,
along with his assistant pro. Interesting, so she was I
would say that she was an encouraging influence. And if
you were talking to Jack flu today, he'd probably tell
you that she kind of pushed him out there and said, Jack,
just just go find out. Okay, you want to you
want to find out if you can play, go try
it and give it two years. And if you don't, hey,
if you're just going to come back to Island and
be a club pro. And that's the way it's going
to be. And there are a lot of guys like that.
It was really hard to play.
Speaker 1: She said, uh, you know, Jack, just go find out.
So if you can pick it up right around there,
I'll clean it up.
Speaker 4: And edit it.
Speaker 3: I think you're right about what you said, Fred. She did.
It was sort of a challenge to him, and she said, Jack,
get out there and go find out, and if you
can't make it in two years, you'll get tournament and
playing tournament golf out of your system. So it was
a challenge. And he had said to her at the
end of the fifty four season, just privately, something he
told me, and it's also in the book. He wanted
to see if he could play what he called championship
golf before Hogan and Sneed retired. So he looked up
to those guys and I think he wanted to see
if he could play at that level. Now, he wasn't
going to be Hogan or Sneed, but he wanted to
be able to see if he could really compete and
play better than he'd played up to that point. So
this was his shots. It really was his chance, his
window of opportunity to go try to play the full tour.
Speaker 4: Had he played in major.
Speaker 3: Before, yes, he had, he played. You know whereas Hogan
comes into fifty five, he's won four US Opens and
finished very high on many of the others that he
played in. Jack flex only played in two. He's only
played in two, and the first one was in nineteen
fifty where Hogan made that miracle comeback. So the first
Open that Jack played and he missed the cut. And
then Jack played again in nineteen fifty three where which
was a part of Hogan's Hogan's slam year where he
won the three majors, and that was that Oakmont and
in that one Jack finished something like, I think he
finished fifty second, twenty six shots behind Ben Hogan. So
he's played in fifty four. He tried to qualify, but
he didn't qualify. He didn't play in fifty four, and
he had to qualify in fifty five. This is an
era where pretty much the whole field has to qualify
just to get into the US Open. There are all
the exemptions that there are now to get into the field.
You're looking at all, but seventeen players who qualified around
the country can get into the field.
Speaker 4: So then talk about the qualification process.
Speaker 3: There were seventeen players that were exempt into the nineteen
fifty five US Open field out of one hundred and
sixty two that started. So from that, you can just
imagine that you have all these players qualifying, and a
lot of them are really great players. There are players
that have been playing on the tour and winning money,
but you didn't have the exemptions like you do now.
You know, where there's all this different criteria for getting in,
whether you're in the top fifty in the world and
all these other things.
Speaker 4: Plus the money.
Speaker 1: You know, probably well, definitely the money wasn't it like
it is today. But if you were probably out of
the top what five, top top ten that you really
didn't win anything.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. So what you had in fifty five,
the guys that were in were the last five players
to win the US Open, the players who had finished
in the top ten in nineteen fifty four, they're in.
And then you have the winners of the US Amateur
and the British Amateur they're in. And I think that
pretty much covers the criteria cheria for being exempt into
the nineteen fifty five US Open. Field neck ends up
being about seventeen players.
Speaker 5: The other.
Speaker 3: Going to try to do math here, other one hundred
and forty five players have to qualify. These are pros
and amateurs, club pros, guys who've been playing the tour.
They're qualifying at locations around the country. They were total
of over fifteen hundred that went to qualifying for one
hundred and forty five spots around the country. Wow, Jack
qualified in the Chicago sectional and there might have been
I don't know, a hundred row a few more in
that sectional and maybe six seven spots. So it was,
as some of the players told me, it was just
an honor. You had to be a great golfer just
to play in the US. So a lot of guys
felt like just getting to the tournament, playing in it
was a huge honor, and they were just it said
that they are a good golfer just being in the tournament.
Speaker 1: That actually could turn into a lot of work for
them in those days, just to be able to say
that they qualified for the tournament. They can become the
pro for at a club for life, and really that
that was probably a more secure profession at the time.
If you talk about that being a profession than being
a touring.
Speaker 3: Golfer, that's absolutely correct, because there just wasn't There just
wasn't the money. Yeah, professional golf, playing tournament golf, and
there were the purses ranged from this is total purses
for the whole field. They might range from about ten
thousand dollars to thirty thousand dollars the winner would get,
so anywhere from two thousand dollars to five thousand dollars
was the winning check. And all the guys, you know,
guys that are in the Hall of Fame now that
I've got to talk to, they said it was just tough.
It was tough playing out there. You could, you know,
I talked to Donold Palmer. You could make the cut
and not earn a chat you had. There were only
about thirty money places in a lot of tournaments, so
you could make the cut and not get a check.
Jack tells the story. Jack Fleck tells a story where
I don't know, I think it might have been in
the nineteen fifty three San Diego Open. He finished to
think twenty seventh and his check for the week was
thirteen dollars and seventy five cents. And after he paid
his caddy for the week twenty one or twenty two dollars,
he came out, you know, eight dollars in the hole.
Speaker 4: It's not good. That's not a way to make a living.
Speaker 1: And get hear why the wife would be going, uh, okay, yeah,
you got this much time and then you're getting back
to work.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So you know, even the top players, Ben Hogan, Sansny,
Jimmy Demaret, Lloyd Mangrim, Currie middle Cough, Julius Sporls, these
top players, they all had club jobs too, and some
of them were more they Some of the top players,
like Hogan, maybe didn't have to spend a lot of
time at the club. Turn his check, But that did
augment their income because there just wasn't a lot of
money to be made at the tournaments. And then if
you're a top player too, there were some endorsements and
equipment contracts and things like that, and they weren't anywhere close. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the endorsement thing really didn't get going until what
the nineties or something, when I guess Michael Jordan really
put it over the top. But also was the Olympic
the endorsements when the Olympics were in Los Angeles in
eighty four and you wereros really got the official sponsor.
So it was a very different. Sports marketing was a
very different beast in nineteen fifty five than it is
in twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: It was, and a lot of these players too, made
their money and made it from town to town and
tournament to tournament by playing money games in between the tournaments,
you know, playing the best player of that in that area,
the best player at the club where they were playing,
and they'd play in some big money games and they
fell of them made a lot more money not when
they weren't playing tournaments than when they were. You know,
I was at I went down to Hickory, North Carolina
just last week to see Jack Fleck in some of
these other legends, because they were up there playing a
pro am at Hickory, which is where the Champions Tour
event was. Fred Funk won yesterday. But I was sitting
next to a guy who I don't know if he's
he's a good friend to Doug Sanders. And Doug Sanders
was a great player a little later era than Black.
He came along war in the late fifties and early sixties,
and he won. He won a lot of tournaments, and
he very nearly won the British Open. He missed a
short putt at Saint Andrews in nineteen seventy and he
ended up in a playoff with Jack Nicholson lost. That's
what a lot of people remember about Doug Sanders.
Speaker 4: But sounds like another book for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this fellow I met speaking of this income situation
back in those days, he told me that Doug Sanders
made a lot more money playing Jen Rummy than he
was playing golf because he would make he said, numbers
like twenty five thirty fifty thousand dollars playing Jen Rummy
when he wasn't out on the golf course. So That's
just one example. But they they hustled, you know, because
he was just a.
Speaker 1: Guy looking for a game, doesn't matter what it was, right,
he was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and a lot of them were like that.
Speaker 4: Interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 1: So now there's a couple of ways I want to
go with this and I and I want to see
which you're more comfortable with starting because I'm going to
try to get you to do both.
Speaker 4: I want to go talk about.
Speaker 1: The different people that you interviewed and their recollections of
that weekend and how things went. But I also would
love if you could take us through now it was
it a three or four day tournament at that time?
Speaker 3: It was a three day tournament which ended up having
a fourth day because of the playoffs.
Speaker 1: Right, So when they but they would play four rounds
over the three days.
Speaker 3: Right, they play That's right, they played four rounds over
the three days. Right, they played thirty six on the
final day.
Speaker 4: Unbelievable. And Ben Hogan now has to walk.
Speaker 1: That thirty six holes too, which is for him, it's
painful enough just to walk a golf course. Let Loane
walk thirty six holes. Lead Loan walk thirty six holes
in San Francisco at the Olympic Club, which is not
what you call a flat golf course.
Speaker 3: No, it wasn't easy for him to walk, and he
kind of complained. I mean, his legs tired, they were stiff.
It wasn't easy to walk that course because it's definitely
sloping terrain.
Speaker 1: So I would love so the part two of that
was not only talk about the people that you interviewed
in the research that you did for the book, but
to go each day through the tournament and what was
going on, and what were the high points and the
low points that led us to that final day when
you know, on the final round, when everyone thought it
was over and that Hogan had just it was done,
and the networks, you know, the broadcast element of this
story is also very interesting. Yes it is, But so
how how do you want to pursue that? Which way
do you want to go with this?
Speaker 3: I'll go either way. I mean I can talk about
who I talked to, I can I can try to
go back through through it day by day and tell you,
give you some snippets and tell you what what happened
on those days, what was going on?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but I think I think that that's how
we climax this story is the day by day. I
would like to talk about your research process, the people
you talk to and and what they remember about how
the weekend proceeded. You know, one of the all time
favorite T shirts I've ever heard about was this swim
team who was a collegiate swim team that was highly
decorated in the forties I think it was, and you know,
every year they would get together in heavy union and
I think for their one of the major anniversaries, they
had T shirts that were made that said the older
we get, the faster we were. And so I've got
to believe that some of the stories that you heard
were embellished a little more than others. Let's just put
it that way.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know it was interesting for me, Fred because I
hadn't written a book before, and so you know, in
some cases you have to you have to sift through
and try to understand is I don't know that any
player I talked to was intentionally trying to embellish anything. Okay,
I just think maybe through the fog of time you
remember things differently. And first of all, this book really
focuses on Jack Fleck, and of course Ben Hogan's gone,
and I never got a chance to talk to him,
and he wasn't much for talking about talking to writers
and reporters late in his life anyway, So I probably
would have never talked to Ben Hogan. But I can
tell you that Jack Fleck was was totally straight with me.
He's a very kind of black and white person. If
he didn't remember something, he didn't try, He didn't try
to sort of create something for me. He could just
tell me. And one of the things that was interesting
to me was Jack didn't really remember a lot of
details about the first, second, and third rounds. He had
some overall remembrances about playing maybe certain holes, and about
overall feelings he had about how he played that day
and what he shot, but he couldn't take me shot
by shot or hole by hole in any of that.
Speaker 1: Well that's interesting because I'm always blown away when athletes
can go, oh, you know, and they say, well, what
about what about that approach shot? I'm fourteen on Friday,
and they're like they know exact factly what they're talking about,
and I would look at him like, I don't know.
It blows me away that they can remember specifics like that.
So I'm glad to hear that Fleck was going eh.
Speaker 3: He would just tell me I don't remember. And so
one of the challenges for me as a writer was
how do I, first of all, how do I recreate
this tournament for everyone and what happened and make you
feel like you were there. But secondly, since it's going
to really focus on Fleck and Hogan, how do I
tell you about Fleck's first two rounds when he couldn't
tell me a lot about them. Fortunately, that's where my
research came in. There was a lot of newspaper coverage
the Olympic Club where I went, the historian had information.
I was able to get my hands on the pairing
sheet for that week, the hole by whole scores. I
knew the course pretty well from what was written about it.
It's a different course now, but it's you know, there
are a lot of features about it that are the same,
but it's a very different course in fifty five. I
had a lot of good information, and plus the newspaper
coverage told me things about Pluck in the first, second,
or third rounds as well as the other players. So
I used what I had and it was it was
a considerable bob of information.
Speaker 4: Well Neil.
Speaker 1: I hate to interrupt you here, but we've kind of
reached our time limit for the Golf Smarter podcast, and
I would obviously I have a lot more questions because
I've just set you up with telling us the story
about that weekend. Could you stick around and we can
do a part two and make this a member's only conversation.
Speaker 3: Sure, I'd love to.
Speaker 4: Awesome, thank you.
Speaker 1: So then let me let me remind the Golf Smarter
audience and let you know that if you'd like to
hear part two of this conversation and get the full
story of that weekend as best we can determine from
the stories that we're told to Neil. Neil Sagabel is
the author of the book The Longest Shot, subtitled Jack Fleck,
Ben Hogan and Proge Golf's Greatest Upset at.
Speaker 4: The nineteen fifty five US Open.
Speaker 1: It is available as a kendlebook correct as a digital yes,
and it's also on hard hard copy as well, and
we have it in our Golfer Smart at Golfsmarter dot com.
So you can just go ahead and purchase it for
yourself right there, whether you do the download version or
you have it ordered as a gift for you or
somebody else this holiday season, purchase the book. It's a
great story, it's an amazing story, and it's timely, mainly
because of the Olympic Club and the upsets and golf
in general. So Neil, thank you for a green to
stick around. Uh and I again encourage everyone to join
golf Smarter for members only so you can hear part
two of this conversation.
Speaker 4: Neil, you're sticking around right, I am.
Speaker 3: Thanks, thanks so much. I appreciate being on with you.
Speaker 1: It's time once again to welcome back Terry Kaylor, the
CEO of score Golf, and it's our score Zone Short
Game Academy. You can participate in this part of the program,
and we encourage you to click on the score Zone
Short Game Academy button at golfsmarter dot com and submit
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segment by Terry, you will receive a money club of
your choice, custom fit for you by score Golf, and
Terry will give you more information. What do we mean
by a money club? Because he just doesn't like to
use the W word anymore. Terry, how are you welcome back?
Speaker 3: I'm great for it.
Speaker 5: How are you.
Speaker 4: I'm fine, Thank you very much for asking.
Speaker 1: So we get a question here today from Joe Dolan
of WASI in Ohio, and he says, look, if I'm
say about eighty yards from the pin with an open
green in front of me, and I'm between clubs a
sixty degree or a fifty six degree in between those two,
is it better for me to hit a hard sixty
degree club or it takes some off of the fifty
six degree And that's his question. My comment is, I've
never even understood how to take it off or hit
it hard. You know. It's like to me the swing,
if you swing harder, you're swinging that's you don't want
to swing harder, you know. And well, so I'd love
to get your feedback on this too.
Speaker 5: Well. I think the concept of hitting wedges hard is
there's something you never want to do. And one of
the things about hitting your high loft golf clubs and
I said the debut order, but because he's playing wedges and
he's not playing scoring gloves, but shameless plug anyway, So
when you're trying to hit, when you're trying to hit
a high lofted club harder, invariably what's going to happen
is you increase your club edge speed. All that weight
low along the club is going to launch that ball
higher and it's going to end up going shorter. And
I think most of your readers can say, yeah, I
mean I remember that I was trying to kind of
get on that fifty six a little bit, or get
on that gap wedge a little bit, and I felt
the ball hit a little higher on the clubhead and
I swung harder, but the ball went higher and shorter.
These clubs are really hard to control distance with when
you get more than about an eighty percent swing, So
you know, you really want to put the control pace
swing on your high loft golf clubs just in general,
regardless whether it's a sixty or a fifty four or
fifty eight or fifty two, whatever it is in your hand,
you put a high loft club in your hand, throttle
back your swing speed. That your full swing needs to
be refined from what it is with a seven iron
or a five iron or away or hybrid or driver,
particularly so as you so the first part of developing
good short range performance is to get the right arsenal
of clubs in your in your bag, and Joe talked
about it. He's caught between a fifty six and a sixty.
Get the right cup, have four degree gaps, maybe five
if you're a shorter hitter, and then go out and
learn what really is a textbook fifty six, a textbook sixty,
a textbook fifty two, whatever lofts you're carrying, find out
what distance you can produce with that control to swing
rather than think about hitting it, taking something off, as
Joe says, or hitting hard. You know, the lower club harder.
I wrote a book number of years ago, called it
a little booklet called a score Method, and what I
showed you how to do in that. It's free for
download on our site at scoreedoff dot com. You can
poke around, you can find this download. But what the
score method is all about. Once you have understood your
quote full swing distance of these clubs, you can then
dissect those and you should have twelve to thirteen fourteen
yard gaps in your full swing with your scoring clubs.
Then you can dissect those gaps by gripping, by changing
your hand position. So if you grip down on that
fifty six, for example, a half an inch to three
quarters of an inch you're going to see about three
yards come off of that Off of that distance, go
down an inch, you're going to see about cut in
half the gap between that club and the next lower club.
So now you've taken your three or four high loft
clubs and you've given yourself six or eight quote full
swing distances. Now you've dissected your gaps. You can then
dissect those gaps a little more by learning how to
open the face just a little bit or close the
face just a little bit. It adds a little off,
adds a little spin there.
Speaker 4: Again.
Speaker 5: I wrote this booklet called the Score Method that really
dives into deep detail on how to do this and Joe,
what it does for you and for all the listeners
out there is it takes away to take a little
off or jump on it a little bit and you say, hey,
I'm a eighty yards. I know that's a fifty six
degree grip down a half an inch. Just hit it
and it's going to be within two or three yards
of that eighty number, or you know it's seventy one yards,
and I know that's a sixty degree grip down an
inch with the facehood. It just to hear and you
learn how to change the relationship between you're swinging the
club to build these yardages in versus take a little
off or jump on it a little bit.
Speaker 4: So, Terry, how.
Speaker 1: Does this all fall into the feel versus method? You know,
there's a lot of conversation, there's even a lot of
questions that we've been receiving from people on this very topic.
Speaker 4: When it comes to the short game.
Speaker 1: You know, when you have wedge, pitching, chipping, even putting,
the feel versus method, how does that?
Speaker 4: How do you interpret that?
Speaker 5: Well? I think first of all, let's talk about feel.
You have to have some feel of the golf and
the golf how the ball comes off the club. I mean,
that's just essential to golf, and you get that through
hitting a lot of golf shots. You also have to
have a method that you can rely on. I mean,
Dave Felts has got a very complex method for nine o'clock,
eight o'clock, all this kind of stuff. And you can
spend a lot of time learning that if you want,
I take a little simpler approach because most people aren't
going to spend the amount of time, or if they're
not going to spend the amount of time, and I
look at say, learn what I'm just talking about with
the score method, learn your bractet of full swing yardages,
and then go and practice a half swing. Uh, and
just learn that this is kind of the field thing.
And to me, a half wing is you know, if
you're a right handed player, your left arm goes back
to parallel to the ground, so your your hands are
about shoulder high, you know, behind you, and that half swen.
You know, you can take your golf clubs and you
can practice that half swen and see what your sixty
does with a half wing and you're fifty six, and
you're fifty two, and even down into your pitch, you're nine,
and again, chart those yardages and know you know that's
a half swing sixty laid open a little this you
consist your scoring range performance. The field comes in when
you get down less than that, and that's really letting
your ie ND coordination take out. And what I like
to do is hit most of the of my pit
shots with some to a half swing because it's long
enough to be with them. And I developed a little
method that I've shared with people and they really like it.
And that is once you really learned this half swing.
Now you can inject what I call the third element,
and that's really the field element, the speed element. So
what's really a fun exercise and it's very eye opening
and it's and it's it adds a lot of feratility
to your short range performance. Is to go practice that
half swing at three different speeds. And I use driving
as kind as kind of an analzi. So I have
a half wing at country road speed, which is fifty
miles an hour and fifty five miles an hour well
under highway speed. It's not full proddle. It's just a nice,
you know of a power pace, but well under control.
And then I practiced that halssling at what I call
city driving, so it's the same half wing, but it's
a slower pace, it's more careful, it's more cautious like
when you're driving in the city. And then I have
school zone, so I'm still going into a half wing,
but I'm slowing everything down to the very careful, precise
driving I would do in the school zone where little
kids might jump out in front of me. So if
that's to me, the way to gauge feel is to
think a feel as a pace.
Speaker 3: Rather than how hard to hit it. Think about how what.
Speaker 5: Your pace of your swing is going to be. So
now you have created with a fun exercise. It didn't
take hours and hours. You created multiple distances with each
club through this full swing exercise of ripping down and
laying the face openness to air. You've created another whole
set of yardages with your half swing at regular full
swing speed. And then another few things you can do
by burying your swing pace from this country road to city,
driving the school zone. That's a lot for one little
podcast session for it. But I think that there's a
big picture here of how to build a system that
uses the field you brought to the golf course because
everybody has eye hand coordination. Everybody has that, and you've
used those qualities that you have and just a little
bit of regimentation in hand position on the grip and
learning this half swing and developing these free paces there
are only two if you want that you develop a
faster pace and slower pace, and all of a sudden
you have a whole arsenal of shots to use inside
nine iron range.
Speaker 1: Awesome, awesome, thank you. I can't wait to go out
and start trying this now, Yami, we've talked we've talked
a lot about We've had talk about tour tempo on
here numerous times, and last time he was on, I'm
sorry I'm blanking on his name right now, but last
time he was on It'll come to me. We talked
about how you know the rhythm, the pace, the tempo
of the short game is a one to one versus
the three to one that he has on a full swing.
And I realized in practicing that that in my short game,
especially in chipping, I speed things up, and when you
speed things up, you also get a tighter grip, your tents,
your shoulders up. But when I slow it down and
get that nice one to one pace, bump, bomp, bomp,
you know, everything works a little bit better. And so
combining that you know lesson with what you've just provided
just kind of cleans.
Speaker 4: It all up for me.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm glad I was able to do that. I
think that the thing to keep in mind, the closer
you get to the flag, the slower you work, it
becomes more of a precision game. And I'd always tell
the story. I think I've already breed your listeners with
the idea of painting a house. But when you're laying
on the big areas of paint, you work fast, you
work with the powers prayer, you work with a big
power roller, and it's just get the paint on and
you work with speed and power. That's your tea game
and your long ball and even in your middle irons.
The closer you get to doing the trim work to
finish off that bank job, the slower and more meticulous
you are. And so I kind of like on that
to the way to play a hole of golf. Is
that the closer you get to the flag, the lower
and slower and more precise you get, the more meticulous
you get, because you know you're trying to get it
in the hole. It's just kind of nice thing to
keep you thinking. Kind of slow around the greens is
just slow everything down?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well that's driving.
Speaker 5: In a parking lot versus the freeway. How that there
you go.
Speaker 4: I'm kind of stuck on the painting thing.
Speaker 1: So that is our score Zone Short Game Academy with
Terry Taylor, and that's we do on each Golf Smarter episode.
So we thank score Golf and Terry, we thank you
very much for the support of Golf Smarter podcasts. Helping
us stay alive and really enjoyed the lesson.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much, bud Well.
Speaker 5: We always enjoyed that look forward to the next show.