There is a yardage that decides more amateur rounds than any other, and almost no one practises it. It is the awkward in-between distance from the front edge of a green, somewhere around forty yards, where a full sand wedge is too much club and a chip is too little. The lie is usually fine. The pin is usually visible. The result, for most amateurs, is a shot that comes out fat or thin or scuttling, and the third shot from the bunker that follows is the one that turns a four into a six.
The half-wedge from forty yards is the most useful shot in golf for the player who scores between eighty-five and one-oh-five. It is also, by some distance, the least practised. You can stand on a Saturday afternoon range at any club in the country and watch fifty players hit drivers, twenty hit seven-irons, and three hit half-wedges. The arithmetic of where strokes are actually saved on the course is the inverse of that breakdown, and it has been for as long as the strokes-gained data has been available to look at.
Why the shot is so hard
The forty-yard wedge is hard for a specific reason, and it is not the reason most amateurs think it is. Amateurs tend to assume the difficulty is one of touch, and that the player who can hit a tour-quality version of it is a player with delicate hands and a feel for distance the rest of us were not born with. That is partly true. The larger truth is that the shot is hard because it is not a swing the player owns. The full sand wedge has a length the player has hit a thousand times. The chip has a length the player has also hit a thousand times. The shot in between has a length the player has hit on a Wednesday evening twice in the last calendar year, and the brain refuses to commit to a swing the body has no record of having made. The chunked result is a function of deceleration, and the deceleration is a function of doubt.
The fix is not a feel fix. The fix is to give the swing a length that the body recognises. There are several ways of doing this. The simplest one, and the one that tour players have been quietly using for thirty years, is to think of the swing in terms of the position of the lead arm at the top of the backswing. A full swing is the lead arm parallel to the ground, or near it. A half swing is the lead arm at ten o’clock as the player looks down at it. A quarter swing is the lead arm at eight o’clock. Each of those positions, for any given club, produces a repeatable distance.
The clock drill, properly done
The clock drill is one of those pieces of practice ground vocabulary that most amateurs have heard of and almost none of them actually do. Done properly, it is the most useful single drill in the short game. Done improperly, which is to say done with a vague intention to swing softer, it produces nothing.
The properly done version goes like this. Take your sand wedge to the practice ground. Hit ten balls with the lead arm reaching the eight o’clock position at the top, and pace off the average distance. Hit ten with the lead arm at nine o’clock. Hit ten at ten o’clock. Pace off each set. Write the numbers down, on paper or on a phone. The numbers will surprise you. For most amateurs with a standard 56-degree wedge, eight o’clock is around twenty-five yards, nine o’clock is around forty, and ten o’clock is around sixty. These are your three short-game distances. They will not change much from week to week. They will not require recalibration on a different course. They are the part of your bag that, once measured, will save you more strokes per season than any new club ever could.
Repeat the exercise with your gap wedge. The same three positions will produce three different yardages, slightly longer than the sand wedge versions. You now have six known yardages between twenty-five and seventy yards, all of them the result of a swing length your body recognises and can repeat under pressure. The gaps in the bag are filled. The forty-yard shot, which used to be a guess, is now a nine-o’clock wedge.
What changes on the course
The change on the course is not what most players expect. The expectation is usually that the new short game will lower the player’s average score by removing a couple of bogeys per round, and it will, eventually. The first thing it does is something more useful, which is that it removes the double-bogeys. The double-bogey on a par-four for a mid-handicap player is most often produced by a missed approach to a short-side bunker, a sand shot to twenty feet, and a three-putt. The new short game intercepts the sequence at the second step. The sand shot still goes to twenty feet, because the sand shot is a different problem entirely. But the missed approach is now more likely to leave the player with a forty-yard pitch from the fairway than a buried lie in sand, because the player has a third option in the approach club selection, and the third option is the half-wedge that lays up to a known yardage rather than the full pitching wedge that flies over the green.
The compounding effect, over a season, is significant. The first month produces no obvious improvement in the score, and most players give the practice up at this point. The third month produces an improvement of around two strokes per round, because the bogeys have started to convert to pars and the doubles have started to convert to bogeys. By the end of the season, the player is two shots better than they were on a typical round and four shots better on a bad round, all from a drill that takes twenty minutes a week and costs nothing.
The practice that nobody does
The reason nobody does this is that the half-wedge is unglamorous. It is not the shot in the highlight reel. It is not the part of the game the player looks forward to working on. It is a kind of patient accountancy, performed alone on a corner of the practice ground that nobody else is using, with a notebook and a sand wedge and a willingness to pace off twenty-five yards. The reward is not visible until the round in October when the player notices, walking off the eighteenth, that the card has no number larger than five on it. That round is the dividend on the half-wedge work, paid out three months late. It is the most reliable return on practice the game has on offer, and it sits unclaimed by almost everyone who plays.