The shot the touring professional plays from twenty yards short of the green, on a tight lie, with thirty feet of fairway between the ball and the front edge, is not the shot the club golfer plays from the same position. The Tour player will, more often than not, reach for an eight-iron, set up with a narrow stance, place the ball back in the stance, and play a low running shot that lands on the apron of the green and rolls out to the flag. The club golfer, faced with the same shot, will reach for a sixty-degree wedge, open the face, and try to land the ball softly somewhere near the hole. The Tour player will, on a representative sample of these shots, finish inside six feet four times out of five. The club golfer will leave the ball on the wrong side of the hole roughly the same proportion of the time, and will three-putt from there often enough that the difference between the two shots, over the course of a round, costs the club golfer four or five strokes.
The bump-and-run is the shot the modern amateur has been quietly persuaded not to play. The reasons are partly cultural and partly equipment-driven. The lob wedge as a marketing category, the highlight reel of the impossible flop shot, the slow-motion replay of a Tour player landing a wedge a foot from the flag and producing a single bounce of backspin, have together convinced the recreational golfer that the high soft shot is the shot the short game is about. It is not. The high soft shot is the shot a Tour player can produce, on demand, on a firm green, off a perfect lie, with a wedge they have practiced on for hundreds of hours. The shot the club golfer can produce, on demand, from a tight lie, off any kind of grass, with a club they already know how to hit, is the bump-and-run. The reason the shot is not in the recreational bag is not that it does not work. It is that nobody has been showing the recreational golfer how to play it.
What the shot actually is
The bump-and-run is the shot where the ball flies for roughly a third of the carry distance and rolls for the other two thirds. The club used is anything from a seven-iron to a pitching wedge, depending on how much carry is required. The ball position is back of centre. The hands are slightly ahead of the ball at address. The face is square. The swing is a putting-style stroke, with the body rotating gently towards the target and the wrists staying quiet. The shot lands on the apron, takes one or two bounces, and runs out to the hole. The trajectory is low. The spin is minimal. The ball is, for nearly the whole journey, doing exactly what a putted ball would do if the lie had allowed for it.
The mistake the amateur makes when they first try the shot is to use the lofted club anyway. They take a wedge, place the ball back in the stance, and try to hit a low chip. The result, almost always, is a thinned shot that races across the green. The wedge does not produce a low running ball. It produces a low ball that, when struck thin, has the leading edge catching the equator of the ball and sending it screaming forward. The seven-iron or the eight-iron, by contrast, has the loft profile of a club that wants to roll the ball. The strike does not need to be perfect. The clubface, on a back-of-centre ball position, will produce the low launch the shot needs even if the contact is slightly heavy. The forgiveness of the lower-lofted club is the part of the shot the amateur is, in most cases, not aware of.
When to use it
The shot is the right shot whenever three conditions are present. The first is that there is room between the ball and the green, ideally at least ten yards of fairway or short fringe, for the ball to land short of the putting surface and run out. The second is that the lie is tight, meaning the ball is sitting on closely-mown grass with no cushion underneath it. The third is that the green is firm enough, or sloping in the right direction, for the running ball to release to the hole. If those three conditions are present, the bump-and-run is the shot. The lob wedge is the wrong club. The amateur who reaches for the lob wedge in those conditions is the amateur who is playing the shot the magazine cover told them to play, rather than the shot the situation requires.
The conditions are present more often than the recreational golfer realises. On a parkland course in the middle of summer, when the run-up to the greens is mown down to fairway height, the bump-and-run is the percentage shot from anywhere short of the green and below twenty-five yards out. On a links course, of course, the bump-and-run is the only shot. On an American golf course with closely-mown collection areas, the bump-and-run is the shot the architect designed the collection area for. The recreational golfer who learns to recognise the conditions, and who has the technique to play the shot when the conditions arrive, will, within a season, drop four or five strokes from the average round.
How to practice it
The practice routine that produces a competent bump-and-run is the most boring practice routine in the short game. Find a flat lie on the short-game area. Place ten balls at twenty yards from the edge of the green. Take an eight-iron. Hit each of the ten balls with a putting-style stroke, landing each one on the same spot two yards short of the putting surface. The aim is not to hit it close to the hole. The aim is to land the ball on the same spot every time. The roll-out, once the landing point is consistent, will look after itself.
The drill should then be repeated at thirty yards, and at forty yards. The landing spot, in each case, should stay on the apron. The length of the swing, and the choice of club, should be the variables. A thirty-yard shot might call for the same swing with a seven-iron. A forty-yard shot might call for a slightly longer swing with the same seven-iron, or the same swing with a six-iron. The objective of the practice is to build, over a hundred repetitions, a feel for which club to pull out of the bag for each combination of carry and roll. The feel is the thing the Tour player has internalised after two decades of practice. The club golfer can build a useful approximation of it in a single dedicated session.
The further benefit of the shot is psychological. The amateur who has hit ten good bump-and-runs in the short-game area arrives at the same shot on the course with a confidence the lob wedge has never produced. The shot looks ugly. It does not have the satisfying loft and check of the wedge shot. It does, however, produce a ball next to the hole far more often than the shot the amateur has been playing instead. The score, over the course of a round, is the only feedback the shot needs. The score, if the shot is played, will be three or four strokes lower than it was the week before. The lob wedge, after a season of this, will start to feel like a club the player only reaches for when the shot truly calls for it, which is the way the bag was meant to be used in the first place.