Opinion
In Defence of Nine Holes
There is a particular look a certain kind of golfer gives you when you tell them you only played nine. It is somewhere between sympathy and suspicion, as though …
Amateur Golf
Tips and Instruction
The Greenside Bunker Shot Most Amateurs Get Backwards
The greenside bunker is the only shot in golf where the player is, in the literal sense, trying not to hit the ball. Every other shot in the bag is a contest …
Opinion
What the Provisional Ball Actually Costs You
The provisional ball is the one shot in golf the rules of the game have explicitly designed to save the player from themselves, and it is the one shot in golf …
Tips and Instruction
Pin High: The Standard the Amateur Game Refuses to Use
There is a phrase the Tour commentator uses, two or three times a Sunday telecast, that the average amateur has heard a thousand times and has never once made …
Tips and Instruction
The First Putt: The Speed Drill the Amateur Game Won't Do
There is a putt that the average amateur faces ten or eleven times a round and almost never practises. The putt is the first putt from a distance the player …
Opinion
The Quiet Case for the Half Set
There is a small experiment that almost every amateur should perform, in the off-season or on a slow evening at the home course, and that almost no amateur ever …
Opinion
In Praise of the Bad-Weather Round
There is a moment that arrives at the first tee of every cold, wet, badly-windy round that begins the same way for everyone who has signed up to play it. The …
Tips and Instruction
The Three-Quarter Swing: The Tempo Fix the Amateur Game Refuses to Try
There is a moment in almost every amateur round in which the player notices the swing is not where it was on the range. The contact has gone thin. The driver, …
Opinion
The Quiet Case for Playing One Set of Tees Forward
The recreational golfer who has, over the course of the last decade, slowly worked his handicap from the high twenties down to the mid teens, and who plays, on …
Opinion
Pace of Play Is Not the Problem Most Golfers Think It Is
The pace-of-play conversation, in the modern amateur game, has reached the kind of saturation point at which it has stopped being a conversation about a problem …