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 …
Course Management
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 …
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 …
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 …
Tips and Instruction
The Bump-and-Run Most Amateurs Never Try, and Why Their Scores Suffer for It
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, …
Tips and Instruction
The Forty-Yard Shot Nobody Practices
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 …
Opinion
In Defence of the Layup
There is a moment that happens on a par-five at every level of the amateur game, and that I am increasingly convinced has been getting talked about wrongly for …