If you want to break 80 consistently—and chop strokes off your golf handicap—you must make aggressive shots toward your target. If you’re not confident about the shot you’re about to make, you can’t make an aggressive shot. How do you gain enough confidence to make these types of shots? When you’re not playing, taking golf lessons to perfect technique and practicing as often as you can really helps. When you’re playing, accurately, assessing your situation builds confidence.
Mastering Golf’s Toughest Shots, by James Bartlett and the Professional Caddies Association, provides a simple, easy to learn memory device to help gauge different situations. The book’s subtitle reads The World Best Caddies Share Their Secrets of Success. Bartlett and the Association also wrote Think Like A Caddie, Play Like A Pro. Both books provide the type of golf tips caddies provide PGA and LPGA pros in tournaments. Called the Five-Finger Format, the memory device is explained briefly below:
- Thumb. The thumb is your most important finger. Without it, almost nothing else would be possible. And the most important piece of a pre-shot data in—as we tell students in golf instruction sessions—is the target. Choose your target before doing anything else—even in putting. Make it precise. Pick out a specific part of the green on approach shots. Or, a particular blade of grass on the cup’s edge when putting.
- The Pointer (second finger). After picking a specific target, point at the ball with this finger and consider the lie. If you are in the middle of the fairway or in the tee box, you have as good a lie as you’re going to get. Move on to the next finger. When your ball is not in either of these places, carefully assess the situation. Can you get it to the target you’ve picked from there? If not, pick out another target—a more appropriate target. Then move on to the next finger.
- Middle finger. Your middle finger is the longest finger. Think yardage to your target. Think about what club you’ll need to reach your target comfortably. Picking the club after considering the target and the lie may be contrary to what some teaching pros tell you in golf lessons. It also seems contrary to how many of us do it. But that’s not how a caddie thinks. And it’s not how the pros think. It makes no sense to figure out yardage until you know exactly where you want the ball to go.
- Ring finger. Use your ring finger to remind you to consider the conditions. What’s the wind like? Don’t underestimate it. We know from golf instruction sessions many weekend golfers do. It can mean the difference between putting for a birdie and struggling to make bogie. Also consider, the weather (Is it cold and damp? Hot and humid?) and the terrain (Is the lie flat? Is the target uphill or downhill? Add yardage for uphill. Subtract yardage for downhill.) Then ther’s the shot shape (Do you have to go around a tree? Do you have to hit the ball right to left?) and the target itself (Is it hard or soft? Can you fly it in or do you need to roll it?)
- Pinky finger. Use the smallest finger to consider the situation. Some shots are more important than others. Importance depends on the kind of competition or game you’re playing. Is it stroke play or match play? If you playing a relaxing game, that’s one thing. But if you’re on the 18th hole and the tournament is riding on the shot, that’s another. Select the best possible shot to match the situation.
There’s no “correct” way to play a hole, as we tell students in golf lessons. How you play a hole changes based on your strengths and weaknesses as a player. It also changes from shot to shot and sometimes from one time of day to another. But there’s one thing that’s certain: To break 80 consistently—and whittle your golf handicap down to single digits—you must play aggressively toward your target.
