Let’s make a deal. You pretend to be interested in a story about one of my recent golf rounds, and I promise it will teach you something about your golf in the process.
If I just wanted to drone on about my golf without a point, that's why I have a family.
The details are as follows: A club match, extra holes, an approach shot that lands just short of the green.
Important detail you need to remember for later, Part I: I was having one of my best chipping days in a while.
Important detail you need to remember for later, Part II: Under pressure, experts say you are better off with the putter.
The playoff hole was an uphill par 5, and my approach had caught a false front and rolled back to a shelf just short of the green. To this point, my wedge had saved me all day—I got up and down for par five times in a 10-hole stretch—but now the stakes were high, and even the advice in my colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen’s recent Game Plan video was clear. When in doubt from off the green, he says to get the ball on the ground as quickly as possible.
So I went with the putter, silently congratulated myself on making the mature, disciplined decision, and watched the next shot end up in disaster. My putt rolled through the fringe, started to scale the ridge, but lost speed and started tumbling backward down the hill and off the green. The match ended in humiliation.
As promised, there’s a lesson in this, and it doesn’t contradict Luke’s advice. When I reached out to the course management expert Scott Fawcett to ask him about the mistake I made, he agreed a putter for a mid-handicap player like me is generally the safer play from off the green.
So what did I mess up? As Fawcett said, it was abandoning one type of shot that had been working all day and going with the type of shot I hadn’t even practiced. “You really gotta lean on the shots you practice, and you just don't practice that five-yard putt through the fringe very often,” Fawcett said.
Fawcett told the story of Kenny Perry leading the 2009 Masters on the 17th green and abruptly going to a bump-and-run when he hadn’t played the shot all year. Perry made bogey and ended up losing the Masters in a playoff.
“It’s the same thing,” Fawcett said. “Now you're in a pressure situation hitting a shot you don't really practice. That’s a lot to ask.”
As much as the mistake was rooted in technique and course strategy, it was more about psychology, because it underscored a favorite concept of mine, the paradox of choice. The problem with my shot from just off the green was not a lack of options, but a surplus of them. With two conflicting ideas in my head, the sense of doubt likely lingered even as I was standing over the ball.
My Mind Games video explains the concept further.
It’s true, the percentages might favor one shot over another, but at some point, it doesn’t matter. In the words of Harvard psychology professor Dr. Ellen Langer, “stop stressing over making the ‘right’ choice and instead make your choice the ‘right’ one.”
Have a topic you want me to explore? Send me an email at Samuel.Weinman@wbd.com with your feedback.