Good golf is about learning to love your misses

Golf compliments don’t come around often for a player of my level, but last week at my home course, I got one after sending my drive to a perfect angle into the 12th green.

“Smart play,” a playing partner said.

But it wasn’t. I caught the ball on the heel, which produced a low, weak fade that scuttled down the fairway. Maybe I’d be happy if that was my intent, but I dismissed it as a lucky bounce.

Golfers tend to exert most of their mental energy managing bad outcomes—nervous swings on the first tee, frustration after missed putts. But good results present challenges, too, particularly when we don’t know how to think about them. Can you really be happy with a shot that comes off the club so poorly?

Maybe so if you start grading on a different scale.

“Most people don't understand what a good miss is. They think good contact is something that should happen consistently,” said Will Robins, a Golf Digest Best Young Teacher out of Folsom, Calif. “And as a professional, I know that's not true. I hit a ball flush once every 15 shots. But I can miss it pretty well. I can hit it a little bit thin, or out on the heel, or the toe. It’s the one thing amateurs can work on.”

The cliche about no pictures on the scorecard is a reminder that how a ball travels from A to B is less important than we think. Yet golfers like me are guilty of believing the road to better scores is by way of impeccable ball-striking.

“ I think it's poor teaching of golf, which is, ‘If I hit the ball better, I'll shoot lower,’” Robins says. “That's a total lie. Because then our expectations is, ‘Oh, I need to go and work on this.’ But it’s really, can you miss it in a good position? Because you can't score if you can’t miss it in a good way. To me, golf is a game of misses.”

The point isn’t we should try to hit the ball poorly. Robins just wants to remind us to expect it to happen, and that a different version of progress is when your awful shots improve to just bad.

Earlier this week, my colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen explained that on the scale of mis-hits, striking the ball off the heel or toe isn’t nearly as bad as hitting it too high or too low on the clubface (he also lays out ways to avoid them, including improving the low point of your swing). In that sense, it’s possible my low running drive off the heel deserved credit for missing in the right spot. That might seem like lowering standards. But it’s more acknowledging that smart golfers have a different definition of success.