How do you get good with your wedges?
That's what I asked Luke Donald at the PGA Championship a few weeks ago. The answer is a very specific kind of practice.
Donald paid his bills with his wedges in the best of times, and he paid them well: He rode them all the way to No. 1 in the Official World Golf Ranking, and multiple Ryder Cup victories.
We got a glimpse of the old magic at Quail Hollow. The 47-year-old Donald's game was showing understandable signs of rust—it was just his fifth major start in the last nine years—but he put on a wedge masterclass at the second major of the year. It helped him jump into contention after the first round, and he made the cut because of it.
Afterwards, I asked him how he goes about working on his wedges. Donald said he spends hours on a 30-golf-ball, scoring wedge game. Take notes, because it's one the rest of us can, and should, try ourselves.
The good news is that Donald's game only requires 30 golf balls. Here's how it works:
- Drop three golf balls at 75 yards
- Hit those shots towards a pin
- Record how far away each shot finished
- Walk three yards further away, to 78 yards
- Drop three more golf balls, and repeat
Rinse and repeat this process 10 times total. If you do that, you'll be hitting three shots from the following distances:
- ]75 yards
- 78 yards
- 81 yards
- 84 yards
- 87 yards
- 90 yards
- 93 yards
- 96 yards
- 99 yards
- 102 yards
Of course, you can adapt this drill in a variety of ways. Mainly by not moving back three yards each time, but by standing in one spot at a range and hitting towards different targets at the same distance. The important thing is that you're changing it up each time.
"Rather than just hitting the same spot to the same spot over and over again, which is not very similar to golf, I try to create games that are a bit more golf-like," Donald says. "Create variability and then attach a score, then you can figure out where you stack up and what I need to work on and what I don't need to work on. There's a bit of a science to it."
It won't take too many run-throughs of this game to start improving your scoring wedges. Do it a few hundred thousand times, and your wedges might even get as good as one of the best to ever do it.