Opinion & Analysis
Golfers have ridiculous expectations
Golf is supposed to be fun.
Even for the highest level professionals, it is still supposed to be fun.
The biggest enemy of a golfer and his scorecard is not the wrong equipment, horrible swing flaws, slow play or even your kids jumping off the top turnbuckle of the couch and doing a cannonball into your lap (Yes, this happens to me on a daily basis. The game is called “beat up daddy” and my 3- and 4-year-olds love it more than ice cream).
The biggest enemy of the golfer is being ridiculous in his or her expectations. That leads to course management problems that ruin the enjoyment of the game. It’s ok for golfers to have long-term expectations that are as high as they want, but short-term expectations, as in the very next shot, need to be more mundane at every level.
I have a good friend who is a 5 handicap. Smart guy — he went to an Ivy League law school. I once added up his cumulative expectations for every shot and he literally would have shot in the 50s had he lived up to his ridiculous standards.
He’s not alone. Golfers have a warped perception of what level of golf shots produce what scores. All you have to do is check out the PGA Tour stats.
It is safe to say that the average 0 to 15 handicap golfer is worse than the worst player on the Tour by a margin so wide it cannot be measured. The best average approach shot from the fairway to the green is 32 feet, 3 inches. Yes, you read that correctly. As I write this article, the guy on Tour who averages the closest to the pin from the fairway (shots from rough not included) is more than 32 feet. The worst on the Tour is 43 feet, 6 inches.
That means the average approach shot to the green on the Tour is between 31 and 47 feet. Why then do I hear the constant moans and groans when shots are not stoned dead?
The devil’s advocate would say, “Well, Monte, there are a lot of long approaches to the green, as there are 500-yard par 4s and pros go for the green from as long as 300 yards and those numbers are factored in.”
Fine. The best guy on Tour averages over 16 feet from the hole from 125 to 150 yards, a very common yardage for golfers playing the middle tees on par 4s and a yardage most experienced golfers expect to hit close. Again, using the premise that the average golfer is significantly worse than the worst Tour player, the bottom guy averages over 36 feet from the hole from 125 to 150.
So let’s look at this realistically. If the worst guy on the Tour is 36-plus feet from the hole, the run of the mill scratch golfer should be more than satisfied with that distance. And the 5 to 15 handicap should be doing cartwheels. But we all know that’s not the case.
I play with 15-handicaps who are ready to drive their cart into the nearest lake if they so much as hit the ball outside 30 feet on a shot of that length. Exaggeration? Maybe, but not much. Remember, these are stats from the fairway, not the rough, trees or someone’s patio.
Let’s work in even further. From the fairway, there are only 35 players who are currently averaging under 10 feet from the hole on shots of 50 to 75 yards, and many average over 30 feet. It’s a small sample size at this point on the season, but it is still telling.
These stats tell us one thing: We mere mortals should be happy just to hit the ball on the green, which leads me to the next faux pas I see. A solid single digit has a 100-yard shot to a tucked right pin and is taking dead aim. He shoves it 15 feet and short sides himself.
“If I can’t hit the green from 100 yards, I might as well quit,” I’ve heard many say.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.
My response is he just hit a great shot and has a 15-foot putt from the fringe, or simple chip that is very make-able. The response is still being incredulous about missing the green because it is a blackmark on the stat sheet. So I do this. I drop five balls and offer them $20 to hit all five balls on the green anywhere. The result is often all five balls on the green between 10 and 50 feet with an average around 40. Basically, not much worse than the average shot of a low-end Tour player.
I am definitely not saying you should be this conservative, but be aware of what a good shot actually is. If you are a good player with a good short game, know that shots that miss the green but are still close to the hole are often more damaging to your stats than your score.
YARDAGES
Even with the advent of Flightscope, Trackman and laser range finders, I am still appalled at the horrendous lack of knowledge golfers have about how far they hit the ball. Play any golf course in the world and you will see two things.
- Greenside bunkers short of the green that look as if they were the front of a WWI battle.
- Nearly untouched bunkers behind the green that only receive traffic from the people who hit it in the front bunkers and decide that picking the ball clean is the best way to hit a sand shot.
Let me give you some advice. The distance you hit an iron is not how far you hit one downhill, downwind, at altitude, when you leaned on one orhit the best shot of your life (and after it landed a coyote picked it up and ran another 50 yards). Seeing as how I have played with many golfers who played 18 consecutive holes without hitting a ball that didn’t land short of the green, this is again not much hyperbole.
“OK, Monte, we get the point, we need to take the average distance we hit our clubs, give it a rest.”
Well, I won’t give it a rest because that is wrong too. It is not the average distance you hit a club, but the distance you hit the ball most often. That sounds like the same thing, but I have found though years of harassing poor, unsuspecting amateurs that the “most often” shot is usually five and sometimes as much as 10 yards shorter than the best shot. But the fear of going over the green chides people into being short all day long. Using the most often approach can result in five or more saved shots from not being short, which is a lot better for your score than the one bogey you might make from the career shot that sails over the green.
I like what the great Jackie Burke said to one of his students when he was pondering a club choice. He asked the unsuspecting young star what he could hit over the green. The student responded, “5-iron.”
Burke then responded, “Well then, wouldn’t that make this a 6?”
There are so many ways to improve your scores if you just use some common sense. The Ivy League lawyer I spoke of earlier, well that kind of on-course behavior runs in the family. His father would attempt flop shots (which he was horrible at) from a place where Phil Mickelson would be hard pressed to get the ball within 30 feet. The results were predictable. He would advance the ball 6 feet in front of him from getting too cute, then the second shot would end up 30 feet, which is where it would have ended up with a normal chip, bump and run 7-iron, foot wedge, topped driver or one of Phil’s gravity defying parachute flops.
The answer to this question is the answer to most every other shot in golf. What shot would have the best cumulative results if you hit it 10 times? It might not be the way Tiger plays it, the way Johnny Miller says is the best way to play it or the way your club champion plays it, but if it’s the way you can do it well most times, it’s the right shot even if your friends laugh at you for putting from 20 yards off the green with a sprinkler in your line.
Now that I have segued to putting, more strokes are lost on putting by people trying to make too many putts. You read the putt, you line up, hit it the right speed and it will go in or it won’t. You have no control over anything but proper speed outside of 3 to 4 feet. Don’t believe me? The best putters on Tour only make two out of five putts from 10 to 15 feet, and many only make one out of five or worse.
My question is: Why are we trying so hard to make long putts? Why do we hit them so hard or and try to steer them on line?
Unless you are a masochist and want to provide hours of entertainment for your friends, dollars for their bankroll and keep the producers of Prozac in business, the next time you play golf try this:
1. Hit whatever club (using your normal yardages) will end up 5 yards short of the back edge of the green.
2. Try to hit the ball where your predominate miss won’t miss the green, no mater where the pin is.
3. Try and hit every putt outside of 5 feet the correct speed and don’t worry about whether it goes in or not.
4. Be ambivalent about the results of individual shots.
I guarantee your next 20 rounds will lower your handicap.
As the editor-in-chief of this website and an observer of the GolfWRX forums and other online golf equipment discourse for over a decade, I’m pretty well attuned to the grunts and grumbles of a significant portion of the golf equipment purchasing spectrum. And before you accuse me of lording above all in some digital ivory tower, I’d like to offer that I worked at golf courses (public and private) for years prior to picking up my pen, so I’m well-versed in the non-degenerate golf equipment consumers out there. I touched (green)grass (retail)!
Complaints about the ills of and related to the OEMs usually follow some version of: Product cycles are too short for real innovation, tour equipment isn’t the same as retail (which is largely not true, by the way), too much is invested in marketing and not enough in R&D, top staffer X hasn’t even put the new driver in play, so it’s obviously not superior to the previous generation, prices are too high, and on and on.
Without digging into the merits of any of these claims, which I believe are mostly red herrings, I’d like to bring into view of our rangefinder what I believe to be the two primary difficulties golf equipment companies face.
One: As Terry Koehler, back when he was the CEO of Ben Hogan, told me at the time of the Ft Worth irons launch, if you can’t regularly hit the golf ball in a coin-sized area in the middle of the face, there’s not a ton that iron technology can do for you. Now, this is less true now with respect to irons than when he said it, and is less and less true by degrees as the clubs get larger (utilities, fairways, hybrids, drivers), but there remains a great deal of golf equipment truth in that statement. Think about it — which is to say, in TL;DR fashion, get lessons from a qualified instructor who will teach you about the fundamentals of repeatable impact and how the golf swing works, not just offer band-aid fixes. If you can’t repeatably deliver the golf club to the golf ball in something resembling the manner it was designed for, how can you expect to be getting the most out of the club — put another way, the maximum value from your investment?
Similarly, game improvement equipment can only improve your game if you game it. In other words, get fit for the clubs you ought to be playing rather than filling the bag with the ones you wish you could hit or used to be able to hit. Of course, don’t do this if you don’t care about performance and just want to hit a forged blade while playing off an 18 handicap. That’s absolutely fine. There were plenty of members in clubs back in the day playing Hogan Apex or Mizuno MP-32 irons who had no business doing so from a ballstriking standpoint, but they enjoyed their look, feel, and complementary qualities to their Gatsby hats and cashmere sweaters. Do what brings you a measure of joy in this maddening game.
Now, the second issue. This is not a plea for non-conforming equipment; rather, it is a statement of fact. USGA/R&A limits on every facet of golf equipment are detrimental to golf equipment manufacturers. Sure, you know this, but do you think about it as it applies to almost every element of equipment? A 500cc driver would be inherently more forgiving than a 460cc, as one with a COR measurement in excess of 0.83. 50-inch shafts. Box grooves. And on and on.
Would fewer regulations be objectively bad for the game? Would this erode its soul? Fortunately, that’s beside the point of this exercise, which is merely to point out the facts. The fact, in this case, is that equipment restrictions and regulations are the slaughterbench of an abundance of innovation in the golf equipment space. Is this for the best? Well, now I’ve asked the question twice and might as well give a partial response, I guess my answer to that would be, “It depends on what type of golf you’re playing and who you’re playing it with.”
For my part, I don’t mind embarrassing myself with vintage blades and persimmons chasing after the quasi-spiritual elevation of a well-struck shot, but that’s just me. Plenty of folks don’t give a damn if their grooves are conforming. Plenty of folks think the folks in Liberty Corner ought to add a prison to the museum for such offences. And those are just a few of the considerations for the amateur game — which doesn’t get inside the gallery ropes of the pro game…
Different strokes in the game of golf, in my humble opinion.
Anyway, I believe equipment company engineers are genuinely trying to build better equipment year over year. The marketing departments are trying to find ways to make this equipment appeal to the broadest segment of the golf market possible. All of this against (1) the backdrop of — at least for now — firm product cycles. And golfers who, with their ~15 average handicap (men), for the most part, are not striping the golf ball like Tiger in his prime and seem to have less and less time year over year to practice and improve. (2) Regulations that massively restrict what they’re able to do…
That’s the landscape as I see it and the real headwinds for golf equipment companies. No doubt, there’s more I haven’t considered, but I think the previous is a better — and better faith — point of departure when formulating any serious commentary on the golf equipment world than some of the more cynical and conspiratorial takes I hear.
Agree? Disagree? Think I’m worthy of an Adam Hadwin-esque security guard tackle? Let me know in the comments.
@golfoncbs The infamous Adam Hadwin tackle ? #golf #fyp #canada #pgatour #adamhadwin ? Ghibli-style nostalgic waltz – MaSssuguMusic
Episode #16 brings us Cliff McKinney. Cliff is the founder of Old Charlie Golf Club, a new club, and concept, to be built in the Florida panhandle. The model is quite interesting and aims to make great, private golf more affordable. We hope you enjoy the show!
Last week, I came across a reel from BBC Sport on Instagram featuring Scottie Scheffler speaking to the media ahead of The Open at Royal Portrush. In it, he shared that he often wonders what the point is of wanting to win tournaments so badly — especially when he knows, deep down, that it doesn’t lead to a truly fulfilling life.
View this post on Instagram
“Is it great to be able to win tournaments and to accomplish the things I have in the game of golf? Yeah, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it because I’ve literally worked my entire life to be good at this sport,” Scheffler said. “To have that kind of sense of accomplishment, I think, is a pretty cool feeling. To get to live out your dreams is very special, but at the end of the day, I’m not out here to inspire the next generation of golfers. I’m not out here to inspire someone to be the best player in the world, because what’s the point?”
Ironically — or perhaps perfectly — he went on to win the claret jug.
That question — what’s the point of winning? — cuts straight to the heart of the human journey.
As someone who’s spent over two decades in the trenches of professional golf, and in deep study of the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the game, I see Scottie’s inner conflict as a sign of soul evolution in motion.
I came to golf late. I wasn’t a junior standout or college All-American. At 27, I left a steady corporate job to see if I could be on the PGA Tour starting as a 14-handicap, average-length hitter. Over the years, my journey has been defined less by trophies and more by the relentless effort to navigate the deeply inequitable and gated system of professional golf — an effort that ultimately turned inward and helped me evolve as both a golfer and a person.
One perspective that helped me make sense of this inner dissonance around competition and our culture’s tendency to overvalue winning is the idea of soul evolution.
The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies has done extensive research on reincarnation, and Netflix’s Surviving Death (Episode 6) explores the topic, too. Whether you take it literally or metaphorically, the idea that we’re on a long arc of growth — from beginner to sage elder — offers a profound perspective.
If you accept the premise literally, then terms like “young soul” and “old soul” start to hold meaning. However, even if we set the word “soul” aside, it’s easy to see that different levels of life experience produce different worldviews.
Newer souls — or people in earlier stages of their development — may be curious and kind but still lack discernment or depth. There is a naivety, and they don’t yet question as deeply, tending to see things in black and white, partly because certainty feels safer than confronting the unknown.
As we gain more experience, we begin to experiment. We test limits. We chase extreme external goals — sometimes at the expense of health, relationships, or inner peace — still operating from hunger, ambition, and the fragility of the ego.
It’s a necessary stage, but often a turbulent and unfulfilling one.
David Duval fell off the map after reaching World No. 1. Bubba Watson had his own “Is this it?” moment with his caddie, Ted Scott, after winning the Masters.
In Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, reflecting on his 2011 Super Bowl win, Rodgers said:
“Now I’ve accomplished the only thing that I really, really wanted to do in my life. Now what? I was like, ‘Did I aim at the wrong thing? Did I spend too much time thinking about stuff that ultimately doesn’t give you true happiness?’”
Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
Eventually, though, something shifts.
We begin to see in shades of gray. Winning, dominating, accumulating—these pursuits lose their shine. The rewards feel more fleeting. Living in a constant state of fight-or-flight makes us feel alive, yes, but not happy and joyful.
Compassion begins to replace ambition. Love, presence, and gratitude become more fulfilling than status, profits, or trophies. We crave balance over burnout. Collaboration over competition. Meaning over metrics.
Interestingly, if we zoom out, we can apply this same model to nations and cultures. Countries, like people, have a collective “soul stage” made up of the individuals within them.
Take the United States, for example. I’d place it as a mid-level soul: highly competitive and deeply driven, but still learning emotional maturity. Still uncomfortable with nuance. Still believing that more is always better. Despite its global wins, the U.S. currently ranks just 23rd in happiness (as of 2025). You might liken it to a gifted teenager—bold, eager, and ambitious, but angsty and still figuring out how to live well and in balance. As much as a parent wants to protect their child, sometimes the child has to make their own mistakes to truly grow.
So when Scottie Scheffler wonders what the point of winning is, I don’t see someone losing strength.
I see someone evolving.
He’s beginning to look beyond the leaderboard. Beyond metrics of success that carry a lower vibration. And yet, in a poetic twist, Scheffler did go on to win The Open. But that only reinforces the point: even at the pinnacle, the question remains. And if more of us in the golf and sports world — and in U.S. culture at large — started asking similar questions, we might discover that the more meaningful trophy isn’t about accumulating or beating others at all costs.
It’s about awakening and evolving to something more than winning could ever promise.
‘Why would anybody want to change that swing?’ – Brandel Chamblee says PGA Tour star was wrong to change his swing
‘The stupidest freaking thing I’ve ever heard’ – Billy Horschel slams Open idea suggested by Padraig Harrington
WITB Time Machine: Brandt Snedeker’s winning WITB, 2018 Wyndham Championship
Golfer proudly posts photo of ball mark on iron, receives immediate roasting
WITB Time Machine: Matthew Wolff’s winning WITB, 2019 3M Open
Oakmont Country Club bans Wyndham Clark over locker incident; Reveals specific conditions to earn reinstatement
Adam Scott puts Callaway blades in the bag at Wyndham Championship
Report: LIV star fires caddie and coach in shock shake up
Rickie Fowler makes equipment change to ‘something that’s a little easier on the body’
The championship formula: How 3 key stats separate winners from the field
Peter Malnati WITB 2025 (August)
Peter Malnati what’s in the bag accurate as of the Wyndham Championship. More photos from the event here. Driver: Titleist...
Cameron Young’s winning WITB: 2025 Wyndham Championship
Driver: Titleist GT2 (9 degrees, A1 SureFit setting) Buy here. Shaft: Mitsubishi Tensei 1K Pro Orange 70 TX 3-wood: Titleist...
Camilo Villegas WITB 2025 (July)
Camilo Villegas WITB accurate as of the Wyndham Championship. Villegas was undecided on a 3-wood when we shot his bag. ...
WITB Time Machine: Brandt Snedeker’s winning WITB, 2018 Wyndham Championship
Brandt Snedeker fired a final-round 65 at the 2018 Wyndham Championship to outlast Webb Simpson and C.T. Pan. His 5-under...
Pingback: Basic Guidelines you need to know about taking up golf - Golfing Time
James g
Mar 31, 2015 at 11:41 am
Monte, that is exactly how I was taught to play. My friends laugh when I take an extra club to put the ball on the green except I get the last laugh when they always come up short. There was a saying by an old Tour pro, I can’t remember exactly who, but he said “try to get the ball on the green and let the hole come to you”. Meaning in a round of golf, doesn’t matter how close you are to the hole. Eventually, you will end up closer to the hole than you expected and then you try to make a birdie. In my experience, a lot of the guys I play with kill themselves stalking pins and trying to get it close on every single hole not realizing that par is a good score.
Pingback: A huge reason golfers don’t get better. | Monte Scheinblum.com
bud "flag" zenswing
Jul 11, 2013 at 4:57 pm
Good job, Monte. I have been writing about this on my site for years. Especially the part about club selection. In fact, I once held a tournament called the 3 irons challenge. You were permitted to take only a 4 iron, 7 iron, a pitching wedge, and a putter. I can’t tell you how many of the players came up to me after the round and told me it was the best golf they had ever played. Throw out your driver and your “flop” wedge and put up a good score.
Bud “flag” Zenswing
Pingback: ***Official 2013 US Open***
Jacob
May 1, 2013 at 10:18 pm
Golf is just a game of misses and managing misses. Ben Hogan said it him self, a golfer rarely hits 1 or 2 golf shots the way he wants it. It’s just making the misses manageable.
SumTingWong
Apr 26, 2013 at 5:42 am
Thank you for a great article.
It is a fact that all amateurs hit almost all of their shots shorter than anticipated. Me included. Therefore I started a system where I put a “minus” in the margin of the scorecard for each short shot, and a “plus” for each shot that are long for all shots toward the green and on the green. My goal is to have more “plusses” than “minuses” at the end of a round. If you try it, it really is difficult. If I am long it is almost always less distance from the pin compared to the short shots. Works for me…when I use it.
pablo
Apr 25, 2013 at 7:41 pm
Great article. I’ve just finished reading ‘Golf is not a game of perfect’ and ‘Zen Golf’, and this fits right in with the concepts in those reads. Pre-acceptance of not perfect shots, and knowing you’re going to scramble are keys to enjoying golf more. And as someone else mentioned, NOT keeping score occasionally is excellent therapy, I do that when playing with my girlfriend, as you’ll know when you par or birdie and the rest will fade away as you enjoy the day.
Puddin
Apr 25, 2013 at 2:46 pm
Great read! I use advice from a Mickelson article years ago in GD for putting. Make a few practice strokes you know will not get it to the hole. Then a few strokes that will put it too far from the hole. Now you have your stroke dialed in for distance. Works 99% of the time to get long putts closer. Easy Peasy yall!
purkjason
Apr 25, 2013 at 12:27 pm
I’m glad that my wife and I just push our carts along the course and have a great time regardless of the score, conditions, etc. Golf is nothing more than a game and those who treat it like it’s more than that are really needing to look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves “What am I truly missing in my life?” I ask you all to play a round just one time without keeping score and just enjoy the time outdoors with friends and family playing this GAME.
Buddy
Apr 25, 2013 at 8:49 am
When approaching a green my rule is if the pin is on the front half take the club that will get you to the pin on a normal shot or past the pin with a long hit. If it’s in the back half hit it to the front for a normal shot and pin high for a long hit. It’s most likely to be offline anyway so just getting it at least green high is good enough.
Pingback: My latest GolfWrx article | Monte Scheinblum's Blog
John Kuczeski
Apr 24, 2013 at 9:06 pm
Great feedback and commentary…a wake up call to me and many others!! Enjoy the game!! Thanks!
sgniwder99
Apr 24, 2013 at 8:34 pm
Good read. I especially like the bit about Jackie Burke’s quote, because it’s basically the way I’ve taken to choosing clubs for anything outside of a wedge shot (where I’m probably still too often guilty of trying to choose the right “stone dead” club). I have a GPS unit on my bag, and I almost always just look at the distance to the back of the green, and try to hit a club that I will hit to that distance IF I hit a very good shot with it. This has got me hitting more greens–and being within a short chip on mis-hits more often. The only exceptions to this would be if I know there’s trouble long and there’s none short. Then I don’t mind coming up a bit short.
Pingback: I Just Had My Mind Blown | Tuna Golf
dqtee
Apr 24, 2013 at 3:17 pm
Monte,
I don’t believe I’ve paired with you before, have I? You shouldn’t write about my game to others like this (although I’ve never have wanted, yet anyway, to drive the cart into the nearest lake). All jesting aside, I’m going to follow your 4 tips religiously henceforth, at least for next 20 rounds (which may take yrs to complete at current rate) and if/when my non-existent handicap were to be lowered (surely I’ll be able to tell if my scores would have been lowered on average), I’m taking you out to lunch next time I’m in SoCal.
Sizzle
Apr 24, 2013 at 1:24 pm
a great read, Monte. the totally un-realistic stress we part-time, low-handicap players put on our games…. For a part-timer, its all about eliminating the ‘disaster’ shots – the chunked pitch, the skulled wedge, the nasty block off the tee, etc. I think Mike LeBauve put it best when he said “you need to make your short game ‘disaster-proof’ – meaning, if you hit everything just decently, you’d score fine. We all need to quit fantasizing that we’re a couple of buckets of balls from Tour quality ball-striking and stop trying to ride the razor’s edge. Put a decent move on it, go find it, repeat. Stop trippin’ on gram weight of 3 wood shafts when you’re making more bogeys than birdies….there are bigger fish to fry than the gram weight of your 3 wood shaft.
lbj273
Apr 24, 2013 at 1:18 pm
when factoring the average distance from the pin tour players hit it you also have to realize they aren’t firing at the pin, they are generally hitting to the safest spot on the green that gives them a chance to make the birdie putt and avoid trouble.
Justin
Apr 24, 2013 at 1:00 pm
This is a great article and I agree with your guarantee but I believe you have the wrong information about 1 putts from 10-15 feet. This is what I found http://www.pgatour.com/content/pgatour/stats/stat.405.html. This has rankings from 1-185 of 1 putts made from 10-15′ with a percentage ranging from 45%-13%
Monte S.
Apr 24, 2013 at 2:06 pm
Justin, you are correct. I used the wrong stat. I used % of 1 putts and not % of putts made. Good call. Those numbers seemed low to me when I posted them.
Mea Culpa.
So the best make 2 of 5 and the worst only 1 of 8.
The same point still stands, as I am sure most would agree
Justin
Apr 24, 2013 at 5:42 pm
It’s no problem at all. Yeah, it struck me as a really low number too but it is still a great point and a great article.
Monte Scheinblum
Apr 24, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Thanks again for pointing that out. I had that part of the article edited.
Wildman
Apr 24, 2013 at 12:56 pm
This article will really help me. I was a gymnast in college where, if I didn’t pull off each stunt with near precision, I could easily break my neck. I think this is the basis on which I’ve been playing golf…expecting perfection on every shot and cussing myself out it’s not. Super dumb. Your words of wisdom backed up with solid statistics has finally reached me. Thanks and lets see if I can lower my expectations on the course.
JK
Apr 24, 2013 at 11:58 am
it’s been awhile since i fully agreed with a golfwrx article. this one is great. well done.
Phillip Schmidt III
Apr 24, 2013 at 1:19 am
Great article Monte!
All our students at my Academy shall each receive a copy of this…keep it coming.
Phillip Schmidt III
Director of Salt Creek Jr. Golf Academy
Chula Vista, CA
Monte Scheinblum
Apr 24, 2013 at 2:13 pm
Phil, almost made it out to your course for a long drive event, but I qualified in Arizona the day before.
Great to hear from you. Have to make a trip down there.
Pat
Apr 24, 2013 at 12:57 am
That was one of the better articles I have read on this site. Those stats for tour players are actually staggering! Makes me feel great about hitting so many GIRs, and not so bad about 2 putting.
Dan
Apr 23, 2013 at 2:05 pm
I think this is all great advice. Hopefully, I can take it to heart and use it to improve my own game. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that on many courses you are penalized more if you go over the green than if you come up short. Actually, at the course I play there are at least 10 greens where you definitely don’t want to go long.
Dave T
Apr 23, 2013 at 1:59 pm
Monte,
Guilty on all counts! Thanks for writing this – hopefully it will help me re-think my expectations.
I played a lot of tennis when I was younger and when you think about it there is a “miss” on every point – otherwise the points would go on forever. You never hear a tennis player say I have to hit every shot perfectly.
Billy
Apr 23, 2013 at 12:46 pm
Fantastic article and some great tips at the end there. Thanks.
Dave
Apr 23, 2013 at 12:20 pm
Great advice Monte thanks. For folks who watch a lot of golf on TV, these statistics will certainly come as a surprise. We only ever see the leaders, who are really in control of their game that week. Meanwhile there are plenty of “average” shots being played and putts being missed.
Steve
Apr 25, 2013 at 1:42 pm
This is so true. They generally just follow a couple players that are playing well and then show highlights from around the course. We see a lot more shots that end up within 15 ft. than ones that end up 30+ ft. away. Obviously it is more fun to watch that, but it does not help with expectations for most.
Vince Donahue
Apr 23, 2013 at 11:38 am
Fantastic article. This should be published in all of the major golf magazines. Amateurs should play golf for mere enjoyment! If not, why play at all if you are going to leave the course miserable?? The problem with most amateur golfers who are, let us say competitive in their profession tend to bring that intensity to the golf course–big mistake. I used to do that in my thirties but learned slowly over time to realize that I am going to mishit 5 to 10 shots a game in most rounds that I play and, I have to be mature enough to accept that and just enjoy a great walk. My handicap fluctuates between a 12 and a 15-16. I have learned to enjoy the game!!
Jacob
May 1, 2013 at 10:13 pm
No offence but there are people who play the game and it brings enjoyment and people who get enjoyment out of playing the game well. Being competitive in golf and trying to be the best I can be is a great hobby. If I were to just go out and not and try and better myself every time I play and accept my bad shots then I am someone who just enjoys the game. I have been playing since I was 10. I have been a 3, 6, 10, 12 and 15 handicap. I am currently a 12 due to a 6 year absence from it. Every golfer knows bad shots will happen because golf is a game of misses. It’s just making the misses not horrendous misses and just little misses.
Mark
Apr 23, 2013 at 11:25 am
I think I need to print out the 4 tips at the end of this article, have them laminated, and attach it to my golf bag.
Kevin
Apr 23, 2013 at 11:21 am
Well done Monte. Since when does logic and real stats ever persuade anyone though 🙂
Tom
Apr 23, 2013 at 11:11 am
Excellent article! The title describes me quite accurately. I’m a ~12-15 now. I have taken a couple “career” self imposed time-outs due to frustration and anger regarding my expectations. Will definitely keep this print version in my bag to refer to. Just what the Doctor ordered! Thank you!
Matt
Apr 23, 2013 at 10:47 am
Good read. Definitely something a lot of us needed to hear. I might have to bookmark this and read it everyday in hopes of remembering some of it while I’m out on the course.
Philip Nielsen
Apr 23, 2013 at 10:26 am
Great read! I have been very interested in course management lately. I haven’t had a chance with all our crazy weather to get out this year but I will definitely be putting some of these suggestions into play.