How to hit a long iron like Tom Kim. 

South Korea’s Tom Kim is one of the best long iron players in the game, which has helped elevate him into a three-time PGA Tour champion at the age of 21. He does three things well that all great long iron players do, especially when they are hitting a shot under pressure. Let’s break down his long-iron game, which focuses on three key elements.

Setup

The first thing Tom does well is he gets himself in a good setup [photo 1], which allows him to make a full turn back and through the golf ball. A nice balanced setup is important so that when he swings the club back, he can make a full turn to the top of the backswing and then a full turn to the finish.

Wide swing

The second thing you’ll notice is he creates a very wide swing. In Tom’s backswing, you’ll see his hands get very high and away from his body and he keeps that width throughout the swing [photos 2 and 3].

Smooth transition

A smooth transition at the start of the downswing is another key to hitting your long irons well. Long irons can be intimidating because of the lower loft profile, which can lead to a short, quick swing. Tom has no quickness in his swing with his long iron shots and he maintains the width in his swing, creating a very rhythmical motion from start to finish.

By staying wide throughout the swing, having a smooth transition and making a full turn into his right side going back and into his left side going through, it allows Tom to deliver the club on a shallow angle of attack [photo 4]. He uses the loft of the club to elevate the ball into the air as opposed to falling back and trying to lift the ball or chopping down steeply on it. He also completes his swing with perfect balance [photo 5].

Give these three tips a try during your next visit to the practice range and your long iron play may just be as good as Tom Kim’s. 

Todd Anderson is the director of instruction at the PGA Tour Performance Centre at TPC Sawgrass, home of the Players Championship. The 2010 PGA of America Teacher of the Year has seen his students amass more than 50 victories across the PGA and Korn Ferry tours, including two FedEx Cup titles. He is currently rated by Golf Digest as one of the top 20 golf instructors in the United States. In this tutorial, Anderson breaks down South Korean star Tom Kim’s long iron shots, which have become one of his strongest weapons in the bag.

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Make these easy adjustments to hit your irons low and high

Photographs by Dom Furore

I grew up just outside Oklahoma City, and like most professional golfers from that part of the USA, I became an above-average iron player. I had to. It was a matter of survival. On many days, the wind blew 30 miles per hour and would gust to 40. If I couldn’t hit the ball consistently in the centre of the clubface, I was doomed. When you play in a lot of wind, not only do you have to make crisp contact, but you have to control the spin and trajectory, too. That’s how you become a great iron player. 

 For me, dialling up a low or high ball flight is second nature. I’ve played so much golf in the wind that once I’ve determined the type of trajectory I want, my setup, swing and feel for that shot adjust automatically to create the desired ball flight. I don’t give any thought to technique, which is a great way to play. 

That said, I’m guessing it doesn’t come as naturally for you, and you could use a little help on windy days. So let me and my swing coach, Boyd Summerhays, give you some simple tips to help you control the ball in the breeziest of conditions. If you can command the trajectory of your iron shots, then you can manage any wind. Learn these simple setup and swing adjustments and watch your iron game soar.

TALOR GOOCH is a three-time LIV Golf winner, including making history with his back-to-back wins in Adelaide and Singapore in April. He also has one PGA Tour title.

Hit it low

To hit a low, piercing shot that can penetrate almost any wind, you need to adjust your swing speed and the club’s loft. You subtract speed by abbreviating the length of your backswing [above left] and follow through [above right]. This is done automatically by narrowing your stance, which restricts your ability to turn your hips and shoulders on the backswing and generate maximum speed. I move my trail foot closer to the target, which effectively moves the ball farther back in my stance, slightly behind my sternum. With my upper body more on top of the ball, it’s much easier to return the handle ahead of the ball at impact, reducing the loft on the clubface. Don’t get me wrong, I still try to smash it, but by bringing my feet closer together, I can be aggressive without having to worry about imparting too much spin. That’s a good lesson for you: don’t take speed off by slowing down your body rotation. Make sure that your follow through is at least as long as your backswing, and let your setup dictate your speed.

Point the face down

Most amateurs need help hitting the ball lower because of an open clubface at impact. It’s hard to flight the ball low if you’re consistently delivering the face open, which creates more loft and spin. To fix this, pay attention to the face on the takeaway. Swing the shaft back to parallel and check that the grooves are pointing down towards the ground [top photo, left], not the sky. If they are, the back of your lead wrist will be flat, not cupped, mirroring that of the face both here and all the way to the top of your backswing [left]. From this square position, you’ll find it much easier to hit the ball solid and bring the flight down.

Hit it high

Sometimes it pays to flight your irons high, such as when the wind is behind you or you have a front or tucked pin location. In those instances, you need more speed and loft. Again, a simple adjustment to your setup will help you achieve both. This time, I widen my stance by moving my trail foot farther from the target, which results in the ball being forward relative to my sternum. From this wider, stable base, I’m able to make a fuller backswing [above left] and follow through [above right], generating more clubhead speed and spin for a higher, softer-landing shot. With the more forward ball position, I feel as if my upper body is farther behind the ball so that I hit less down on it, creating a higher launch angle. I’m still compressing the ball, but my hands are not as far ahead of the ball at impact as they are for the lower shot. Be an artist out there. Visualise the trajectory of the shot you want to play and where you see the ball landing, and then let your body paint that picture. 

Keep pace with lower half

The most common mistake I see among amateurs is that they struggle to transfer their weight forward on the downswing. Their lower body moves towards the target, but their upper body stays back. As a result, the club bottoms out behind the ball and you can’t compress it. When you toss a ball, you automatically step forward and transfer your weight. That’s what has to happen on the downswing. Another way to think about it is to feel your upper body moving in conjunction with your lower body. That can’t happen without proper weight shift. Have the upper body tag along on the downswing, and you’ll flush it every time.

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So many golfers struggle to, quite simply, put the clubface on the ball. They’re hitting shots off the heel or two, they’re catching them thin or fat.

It’s that range of contact errors that rob you of distance, direction, and overall sanity.

If you’re struggling with solid contact, it’s probably a low-point issue. The low point of your swing is either two far behind the ball (causing you to hit chunks) or too far ahead of the ball (causing tops and thins). There are two common mistakes that cause those to happen:

1. Get into your left side

Transferring your weight to your trail side on your backswing is great. But by the time they reach the top of their backswing, tour players have already re-centered, as teacher Sean Hogan demonstrates below. Getting your weight into your lead leg, earlier than you think, is key. Lots of recreational golfers hang out on their right side too long, never get back to their left, and hit behind the ball because of it.

2. Ball first, then turf

You can’t hit a solid iron shot unless you’re making ball-first contact. To do that, you’ll need to bring the low point of your swing ahead of the golf ball. One of the ways you can practise this is hitting shots with an ultra-short backswing: hit the ball, then the ground; it’ll create the shaft lean you need for a descending blow, and crispier iron shots.

The post Two crispy-contact swing moves that will quickly upgrade your iron game appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

There is no statistic that correlates with your ability more strongly than your greens in regulation. The more of them you hit, the lower your handicap. The fewer greens in regulation you hit, the higher your score.

Our partners at Arccos Golf actually crunched the numbers on this and found that most golfers are only hitting between five and eight greens each round.

Reigning Masters champ Scottie Scheffler led the PGA Tour in greens in regulation last season, hitting more than 72 percent of them (or about 13 per round) every time he tees it up.

Providing you can keep your drive on the planet – an admittedly big caveat – more distance off the tee really matters. Scheffler put a TaylorMade Stealth driver in play last year, which boosted his driving distance average to 311 yards (284 metres) from 305 yards the season before.

“I hit it a lot further, so with that the dispersion gets a little bit wider,” he said. “But obviously I was able to take advantage of being able to hit it a little further.”

Sure, he missed a few more fairways, but those extra yards put a shorter club in his hands more often. The closer you are to the green, the more likely you are to hit it. But as important as distance in, the key to hitting more greens relies on something else…

Scheffler’s key: he almost never aims at the pin

“I’m almost always aiming slightly away from the pin,” he says. “It’s a very rare occasion that I’m aiming anywhere near a pin on the short side of the green.”

That avoiding-the-short-side-at-all-costs advice seems to be a common theme among tour pros, and Scheffler went on to say that he’s so committed to finding the middle of the green that he rarely diverges from that strategy, even when he’s got a shorter club in his hands.

“I may aim a little closer to the pin when I have a wedge in my hands, but usually it’s somewhere between the middle of the green and the pin,” he says. “Out here, I’m more trying to play for bounces, or for slopes to run the ball towards the hole.”

It’s a safety-first strategy for Scheffler, which the rest of us can clearly learn a lot from.

The post The key to hitting more greens, according to the PGA Tour’s best GIR player appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

Use your lead knee to help make the choice.

Xander Schauffele has been in the top three in one of the PGA Tour’s key ball-striking stats in each of the past two seasons – strokes gained/total. A big reason for that is his iron play. He knows how to adjust his swing to create the desired shot, and I’m not just talking about drawing it or fading it.

You can see that Schauffele’s body looks subtly different as he reaches the top of the backswing in these two images – check the left knee. In one photo [far left] that knee dives in. In the other it remains fairly stable. If you move the lead knee inward and towards the ball as you take the club back, even letting that foot’s heel come off the ground, you’ll be able to make a deeper, longer backswing. That adjustment translates to farther and higher iron shots, because you’ll be able to create more speed in the downswing and put more spin on the ball. Remember this move when you need to get it over a tree or clear something fronting a green.

When you don’t need to max out on distance, go with Xander’s stable-knee backswing for better accuracy. Keeping the left foot planted and the knee fairly still restricts lateral movement of the body and shortens the length of the backswing, making it easier to hit the ball with the centre of the clubface. Along with a ball position that is slightly farther back, a quieter lower body also promotes a lower ball flight and reduces spin, leading to straighter shots. 

When you play the ball farther back at address for this controlled shot, your swing path will be more from inside the target line. To adjust for that, it’s helpful to set up slightly open in relation to the target. – with Ron Kaspriske

Josh Zander, a Golf Digest Teaching Professional, is at Stanford University Golf Course in California.

Photographs by J.D. Cuban

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This is your chance to rehearse a quality backswing.

Waggling the club before you hit a shot is a traditional way of reducing tension and getting primed to make a fluid swing. But if you do it in an old-school wristy fashion, you’re rehearsing something you really don’t want to do when it’s time to take the club back.

Let me explain.

Grab your driver and waggle, flicking the clubhead back and forth with your wrists. Pay attention to where the clubhead travels in the backswing. If it abruptly moves inside the target line, you’re rehearsing a poor takeaway – one that makes you want to re-route the club in the downswing on an out-in-path – an over-the-top slicer’s move.

Instead, waggle like Justin Thomas. Take the club back a few times with your arms and torso moving as one unit. You’ll notice the clubhead stays in front of your hands, yet moves slightly inside the target line without any excessive opening or closing of the face. Be sure to keep your arms relaxed, and move your belly button with the club as you start away smoothly. – with Ron Kaspriske

David Leadbetter is a Golf Digest Teaching Professional.

Feature Image: Walter Iooss 

The post Why waggle? Use the time to rehearse a quality backswing instead appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

Try my drill to improve your contact.

Consistently creating solid contact with irons and wedges is one of the most important parts of the game. I hit 18 greens in my final round at the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions in January, including one that led to a birdie on the first playoff hole for my sixth LPGA Tour win. That wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t puring it. 

I’ll often use this drill to keep my contact sharp – it’s good for chipping and iron play. If you’re a right-hander, grip the club with your right hand, take your stance, and then put your left hand on your left thigh [left photo, above]. Whether you’re chipping with a wedge or making a half-swing with a longer iron, hit one-handed shots while
keeping your left hand from moving on the left leg [right photo, above].

Don’t worry about where the ball goes. Focus on the quality of contact. This drill tells you whether you’re keeping your chest down through the shot. If you pick your chest up, you will change your address posture, and that makes it really hard to hit the ball solid. Why keep your left hand steady on that thigh? It helps remind you to stay down through impact.

If you try this drill, hit five shots one-handed, then take your normal grip and hit five shots trying to re-create that chest-down feeling in the through-swing. I go back and forth from one-handed to two-handed swings during my warm-up to get that feeling locked in before I get out on the course. – with Keely Levins

Photographs by J.D. Cuban

The post Centre strikes appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

How a fearless and insatiably curious second-year pro from Norway developed his swing using the internet.

In a year when golf (and the world) was knocked sideways by a pandemic, a guy who gained 20 kilograms in four months broke the US Open with 200 miles per hour of ball speed, the woman who won the AIG Open Championship couldn’t get into the next LPGA Major and arguably the greatest player of all time waited seven extra months to defend his Masters title on an empty, dormant Augusta National then later mangled a car and possibly the rest of his career in a road accident, can you really say any story is, well, surprising? 

 Still, Viktor Hovland would like to have a word. The second-year pro from Norway has been on a run. A member of the celebrated 2019 class that includes Oklahoma State University teammate Matthew Wolff and PGA Championship winner Collin Morikawa, Hovland validated his formidable college credentials – the 2018 US Amateur and NCAA team titles and low-amateur finishes at the 2019 Masters and US Open – with two PGA Tour wins in his first year as a professional. Both of them came in dramatic fashion. In February 2020 at the Puerto Rico Open, Hovland made a 30-footer for birdie on the last hole to beat Josh Teater. In December, he made a 12-footer in Mexico to best Aaron Wise. 

Even the disarray imposed on the tour schedule could not push Hovland off path. He bought an anonymous McMansion halfway between the Oklahoma State campus and Karsten Creek, the team’s home course, and did pretty much what he has done since he was a 12-year-old swing nerd who had 18 hours of daily Norwegian winter darkness to fill. He watched movies, listened to music and devoured countless hours of online golf instruction and treated his swing like Lego, tinkering, adding and subtracting while using the directions as a reference, not a blueprint.

Hovland, 23, has to be the first elite tour player to teach himself the game from scratch in the dark in a second language from YouTube. He’s just one of a wave of new tour players who are using the most democratic of the modern instruction tools – social media – to redefine the relationship between athletes, coaches and the information they share. 

It’s the new way to get good.  

A chubby, short kid

One of the traditional ways tour players have gotten good is to play for a blue-chip program like Oklahoma State. OSU has produced a lot of them, from Bob Tway and Scott Verplank to Charles Howell III and Rickie Fowler – players who helped the program win 11 national titles in the USA. 

Those titles require talent, and Cowboys coach Alan Bratton was in Scotland at the European Boys Team Championship in 2013 to fill the pool. His main target on the Norwegian team was Kristoffer Ventura, a 6-foot-3 specimen equipped with a tour-player starter set of skills who would end up playing four years at OSU. 

But Bratton couldn’t stop watching a chubby, 5-foot-6 kid with an untucked shirt and Oakley blade sunglasses who came from the same high school in Oslo as Ventura. “Viktor was a little soft and had a different-looking swing, but that swing repeated, and I loved how he competed,” Bratton says. “He might have been only the fourth or fifth best player on that team, but I fell in love with him. I’ve been fortunate to be around a lot of great players, and I thought I saw some of the same traits in him. When I was recruiting Rickie Fowler, I had a plan to watch him and then watch other people, but I couldn’t stop watching Rickie. It’s rare to see him frustrated. He tries shots, and he’s fun to watch. Viktor is the same way.”

That Hovland was even swinging a golf club as a high schooler was an act of providence. His father, Harald, had spent a year as a visiting engineer on a project in St Louis and had bought some clubs during that stretch to kill time at a practice range that was on his way to work. When the year was up, he brought a junior set of clubs back to Norway for his son to try, and by age 11, Viktor was committed.

The Hovlands entrusted Viktor’s embryonic game to James McGowan, a transplanted Australian who has been teaching at Norway’s Drobak Golf Club for more than two decades. From the start, Hovland’s thirst for information and work ethic set him apart. “The first player from Norway to make it to the PGA Tour, Henrik Bjornstad, was a member here when Viktor was a junior. I coached Henrik, too, and he didn’t work as hard as Viktor did,” says McGowan, who taught Hovland from ages 11 to 17. “In the summer, it stays light until 10:30, and even then, Viktor’s parents spent a lot of time waiting in the carpark for him to finish.”

The flipside of those endless summer nights is about six hours of daylight in the winter. That translated into hundreds of hours of web surfing and beating balls at the Fornebu Indoor Golf Centre – and Hovland interrogating McGowan about everything from the latest swing trends on tour to his TrackMan numbers. “I didn’t have one myself at the time,” McGowan says, “but Viktor had a TrackMan at school he could use, so he would work on the numbers to see if what we talked about worked.” The Stack-and-Tilt method was strong on the tour at that time, but Hovland bypassed it without a second glance, preferring to work on adding some Dustin Johnson lead-wrist flavour to his swing to produce more power. “He just kept improving, and there were no flat spots on the way,” McGowan says. “Viktor’s only weakness was putting from around 10 feet, which was the birdie length he mostly had. If he had made more of that length, he would have gone extremely low much more often.”

Hovland’s growth coincided with a massive proliferation of digital-golf coaching personalities across every platform from Instagram to Twitter to YouTube to Facebook. George Gankas parlayed his social-media reach – including quarter-of-a-million followers on Instagram – into real-world work with tour players like Wolff and a spot on Golf Digest’s 50 Best Teachers list. The UK-based teaching pair of Andy Proudman and Piers Ward have more than 700,000 subscribers for their “Me and My Golf” YouTube channel, and they offer everything from a $19 monthly content-streaming membership to pre-packaged $100 “Break 90” video series. They are just some of the brands in that game. Do a search for how to fix your slice, and YouTube will offer up more than 1.1 million videos.  

Hovland was comfortable with that world from the start, and he learned quickly how not to drink from the information firehose. “I started young getting into the golf swing, so I feel I have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on and how it relates to what I’m doing when I hit a ball,” Hovland says. “There’s the valuable stuff, and the stuff you hear and throw out, and then there’s the grey area in between, where you don’t really know. You try it out and see how it goes and leave yourself some breadcrumbs so that you can get back to where you were.” In its best form, that meant taking lots of trips to the golf-information buffet – where grip-adjustment tips from tour legends are mixed with recorded lectures from sports scientists about the importance of understanding moment of inertia. 

But by the time Hovland was in his second year at Oklahoma State, in 2017, his variables were varying, and he was having trouble digesting the remote coaching he was getting from Denny Lucas, a Florida-based coach he had found through Instagram. Hovland’s ball flight had flattened to where he was having trouble holding greens with longer clubs. Legendary OSU coach Mike Holder might have sent Bratton the player out to hit a few more buckets of practice balls during Bratton’s All-American senior year in 1995, but Bratton the coach had to take a 21st-century approach. “We felt like he wasn’t understanding something the coach was telling him remotely,” Bratton says. “So over the Thanksgiving break, he went to see the coach in Jupiter. That helped him get it, and when he came back, he had all this height. He built momentum from there and really hasn’t looked back. I just love the way he plays – confident, not afraid.” 

Instant success on tour

That fear element – or the lack of it – is what makes players like Hovland, Wolff, Morikawa and Bryson DeChambeau so different. They came on tour ready to win because they had seen their peers do it. DeChambeau was runner-up in the Australian Masters as an amateur in 2015 and tied for fourth in Hilton Head in his 2016 professional debut. Wolff won the 2019 NCAA individual championship in May and on the PGA Tour in July. The next month, in starts four, five and six, Morikawa went T-2, T-4 and won. Hovland finished 12th as an amateur in the 2019 US Open and was a millionaire before he pegged it up for the first time
as a professional the next week, at the 2019 Travelers Championship, thanks
to an equipment deal with Ping.  

“Look at what Wolff did over those few weeks in 2019,” Bratton says. “Turning pro didn’t make him any better or make him a different player. He was capable as an amateur. It’s a matter of telling a player the truth about the skill set you need to play at a given level, establishing an environment where they can do that, and then free them to understand for themselves that they can win.”  

  The step into professional golf only reinforced the same drive in Hovland that had transformed his body from chunky to chiselled and validated the personal experiments he conducts on his swing. “There are always things to improve, and I have always liked to work,” Hovland says. “But I think a strength for me is the ability to say, Yeah, something might be a valuable piece of information for somebody, but it’s not necessarily for me. I’m not vulnerable to going to somebody and just giving my brain to them. I want to learn things for myself.” 

Hovland’s experience winning in Puerto Rico paid in more ways than just the $US540,000 cheque. He dumped two chips on the 11th hole on Sunday, leading to a triple-bogey and laying bare the realisation he shared with everybody in the interview after saving the day with his putter. “I suck at chipping,” he said, with his widest trademark smile. “That’s something I know I’m going to have to improve if I want to play my best at this level.” 

For Bratton, Hovland’s openness and willingness to judge his game unemotionally make him a virtual unicorn in professional golf. “I love his honesty – and the confidence to be honest. To say, ‘I suck at chipping’? No tour player will make himself that vulnerable,” says Bratton, who caddied for Hovland at the 2018 US Amateur and 2019 Masters and US Open. “The first European Tour event Viktor played in, he did that double-pump, top-of-the-backswing thing he does in a real round. My phone blew up with people sending me clips of it, so I called him and said, ‘What are you doing? When did you start that?’ He said, ‘This morning.’ He did it as a drill, and it felt good, so he put it in.
It was the same thing at the US Open. He had pretty much the best driving week anybody has ever had. The next week, in Hartford, he was trying the double-pump thing on a couple of holes. The confidence to do that shows who he is.” 

Hovland addressed his short-game shortcoming head-on. Before the COVID quarantine hit, Hovland worked early in tournament weeks with legendary coach Pete Cowen – who helped Brooks Koepka and Gary Woodland with their short games – on using the bounce on his
wedges more effectively. By sliding the club instead of digging it, Hovland could control the loft on his shots more precisely, and the club was less prone to dig the way it did in Puerto Rico.  

The work – and the enforced downtime when the tour shut down last March – gave Hovland time he says was reminiscent of when he was 12 years old, when it was all about playing golf for fun and looking for answers online. The hunt led him to some of the online material created by Jeff Smith, a Las Vegas-based instructor who works with several young tour players, such as Aaron Wise and Patrick Rodgers, at TPC Summerlin. Smith and Hovland had mutual friends, so Hovland was comfortable reaching out to ask if Smith would be willing to look at some video of his swing.  

“He was on a fact-finding mission,” Smith says. “What were the different views of his swing? What could he take away? Viktor has a high IQ related to golf, golf instruction and swing mechanics. He’s always thinking. He’s a highly intellectual individual. He doesn’t show
it off by downloading information onto you, but he can tell really quickly when something passes the sniff test or not.” 

Smith described what he thought were the elements of Hovland’s swing that worked together to produce his elite ball-striking and told Hovland that he didn’t think he needed to make any big changes. “It was more about helping him understand his tendencies and why they showed up when they did and doing problem-solving,” Smith says. “When a certain shot pattern shows up on the course, how do you clear that up?” 

In typical Hovland style, student and coach met up live for the first time in Boston before the first round of the FedEx Cup playoffs because, hey, there’s no time like the present. “Viktor’s generation of players, they want to know,” says Smith, whose Instagram account has become
a popular analytical storehouse for millennial swings on the PGA Tour. “You present them with the information, and they take it and decipher it and make the determination about what to do with it. The previous generation believed you dug it out of the dirt, and you knew it when you felt it. The problem is that you could spend the rest of your career trying to find what you had again.” 

The two did not do much in terms of technical changes, but what they did do is work on doing the same things at a faster rate. “There was a lot for me to gain just by deciding to swing harder,” Hovland says. “So I spend a segment of practice time just swinging the club as hard as I can.”  

Smith says the truth is that Hovland might not have much room to improve his elite ball-striking, so increased speed, by default, is where it’s at. “You give Viktor a 7, 8, 9-iron, and it’s right on the flag. Now the idea is get a 7-iron in your hand where you used to have a 5-iron. He’s been sending me videos where he’s swinging 120 miles per hour.” 

Hovland’s driver speed last year, 113 miles per hour, put him 109th in that category, slower than players like Kevin Na and Lucas Glover. Ramping it up to 120 would put Hovland near the top 20, among players like Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson. Mix 15 more metres off the tee with Hovland’s top-10 ranking in strokes gained on approach shots, and it’s easy to speculate about the closeness of the race between Hovland and Wolff to be the next OSU graduate to win a Major.    

At home in Oklahoma

Experiencing the close-knit Oklahoma State golf fraternity even for a day makes it easy to understand why Hovland wasn’t tempted to spend his money to relocate in Orlando, Jupiter, Dallas or one of the other popular tour-player hot spots in America. The team facility at Karsten Creek is built with the connective tissue of players going back to the earliest days of the program, in the form of memorabilia, donations and time – the stream of players returning for pro-am fundraisers and for no reason beyond shooting the breeze with players to pass on some institutional knowledge.

Hovland’s comfort level in Oklahoma is obvious, and a house is one of the few things he has spent his tournament earnings on. If you didn’t know who he was, you would think he was still a student. When Hovland was enrolled, he rented a room from teammate Austin Eckroat’s parents, who had bought a place so that they could keep an eye on their son from nearby Edmond. Now Eckroat lives at Hovland’s place, and for most of the COVID shutdown, they lived golf’s version of “Groundhog Day”. 

“Viktor was already the most boring person, so it wasn’t a big change: work out, eat, go to Karsten, come home and watch a war movie,” says Eckroat, who is playing his senior year for OSU and getting ready for a pro career. “It was weird to be playing all that golf without having something to prepare for. Viktor never stopped working. I’ve never seen anyone hit so many balls. You go out with him, and it doesn’t feel like anything he’s doing blows you away, but the ball always stays in front of him. He’s just relentless.” 

Outside golf, Hovland used his time to experiment with different diets, intermittently fasting before settling on a routine that is a mix between professional athlete and recent college student: take-away from Panera Bread interspersed with two giant fruit smoothies and a never-ending bowl of popcorn. Despite his Scandinavian roots, Hovland doesn’t drink like a European. “Once in a blue moon, he’ll go out, and that’s one of the best nights, but after a drink or two he’s a total liability,” says Eckroat, inserting the needle. “But he can go out and be himself and nobody bothers him. He gets recognised, but in Stillwater, people mind their own business. It’s simple, stress free.”

Hovland says he feels a duty to Bratton and the team to pass on his experience and advice just like Howell, Fowler and Peter Uihlein have. For his part, Eckroat is the only college senior in the USA who has two of his best friends in the top 15 of the world ranking. The week of Hovland’s win in Mexico. Eckroat got a spot in the tournament because of his ranking in the PGA Tour University standings – a system designed to provide a path for top college players to transition seamlessly to the Korn Ferry Tour. While Hovland was on his way to winning, Eckroat tied for 12th. “They had a party on the beach after the tournament, and Viktor was just as happy for me as I was for him,” Eckroat says. “That’s the guy he is. You watch him work so hard, and he shows you that you can do it, and he [cheers] for you to get there with your own hard work.”

The joy Hovland gets from immersing himself in the process of improvement was one of the first things that drew Bratton to him. “The second time I saw him, he had a different grip, and he had changed his shot shape from a hard hook to a little cut,” Bratton says. “It was obvious he had put a huge amount of time into getting better. Guys like Viktor and Bryson try their thing while continuing to be themselves. They’re sculpting their games more than building them. You have to decide who you are and own that. At the elite level, that means being yourself every day.”  

Check your lead wrist to slice-proof your swing    

“Before I talk about the position of my left wrist, which helps me consistently square the face at impact, you might be curious about that pumping action I sometimes do at the top of the swing,” Hovland says. “To hit a power draw, I slow down the transition from backswing to downswing by pumping the club twice. It’s like a rehearsal, and it helps me create more clubhead speed. If you try it, you might find it also improves your timing, allowing you to complete a fuller backswing before starting the downswing. Another thing that can help you is getting to the top in a good position with your lead wrist. My lead wrist is in flexion [left], which means it’s slightly bowed (palm down). If your wrist is extended (palm up), the clubface will be open at the top. You’ll have to do something in the downswing quickly to close the face, or you’ll probably slice it. It’s a lot easier to avoid a slice  if you fix your wrist position at the top of the swing.”

Speed everything up to generate more power   

“My project has been increasing clubhead speed. To do that, I’m trying to make everything in my swing faster. It makes my hand path longer, my turn bigger, and I’m pushing harder off the ground [far right], which translates into a faster clubhead. That’s a big difference from what many amateurs do. They try to swing faster but don’t turn their hips or shoulders more. That restricts speed. It should feel like you’re letting the clubhead go [near right] instead of directing it through impact with your hands.”

Accuracy starts at address    

“One of my tendencies is to aim too far right, and that’s when I get into trouble off the tee. My stock shot is a little fade. But when I’m lined up right of my target [near left], my instinct is to push my hand path out to make my swing go more left. But that changes my swing path and makes it harder to produce a quality fade. To avoid that, I make sure my shoulders and hips are in line with my target [far left]. Don’t ignore the importance of checking your alignment.”

Use a wedge the way it’s designed 

“Hitting high, soft pitches used to be a challenge because of the flexion of my lead wrist [above]. Flexion is good in the full swing, but it makes it harder to get the ball way up – you hit down on it too much. To take advantage of a wedge’s loft when pitching, I now grip the club stronger with my left hand, meaning turning it away from the target, but weaker with my right hand. This combo puts my left wrist in extension [right] and lets the club glide, not dig, along the turf to create good loft.”

Create different chips from one swing    

“I mostly play low chip shots, but on tour you need to elevate the ball, too. My basic chip setup is with the ball in the centre of my stance and my hands slightly ahead of it [middle photo, above]. To chip it higher or lower, I don’t change where my hands are or what I do during the swing – all I do is change my ball position. For a shot that flies lower and runs out, I play the ball just in front of my back foot [above, left]. For a higher shot, I play the ball off my instep and open the face [above, right]. Then I’m free to pick my landing spot and let feel take over.”

Photographs by Dom Furore

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The six shots you need to go (and stay) low.

It’s an awesome feeling when you drive it great, stripe your irons, hole a bunch of putts and post a score in the low 70s. But if you want to do that regularly, you’re going to have to rely on more than just solid ball-striking and a hot putter. All good players have a variety of specialty shots that they use around the course to turn bogeys into pars and pars into birdies. They might use them only once a round, but if executed properly, these shots often are what make the difference between a good score and a great one. Here are six that will get you down to scratch. – with Ron Kaspriske

1. The baby-draw drive
Good players opt for a shorter-but-reliable fade when they need to find the fairway. But scratch golfers know how to find the fairway without sacrificing too much distance. If you want to score, you can’t afford to be 200-plus metres away from the green. You need some roll. The baby draw is the shot for you. Tee the ball so only a tiny bit is above the clubface when you sole your driver. Grip down an inch and set up so the ball is an inch farther back in your stance than your stock drive. One more thing at address: drop your trail foot away from the target line about six inches [above right]. Now you’re in position to swing down on an in-to-out path in relation to your target – key to drawing it – and hit the ball with a slightly descending blow, which will get it to fly lower. Make an abbreviated swing, feeling like you go back to the 10-o’clock position with your arms [above] and through to 2 o’clock after impact.

2. The bomb-and-stick 3-wood
Good players can hit a 3-wood a long way and reach most par 5s in two. But what they can’t do is hit it high enough to hold a green or access a tough pin location. Scratch golfers can launch a 3-wood way up and get virtually all of their distance from the carry. To hit this moon shot, start by setting up with a slightly open stance and play the ball nearly as far forward as you would for a driver. Also, tilt your upper body away from the target at address [above left]. All of these adjustments help add loft to the shot. Two things need to happen when you swing. As the club starts down from the top, feel like you increase your upper-body tilt away from the target [above], and swing faster than normal through the impact zone. Your arms need to feel super relaxed while your legs feel braced – think, spaghetti arms and steel-rod legs.

3. The gapped wedge
Good players expect to hit the green when they have a wedge in their hands. Scratch golfers expect to hit it close. You might be pretty good from full-swing distances, but you also need the ability to take something off the shot when you’re between clubs. To do that, open the face of your wedge slightly and then grip down on it about an inch. Now here comes a big change. However wide you typically stand for a wedge shot, cut it in half for this shot [above right]. These adjustments let you make your normal swing, but the ball won’t fly quite as far – and that’s key. The mistake is to swing slower, which makes it harder to get a consistent distance. Stick with your tempo [above].

4. The go-and-grab half wedge
Good players can consistently land pitch shots close to their target, but scratch golfers can land it close and get it to stop quickly. A checking pitch that takes a few bounces and stops dead allows you to be super aggressive around the greens. The shot you want to learn is my low, hooking spinner. Set up with your weight favouring the foot closest to the target, but address the ball just forward of centre. This swing requires soft wrists. You hinge them going back but release that hinge as the club moves through impact, so you’re actually shallowing the club’s path in the downswing [right]. The key is to swing down from the inside and make contact with the ball slightly lower on the face than the sweet spot. That produces the spin that makes the ball stop after a few bounces. To get that hooking action, make sure you keep rotating your body towards the target, and feel the clubhead pass the hands through impact [above]. The mistake is holding off the release.

5. The clear-any-lip bunker shot
Good players have a consistent technique in greenside bunkers, and it works well in most situations. But scratch golfers can change their swing to overcome difficult lies, especially when they need to get the ball up quickly. To get out of any bunker, open the face of the wedge super wide before you take your grip [above right], then swing with as much speed as you can muster- [above]: full backswing; full follow-through. It helps to play the ball a little forward, but if you have the face open enough, you won’t have to be as precise with where the club enters the sand. The open face and fast/full swing will create the spin and higher trajectory needed to plop the ball near the cup.

6. The crazy curveball
Good players know how to hook or slice a ball around trouble, but often the shot doesn’t curve enough to get back on line, or it doesn’t give the obstacle a wide enough berth. Scratch players know how to make the curves big enough – like 50 metres of curve – to easily avoid trouble and get the ball to land by their target. To hit the big hook, first determine your target line as if you were playing a straight shot. Then close the face of your club significantly in relation to that line (the face pointing way left of the target line for a right-hander). Next, take your grip, but adjust your setup so your body and feet are aligned significantly away from the trouble you’re trying to avoid (for a big hook, righties would set up way right). Keeping adjusting until your closed clubface now matches the original target line [above]. Then make a swing along your stance line and watch the ball hook like crazy. The opposite adjustments would be made for a slice. Open the clubface wide, take your grip, and stand on a path that would easily clear the obstacle, but make sure the clubface is pointing on the target line as if you were hitting a straight ball [left]. Learn these shots and you can turn double-bogeys into pars – and get your handicap down to scratch.

Jason Guss, one of Michigan’s top instructors, teaches at his academy in Bath Township.

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I see a lot of amateurs get overwhelmed around the greens by thinking each situation requires a different shot. But to get more consistent, it’s better to use the same technique in different ways. Let me explain with the simplest of all chips: the bump-and-run.

The goal is to land the ball on the green and get it rolling quickly. Here I’m flying it about a third of the way, but the ball stays down. Some people use a lob wedge, but that’s too much loft. I’ll use a 7-iron, a 5-iron or maybe even a hybrid. The shot is so much easier to control with less loft.

As for technique, I think of it as a putt that I don’t hit very hard. I play the ball centred in a narrow stance, weight forward, and I just make a nice, smooth stroke back and through, and the ball jumps off the face of the club. You can even use your putting grip to hit these shots.

In the smaller photo, I’m in thicker grass, but you can still rely on the bump-and-run technique from here with a few adjustments: use a higher-lofted club like a gap wedge – you need more loft to clear the rough – and set up with the ball a little farther back, weight still favouring your front foot and the shaft nearly upright. This will help keep the club from getting stuck in the taller grass, which is key. 

Now just make that putting-stroke motion and maintain speed through the ball. It’s that simple.

Korda is a five-time winner on the LPGA Tour. 

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