[PHOTO: Stephen Pond]

With the US Open behind us, it means the golf calendar has entered what I consider the best part of the season: links season. The time of year when regular golfers fly away to their mates trips abroad that they’re so excited about, and professional golf begins rolling through Scotland.

So, to get us excited for the start of links season, I wanted to point to a useful chipping tip for the rest of us along the way.

Look at your loft

You’ve probably heard the term “bounce” before. Oversimplified, bounce is a term for the angle and width of the sole of the club. The more bounce you have on your wedge, the less likely your wedge is to dig into the ground – it’ll bounce off it instead.

More bounce is generally helpful because it can prevent chunked shots, but on the dry sandy turf that links golf is played on, it can make life more difficult. The more some golfers reach for their high-bounce lob wedge, the more they find their wedge bounces off the turf and leads to skulled shots.

Grind vs Bounce: A pair of important wedge concepts, explained

So instead, learn to chip with a lower lofted wedge like a 52-degree. With less bounce and less loft, the 52-degree wedge helps dig the club more into the ground, which creates a low, driving ball flight with lots of backspin and crispier contact.

The next time you’re on dry, linksland turf, try reaching for a lower-lofted wedge. It’ll probably help.

The post It’s a driving chip shot with saucy spin – and it’s perfect for links golf appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

[PHOTO: Gregory Shamus]

Bryson DeChambeau is at his best when he has a problem to solve. The solutions, usually, end up looking pretty strange. But the solutions always end up working.

It’s probably the thing I most admire about Bryson, and the thing the rest of us can learn the most from.

Bryson started his professional career as a shorter hitter, a sketchy putter, and an unimpressive wedge player. He was a serial under-performer as a result: in his first 21 events as a professional, he missed 11 cuts. After a T-2 finish at the 2016 Puerto Rico Open – his only top 10 finish since a year earlier – DeChambeau finished T-44 in his next start, then promptly missed another eight consecutive cuts. In his first 11 major starts as a professional, he notched exactly zero top-20s.

In some alternate universe where golf exists, Bryson DeChambeau is a middling tour player who eventually loses his card and ends up working at a driving range somewhere.

Instead, DeChambeau pushed his way towards a different destiny because somewhere along the way, he stopped caring about what other people thought about his game. He’s one of those players who doesn’t care how something looks, or what others think about how it looks. If it helps him, he does it. If it doesn’t, he doesn’t. There’s no sense of shame or embarrassment. To him, the only stupid thing is not doing something you think would help because you’re worried about looking weird.

It’s also a quality I find most endearing about the game itself. Golf is a humbling game that forces you to confront your own ego in a quest for improvement. Keep yourself honest: how much pride are you willing to swallow to get a little better?

1. Understand acceleration profiles

The garage in DeChambeau’s house is littered with prototype putters of every variation you can imagine. Long putters; short putters; side-saddle putters; light putters; heavy putters; one partially 3D-printed putter he likes the look of but didn’t put in play because he couldn’t scoop the ball easily with it.

One of those it-looks-weird-but-I-don’t-care areas for DeChambeau is his putting stroke. He used to be a pretty bad putter, even when he was a very good amateur golfer. But through radical trial and error, he landed upon a system. It works for him, and there’s some stuff we can learn, too.

There are lots of parts of DeChambeau’s putting system, but one of the most interesting and underrated is his extremely detailed approach to speed control, which is probably the most important part of putting.

Before every round DeChambeau places a ruler by his ball, and a tee 30 feet away. His standard is something like 10 inches: Meaning that when he takes a 10-inch backstroke, with a through-stroke that isn’t either accelerating or decelerating severely (he calls that his “acceleration profile”, which he checks using a Foresight QuadMAX), he knows the ball will roll 30 feet.

But if that day, he makes a backstroke that’s 10 inches long and watches the ball roll 33 feet, he knows the greens are 10 percent faster that day than his standard, so he adjusts his read and speed on every putt accordingly. If the ball rolls 36 feet, he knows they’re 20 percent faster.

Our brains work best when we give it parameters, and give stable reference points to make judgments from. That’s what DeChambeau does every day. The rest of us obviously aren’t going to go to the same degree, but we can adopt the same idea: starting every round hitting the same length putt, monitoring how far we’re taking the putter back and how fast it’s moving through, and paying attention to the result.

US Open 2024: Why does Bryson DeChambeau hover his driver like that?

2. Beware of the small muscles

Have you ever noticed that the grip on DeChambeau’s putter is upside down? That’s because he rotates his left arm as far left as it will go, then grips the putter. It means the palm of his left hand is facing almost directly out in front, a near-180-degree difference than the way most golfers grip their putter with their left hand – that’s why his grip is on backwards.

Bryson’s backwards grip quite literally locks his left arm so far left, that he can’t move it any more left.

“There’s so much range of motion in all these little muscles in the hands and wrists and arms,” he told me once. “I don’t want any of that.”

His grip makes pulling putts, he says, basically impossible. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s interesting that the man who Bryson beat at Pinehurst pulled his crucial two-and-a-half-footer left of the cup on the 70th hole. The small muscles appeared to take over at exactly the wrong moment.

3. One miss is fine, two is killer

Speaking of pulls I must admit: watching Rory McIlroy on the range on Saturday evening before his final round, it didn’t seem like I was watching a man who was about to win a major championship.

Rory was frustrated at a variety of misses late in his third round, which continued into his final round.

“The miss on 16 [left] was a reaction to the miss on 15 [right]. The miss on 17 [right] was a reaction to the miss on 16 [left],” he said on the range.

Rory’s most common miss was high and right, which was annoying but, ultimately, fine. The wheels ultimately came off when he started reacting to that right miss with a panicky left miss. That’s what he was so frustrated about on the range on Saturday.

Keep an eye on that high right miss from Rory. It's been lingering all week.

It happens when he gets the club a little stuck behind him. He can get away with it with his driver, but less with his irons.

Happened on 15 and 17 Saturday, and on the 4th Sunday. pic.twitter.com/OhdTaaEZnU

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) June 16, 2024

Rory knows this, but the oldest cliché in golf is a true one: golf is a game of misses. One annoying, even persistent, miss isn’t the enemy. Rory built a two-shot lead on the back-nine with that lingering right miss. It’s when you start over-correcting for that miss in a way that sends the ball in every direction that the downward slide begins.

4. Perfection doesn’t exist – for anyone

Along those lines, I love this quote from Ludvig Aberg. When the rest of us see Aberg, we see a tall, handsome man with a perfect golf swing. Aberg is wiser enough to know that’s not true. Perfection? That’s a myth. It’s a game of misses when you’re on the course, and a game of tendency-management whenever you’re not.

“As a golfer, you’re always going to have tendencies. You’re always going to have something in your swing that you’re going to work on,” he said. “That’s the case for me, as well. We worked on those tendencies. Sometimes it just shows up. You can’t be perfect all the time.”

5. Tee it high – even with irons?

My week at Pinehurst started on Monday, when I bumped into Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee. Chamblee was in the booth for NBC all week, so he was out early scouting Monday’s star-studded practice round of Tiger Woods, Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler and Jordan Spieth when he pointed out something interesting.

“Look how high Tiger tees the ball with his irons,” he said.

It was right. JT’s ball was nearly flush to the ground on the par-3 17th. Tiger’s was probably a quarter of an inch off the turf.

“It gives him a few extra degrees of launch,” Chamblee said, “and a few feet higher ball flight, so he can hold greens these firm a little better.”

Tiger’s ball did just that. It sailed into the air, and came down soft onto the back portion of the surface.

It’s the details that matter in the US Open, when the margins between good and bad are at their thinnest. Tiger doesn’t have the physical tools to match anymore, but his mind remains as sharp as ever.

6. An A+ piece of advice

I was extremely delighted and slightly jealous that my colleague Chris Powers had the best game-improvement tweet of US Open week. I truly can’t say it any better myself…

It is so hilarious to me how grip conscious the No. 1 player in the world is and yet still every chopper I play with death grips it like a baseball bat and wonders why they hit a 90-yard slice pic.twitter.com/ALJfjseFJ2

— Christopher Powers (@CPowers14) June 12, 2024

7. Give yourself the right kind of feedback

What would you do if you were about to play a US Open you were extremely unprepared for? I would probably start playing a lot of golf.

Robert Rock, the 47-year-old who came out of retirement to unexpectedly qualify for the US Open, did exactly the opposite. And it was actually kind of genius.

Rock spent his weeks leading up to Pinehurst hitting balls into a net. He played just a handful of holes over those weeks, and then went back to his net afterwards. He used a video camera to film his swing, but the net was his way of divorcing himself from his own expectations. It’s hard to stress about where the ball is going when you literally don’t know where the ball is going.

Instead, Rock’s goal was simply to improve his technique, knowing that was his path to his best golf. To focus on the process – the one thing we can control, as golfers – and less on the result, which we can’t.

8. The kings of the golf swing

Every other week of the year, The Cradle is an incredible par-3 course that players travel across the globe to enjoy. During US Open week, it’s a driving range for pros. A super-nice driving range, but on Thursday afternoon Max Grayserman intentionally found the very worst part of it. Squirrelled away in the far right corner, he spent about an hour hitting golf balls on an uneven patch of sand.

Coincidentally, on the other side of the range, Canadian Nick Taylor was holding his club out in front of him like a samurai sword before each shot.

The two things players and teachers care most about is where the clubhead is hitting the ground, and where the clubface is pointing when it hits the ball. That’s what Taylor and Grayserman were doing:

• Taylor was holding his club that way to create a sense of awareness between the back of his left hand and the clubface.
• Grayserman was hitting balls from the unforgiving sand to force himself to make crispy contact with the ball first.

Club before ground, face square at impact. Important stuff happens in between, of course, but those two are the kings of the golf swing. It’s funny how during the biggest weeks, you see players start to pay homage to that.

MORE GOLF DIGEST US OPEN COVERAGE

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If you watched Bryson DeChambeau at the 2024 US Open, you may have noticed that his driver is airborne – before he even hits the ball.

Why is that?

Bryson’s not the first golfer to hover his driver like this: Greg Norman, Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo were hoverers, too, and there are various reasons why golfers do it.

The most common reason golfers chose to hover their driver is because they were worried about the ball falling off the tee, and being penalised. Hovering the driver means that golfers never technically grounded their club, which meant if the ball did move, they wouldn’t be penalised (though this rule has since changed anyway).

Bryson “chipping a few” drives after his round.

187 mph ball speed here.

He’s working on preventing his hips from sliding too much towards the target. Says pushing his body up towards the sky allows him to release his arms more, and square the face easier for his power draw. pic.twitter.com/vFNikBGsRI

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) June 14, 2024

For Bryson, his reasoning is slightly different. He hovered the club because that’s the height he wants his driver to be at impact.

“I’ve done it forever,” he says. “I’m just positioning my club and body at the level I want it to be at impact.”

Even though the club takes a long route to get back to impact, starting the club where he wants it to finish just made more sense to Bryson than the other way, so that’s why he does it.

MORE GOLF DIGEST US OPEN COVERAGE

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At Pinehurst in the days before the US Open, players are stressed – just as the USGA would hope in the lead up to their championship. But it’s not the general sense of anxiety that makes this week at Pinehurst No.2 unique, it’s that players are all worried about the same thing: the greens. More specifically, putting balls off the green.

No, we’re not talking about players’ club selections around Pinehurst’s domed surfaces (though that is a point of concern as well), we’re referring to the near certainty that some players will hit solid approaches and putt the ensuing 30 or 40-footer off the green.

Not buying it? Here’s what Tiger Woods said during his Tuesday press conference:

“The past few days playing practice rounds – I’m guilty as well as the rest of the guys I’ve played with – we’ve putted off a lot of greens. It depends how severe the USGA wants to make this and how close they want to get us up to those sides. But I foresee just like in 2005 watching some of the guys play ping-pong back and forth. It could happen.”

Coming off a third-place finish at the PGA Championship at Valhalla, Viktor Hovland agrees:

“I miss it maybe a foot low side, with just a hair too much speed, the ball is off the green. It doesn’t just roll off the green, sometimes it rolls off the green and into the brush. Seems to me that some of those pins are a little bit close to the drop-offs.”

Reigning PGA champion Xander Schauffele sees getting on the green as only half the battle at Pinehurst:

“Leaving yourself in a really good position is A-1, but even when you do leave yourself in a good position, the hole is not over yet. It’s sort of half the battle.”

That players – nearly unanimously – agree on the danger of putting balls off the green dismisses the possibility of one or two curmudgeons are exaggerating the difficulty. So, why are they so worried about it at Pinehurst? Ralph Bauer, a top PGA tour putting coach, says that it’s a combination of severe slopes and the USGA’s willingness to place hole locations on the edges of those slopes.

US Open 2024: Wyndham Clark warns Pinehurst’s greens are already ‘borderline’

“This place is like if Augusta National and Royal Melbourne had a baby,” Bauer says. “There are slopes of more than 3 percent everywhere, and the USGA has no problem putting pins on them.”

Bauer explained that 3 percent slopes are a “little crazy” and “regular PGA Tour events are not going to use too many 3-percent slopes. They’re going to stick to 1s and 2s.”

At Pinehurst, however, the USGA may place hole locations on those 3-percent slopes, but even more difficult is that if players get their balls rolling on the wrong side of the hole, the slopes are even more severe, which is how you’ll get players putting balls off the green. Take the first hole, for example.

LPGA winner: If you’re trying to break 80, get rid of this club

During the final round in 2014, when the US Open was last held at Pinehurst, the hole location was roughly in the front-middle of the green. As you can see from the Stracka Line yardage book below, the hole was located where the green portion (2 to 4-percent slope) meets the red (more than 4-percent slope). This, essentially, is an extreme false front, with the hole located just feet away from the drop-off.

For reference, balls that find the red portions of the green will most likely fall off the green entirely – the slope is too severe. A putt, say, from the middle of the green that is carrying a little too much speed will hit that red portion of the slope and repel off the front.

As another example, let’s look at the second green, one of the most severe on the course. In 2014 during the second round, the hole was cut 23 paces on and 11 from the right. On paper, that’s a generous pin, but let’s look closer at the Stracka Line heat map. A putt from the middle of the green that breaks a little too hard can quickly catch that 5-percent slope the right of the hole and filter off the green.

The trick that players will use to avoid de-greening themselves? All week, you will see them opting for the highest line possible, with the ball dying at the hole. That’s essential, Bauer says, because putts that stay on the high line will roll out less.

“I’ve done a bunch of testing with Foresight, and one of the cool things that I found is if you hit two putts equally hard – one high and one low – the low one is going to run out much more,” he said. “The high one is going to be fighting the hill, and it’s not going to roll out as much. This low one is going to find that slope and run out. Both of those putts can be hit the same speed, but there can be a foot difference very easily based on the line you take.

“If we want to lag something, just take a higher line and then die it in.”

At times, it may look excessively conservative or even defensive, with balls struggling to get to the hole, but it’s a key strategy players will use to avoid the worst possible outcome.

“Normally you’re not more than four or five inches outside the cup on most greens,” defending champion Wyndham Clark said. “Here you’re maybe playing 10 to 12 inches just so that you’re not getting below the hole and having it run away.”

MORE GOLF DIGEST US OPEN COVERAGE

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Conquering the greens – and the green surrounds – this week at Pinehurst No.2 will be a huge part of surviving this US Open, let alone winning it.

From an Australian standpoint, few golfers in the world own a better short game than Cameron Smith. During his practice round ahead of the year’s third major, the Queenslander provided a six-minute insight into his approach to chipping and pitching to the “upturned saucepan”-style greens at the famed No.2 layout. Check out his fascinating discussion with Golf Channel’s Johnson Wagner:

That footage had a bit of everything – technique, wedge bounce, even a mis-hit and a jovial moustache comparison with Wagner.

We’re not saying Cam’s gonna win this week – we can’t say that… yet – but he has the right tools to figure out the maddening greens Pinehurst is known for.

MORE GOLF DIGEST US OPEN COVERAGE

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Three things regular golfers should learn from one of golf’s smoothest swings, according to a top teacher.

You’ve heard it before: watch LPGA Tour players if you want to learn something applicable to your golf swing, because their swing speeds are more similar to average players’. And it’s true.

The speeds LPGA players swing at are more attainable than the incredibly fast swings of the PGA Tour. Because of this, there are moves in LPGA players’ swings that you’re more likely able to copy. Take Australia’s Minjee Lee, for example. There are a few things in her driver swing that top teacher Jason Guss says amateurs would be smart to emulate.

1. Stay level

“Minjee is so much more level than average golfers,” Guss says. “On her backswing, her eyes stay so level. Amateurs have a tendency to tilt too much one way or another.”

At address, your eyes are parallel to the ground. If you watch Lee’s throughout the swing, they stay parallel through impact. If your eyes tilt so that your lead eye is below your trail eye – a common mistake among average players – you’re a reverse tilter, Guss says.

“When the lead eye gets low early, you’re more likely to swing outside-in,” Guss says. This swing shape will lead to a slice. “Keeping your eyes level will make it easier to stay on-plane back and through.”

2. The right amount of weight shift

“There’s still the ongoing debate of: should players stack and tilt, or should they shift their weight back and through,” Guss says. “Lee is a fantastic example of a tiny shift back with turn, and tiny shift forward with turn.”

Lee’s swing has neither a huge turn nor a massive stacking of the weight to one side. She has a little bit of each, which gives the swing a nice flow and creates a simplified, repeatable motion.

3. Maintain width

“Throughout her entire golf swing, she maintains great width,” Guss says.

Amateurs often lack width because they don’t turn to start the backswing. “They pick the club up and that kills width,” Guss says. “When someone doesn’t know how to hinge, they seek a lever somewhere else and usually that’s the lead arm. If you can turn and hinge like Minjee does here, you can keep width in your swing.”

Each of these things Lee does leads to more consistency, Guss says. And that’s something we all could use more of. 

Getty images: Meg Oliphant, Harry How, Andy Lyons

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There’s no need for a pricey gym membership to get in golf shape.

Most commercial gyms are packed with expensive equipment to, well, get you to buy a membership. It’s a logical marketing strategy, but the reality is, once you’re in the door, you’re much more likely to brush past nearly all that equipment than you are to use it.

Candidly, most golfers need very little to get a good, well-rounded workout that boosts performance on the course and helps avoid injuries, says Jennifer Fleischer, one of Golf Digest’s 50 Best Fitness Trainers in America. “You’d be surprised how far you can get with a pair of dumbbells, a medicine ball and a resistance band,” she says. “Even doing body-weight exercises with no equipment is super helpful.”

If you’ve been cleared for exercise by a medical professional, here are two things to consider when building a workout, Fleischer says. The first is to include training from four subcategories: pushes (think bench presses or squats), pulls (rows, arm curls, etc.), core strengthening (planks, bird dogs) and lower-body training (deadlifts, lunges). The second is a program that encompasses  all three  planes of motion. Exercises that have you moving forward and backward, side-to-side or rotationally – or a blend of all three planes. To get you started with your program, Fleischer demonstrates three moves that meet many of these guidelines while requiring less than $100 of gym equipment.

Jennifer fleischer, who trains in the San Francisco area, is a Golf Digest Certified Fitness Trainer. 

Single-leg, tabletop chest presses

Lie back on a bench or ottoman with your head and upper back fully supported but most of your body suspended off the ground like a tabletop. Extend one leg and perform a rep by pushing straight up with the dumbbells. Keep your hips from sagging, and do several reps alternating the extended leg. This enhances power and stability in the swing and strengthens key areas, including the chest, core, glutes and hamstrings.

Split-stance medicine-ball chops 

Get into a split stance and hold a medicine ball near the hip of the trail leg. From this stance, rotate your torso and raise your arms until the ball is on the opposite side of your body at about head height. Then reverse the motion until the ball is returned to the start position. Do several reps, then switch hand and leg positions and repeat the “chops” in the opposite direction. This exercise improves lower-body stability and allows you to swing a club across your body under control.

Coiling slide backs

Get into your golf posture, feet together, and step on a band while holding one end with one hand so that it’s taut. Perform a backward lunge with the opposite leg while hoisting the band upwards and rotating at the same time towards the pulling arm – then return to the start. Do several reps, switch hand and leg positions and repeat. This exercise improves co-ordination and function between the actions of the lower and upper body during the swing.

Images:  kaare iverson

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It’s all about how you start on pressure putts.

Putting under pressure can be a grind mentally. Like most golfers, I find that the more I focus on what the putt means for my score, the harder it becomes. That’s why I like to set my attention on something small, like the first six to eight inches of the putt. 

Generally, every putt is a straight putt within the first foot. Instead of trying to focus all my energy on holing an eight-footer to win my match, I make it my job to hit a straight putt for those first six to eight inches. That way, the ball starts on my intended line and rolls true. Provided I read the putt correctly and hit the ball with the proper speed, it should take the break and find the bottom of the cup.

The next time you have a five-footer to break 80 for the first time, think about nailing the first six to eight inches of the putt and nothing more. To practise your start lines, find a relatively straight putt on the practice green, determine your line, and focus on a spot six to eight inches along the chosen track that the ball has to pass over. Then set up two tees slightly wider than the width of the ball at that spot and putt the ball through the gate. Do this several times, then find a putt that breaks slightly from left to right, then right to left, and repeat.

The more consistently you hit your start lines, the steadier and more clutch you’ll perform under pressure.

LEONA MAGUIRE is the only Irish-born player to win on the LPGA Tour. She has a 7-2-1 career record in two Solheim Cup matches.

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LPGA Rising star Ronni Yin demos some savvy ways to save par.

Photographs by Jensen Larson

If you aren’t yet familiar with the golf skills of rising LPGA Tour star Ruoning Yin, an introduction is in order. “Ronni,” as she’s called, went from missing the cut in more than half the events she played in her first LPGA Tour season in 2022 to winning a major (KPMG Women’s PGA Championship) and rising to No.1 in the Rolex World Golf Ranking in 2023. She also won the DIO Implant LA Open and had eight other top-10 finishes last year. That’s a pretty big upward move in a short amount of time- – and somewhat historic. Yin, 21, is only the second Chinese golfer to reach No.1 in the Rolex ranking, joining Shanshan Feng.

One of the reasons she improved so quickly is that she learned how to routinely recover from bad shots. Yin, who ranked second on the LPGA Tour in strokes gained/scrambling last season, got up and down two out of every three times she missed the green in regulation. What’s her secret? 

She’ll share some technique tips in a moment. First, Yin says, you might want to think about your mind-set. A big part of improving comes from knowing you’re going to miss the green- – a lot. You have to be prepared to save par from a less-than-ideal lie. You need a smart plan to get the ball close to the hole and the familiarity and confidence to pull it off. 

 “Having a good short game is about consistently hitting the ball with the centre of the clubface,” she says. “But I see amateurs trying to hit really technical shots around the greens, even though they don’t have enough time to practise and develop the feel and skill necessary to hit those shots. Instead, go with the simplest shot for the situation.” An example: putting instead of chipping from just off the green in the fringe or fairway.

With input from her coach, Gareth Raflewski, here are Yin’s thoughts on getting out of a couple of the most common, yet tricky, jams all golfers face from just off the green.

Tricky Spot #1

When you have to fly it over something

Ronni says: If you’re in the rough and there’s something between you and the green that you have to carry, resist the urge to try a flop shot. It’s too tough to consistently execute. Instead, follow what I’m doing in these photos [above]. Grab your most lofted wedge, set up with the clubface and your stance a bit open, and set more of your weight on your front foot. This adjustment in weight will help steepen your angle of attack, which in turn helps you strike the ball with less interference from the grass. That’s key if you don’t want to leave these shots short. Don’t worry about the steeper angle lowering your ball flight. Opening the face slightly at address counters that. You’ll still have enough loft to fly the ball over whatever is between you and the green.

When you swing, keep pressure on that front foot. It’s a short shot, so there’s no need for any weight shift;  all the power you need will come from rotating your torso towards the target. Also, keep your wrists firm. Hinging and unhinging your wrists will make quality contact much harder to get.

Here’s one more thing to remember: when picking your target, know that the ball will come in high and soft. You won’t get a lot of roll, especially on a shot where you’re chipping into an uphill green that is pitched towards you [above]. 

Tricky Spot #2

When you have to chip it uphill

Ronni says: When the ball is sitting below the green, especially when it’s on a tight lie like this [left], it’s common for amateurs to dig their wedge into the turf. The result is a chunk that doesn’t get to the green and, a lot of times, rolls right back to where you’re standing­.

If this shot is tricky for you, start by making a few adjustments at setup. One of the reasons you might chunk this shot is because you’re leaning the shaft way forward, a prime digging position. Instead, I open the face a bit and then lift the heel end of the clubface off the ground slightly. This sets the shaft more vertical than usual, but more importantly, puts the club in a much better position to slide along the turf instead of digging into it. Just know that you’ll probably strike the ball higher on the face, which means it will launch higher [left]. Be sure to factor that into how far you want it to carry before it starts rolling.

Here’s another thought that should keep you from leaving this shot short: as you swing back and through, feel like your arms and torso are moving together. This will make your motion more consistent and controlled. To help you stay connected all the way past impact, think about the grip of your club going towards your left pocket. Also, don’t release your wrists. Any time you do that, you automatically make quality contact much harder to achieve.  

Now make the putt

To capitalise on your great recovery shot, be sure to hold your finish when you putt – just like you would for a full swing. It’ll keep the ball on the line you chose.   

I also do this drill [right] to build confidence. Try to make a putt from each tee station around the hole. If you can’t make them all consecutively within 20 minutes, tap out. This is about keeping your focus on makeable putts. Do that, and you’ll save a lot of pars.

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Who is the longest golfer in the field at the 2024 US Open?

Bryson DeChambeau is a name that might spring to mind after he hit 196mph with a drive during the final round of the PGA Championship last month. Gordon Sargent would be another good guess –  the No.1-ranked amateur in the world who has already earned his PGA Tour card, and can cruise in the high 190s.

But the correct answer, ultimately, is Charlie Reiter. A former junior golf phenomenon who played college golf at the University of San Diego and University of Southern California. The professional golfer who plays the PGA Tour Canada fired a 63 in final qualifying to make his second US Open appearance at Pinehurst this week.

Charlie Reiter smoothing one on the range.

194 mph ball speed. Clocked the apex at 164 feet which might be wrong but I’d also believe it.

Crazy how much power he has. pic.twitter.com/eEE4klqf14

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) June 11, 2024

“The kid is a freak,” his coach, Golf Digest Top 50 coach George Gankas, says. “It’s pretty insane.”

“He’s crazy-long,” DeChambeau says. “Super, super powerful.”

How long is Reiter? We’re less than two days into the US Open and the stories are already piling up.

• Reiter hit a drive north of 198mph on the range on Monday – which would’ve been the fastest drive recorded on the PGA Tour last season.
• Reiter hit multiple 3-woods over the net installed on the Pinehurst driving range – a more than 320-yard carry.
• Reiter hit one drive more than 30 yards past Bryson DeChambeau during their practice round together on Monday.

Charlie Reiter on the U.S. Open range pic.twitter.com/6zQ2twDvgz

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) June 11, 2024

How does Reiter generate such power? Well, that’s a better question for the rest of us.

Reiter is an incredibly explosive athlete, forged by years of speed training growing up. A recent analysis by Dr Chris Bishop at Middlesex University in England found that golfers’ ability to perform a variety of explosive tasks, like jumping, correlates most highly with clubhead speed. Reiter is obviously extremely strong, but perhaps more importantly, he’s explosive.

He also works hard on his golf swing with his long-time coach Gankas. A key move, Gankas says, is to make sure Reiter shallows early in his downswing, which allows him to swing from the inside as he uses the big muscles in his legs and torso to rotate aggressively through for more speed.

As for how he’ll fare this week at Pinehurst?

“Don’t be surprised if he plays well,” Gankas says. “That kid is capable of anything.”

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