Tigu Golf Guide

Hitting a golf ball

To hit the ball, the club is swung at the motionless ball on the ground (or wherever it has come to rest) from a side stance. Many golf shots make the ball travel through the air (carry) and roll out for some more distance (roll).

Every shot is a compromise between length and precision, as long shots are generally less precise than short ones. Obviously, a longer shot may result in a better score if it helps reduce the total number of strokes for a given hole, but the benefit may be more than outweighed by additional strokes or penalties if a ball is lost, out of bounds, or comes to rest on difficult ground. Therefore, a skilled golfer must assess the quality of his or her shots in a particular situation in order to judge whether the possible benefits of aggressive play are worth the risks.

Poor shots

There are several possible causes of poor shots, such as poor alignment of the club, wrong direction of swing, and off-center hits where the clubhead rotates around the ball at impact. Many of these troubles are aggravated with the "longer" clubs and higher speed of swing. Furthermore, the absolute effect of a deviation will increase with a longer shot compared with a short one.

For many people who play golf, the number and variety of poor shots is larger than they would like. Consequently, many, many words have been found to describe the shots--some of them are quite colourful. Some of the more common terms for the poor shots are explained below:

Hook : The ball flight curves sharply to the left for a right-handed player (to the right for left-handed players). A severe hook is commonly called a Duck-Hook or a Snap hook.

Slice : The ball curves sharply to the right for a right-handed player (to the left for left-handed players). For beginning golfers this is the typical outcome of most shots. A severe slice is commonly referred to as a Banana-Slice or a Banana-Ball.

Pull : For a right-handed player the ball is 'pulled' across the body and flies to the left of the intended target without curvature (the ball flies to the right for left-handed players). A Pull-Hook indicates that the ball started out left of target and curved even further to the left. A Pull-Slice means the ball starts out left then curves back to the right.

Push : The opposite of a Pull, where the ball is 'pushed' away from the body. The ball flies to the right of the intended target for right-handed players (to the left for left-handed players). A Push-Slice indicates that the ball started out right of target and curved even further to the right. A Push-Hook means the ball starts out right then curves back to the left.

Shank : The ball is struck by the hosel or the outer edge of the club rather than the clubface and shoots sharply to the right for a right-handed player.

Thin or Blade or Skull : The ball is struck with the bottom edge of the club and not its face. This may damage the surface of a golf ball with a soft cover material, and may result in a stinging sensation in one's hands on a cold day.

Fat : A fat shot occurs when the club strikes the ground before the ball. A large divot is usually produced along with a clubface covered in the divot.

Top : The topside of the ball is struck with the blade of the club. The result usually consists of the ball rolling forward on the ground with much topspin.

Sky Ball or Pop-Up : The opposite of a Top. This occurs most frequently when teeing the ball up too high, though sometimes a Sky Ball will occur when the ball is sitting on top of long blades of grass and the club has space to pass under the ball. The top side of the club strikes the bottom side of the ball and forces the ball higher into the air than desired. A true sky ball occurs when the ball travels farther vertically than it does horizontally.

Double-Hit : Hitting the ball twice in one swing. This occurs most often in chipping or pitching, and is extremely rare in any other kind of shot. This is commonly referred to as a T.C. Chen, named for the Taiwanese golfer who led the 1985 U.S. Open by 5 shots on Sunday, wherein he double-hit a chip on the fifth hole and made an eight, costing him the championship.

Flyer : This type of shot usually occurs when playing from deep rough. Grass blades come between the club face and the ball, preventing the club face from imparting maximum backspin on the ball. This loss of lift from backspin will typically cause a lower, longer shot than a cleanly contacted shot. The resulting flight of the ball is that the target is overshot by 10 or more yards and the ball does not stop as quickly on the green.

Hood : Somewhere during the swing the clubface becomes more perpendicular to the ground, or angled more toward the golfer. The clubface may strike the ground first or get caught up in heavy rough. This results in the ball flying lower to the ground than intended and usually resulting in a Pull as well.

Wormburner, Groundhog Killer or Sally Gunnell : The ball is hit extremely low to the ground, or bounces rapidly across the ground, essentially "burning up worms" or hitting groundhogs as it speeds along.

Chili Dip : A common miscue while chipping where the ball is flubbed only a few feet forward. Sometimes referred to as a Chunk.

Foot Wedge : An illegal act of literally kicking one's ball to a better location. The character Judge Smails uses this technique in the movie Caddyshack.

Hand wedge: An illegal act of literally throwing one's ball to a better location.

Whiff or Air Shot : Missing the ball completely after stepping up to hit counts as a stroke. Usually results in a form of embarrassment, followed by another shot. May be referred to as Practice Swing.

Iron Hooker : Holding the club too far forward causing a flicking action which results in a major hook.

Gunnell/Top : A Gunnell, or Top, is a low shot where the club face makes contact with the top of the ball. Shots that go ¾ distance in this manner are usually referred to as a 'Gunnell', or 'A runner, but not a looker'. The expression originated in England, and is a reference to former Olympic sprinter Sally Gunnell.

Lateral : also known as a shank, occurs when the ball is hit off the hosel resulting in a shot that travels more laterally than forward.

The golf swing

Putts and short chips are ideally played without much movement of the body, but most other golf shots are played using variants of the full golf swing. The full golf swing itself is used in tee and fairway shots.

A full swing is a complex rotation of the body aimed at accelerating the club head to a great speed. For a right-handed golfer, it consists of a backswing to the right, a downswing to the left (in which the ball is hit), and a follow through. At address, the player stands with the left shoulder and hip pointing in the intended direction of ball flight, with the ball before the feet. The club is held with both hands (right below left for right-handed players), the clubhead resting on the ground behind the ball, hips and knees somewhat flexed, and the arms hanging from the shoulders. The backswing is a rotation to the right, consisting of a shifting of the player's body weight to the right side, a turning of the pelvis and shoulders, lifting of the arms and flexing of the elbows and wrists. At the end of the backswing the hands are above the right shoulder, with the club pointing more or less in the intended direction of ball flight. The downswing is roughly a backswing reversed. After the ball is hit, the follow-through stage consists of a continued rotation to the left. At the end of the swing, the weight has shifted almost entirely to the left foot, the body is fully turned to the left and the hands are above the left shoulder with the club hanging down over the players' back.

The full golf swing is an unnatural, highly complex motion and notoriously difficult to learn. It is not uncommon for beginners to spend several months practicing the very basics before playing their first ball on a course. It is usually very difficult to acquire a stable and successful swing without professional instruction and even highly skilled golfers may continue to take golf lessons for many years. One can also purchase or use a new golf simulator that can cost upwards of $50,000.

Relatively few golfers play left-handed (i.e., swing back to the left and forward to the right). The percentage of golfers in the U.S. who play left-handed is estimated to be anywhere from 4 percent to 7 percent in the U.S. according to http://www.pga.com/equipment/focus-on/lefthandedequipment050503.cfm. Even players who are strongly left-handed in their daily lives prefer the right-handed golf swing. In the past, this may have been due to the difficulty of finding left-handed golf clubs. Today, more manufacturers provide left-handed versions of their club lines, and the clubs are more readily purchased from mail-order and Internet catalogues, as well as golf stores. A golfer who plays right-handed, but holds the club left-hand-below-right is said to be "cack-handed". It is difficult to obtain the same consistency and power with this arrangement as is possible with conventional technique.

Besides the physical part, the mental aspect contributes to the difficulty of the golf swing. Golfers play against the course, not each other directly, and hit a stationary object, not one put into motion by an opponent. This means that there is never anyone to blame but oneself for a bad result, and in most competitive formats there are no teammates to directly help one out. Knowledge of this creates a great deal of psychological pressure on the golfer; this pressure exists at all levels of play. Even the best professional golfers sometimes succumb to this pressure, such as getting the "yips" (an infamous affliction of Bernhard Langer) a severe putting disorder caused by uncontrolled muscle spasms of the arms, resulting in a jerking motion during the follow through of the putt causing the ball to go much farther than desired, or having collapses of their full swing (as with Ian Baker-Finch).

A golf ball acquires spin when it is hit. Backspin is imparted for almost every shot due to the golf club's loft (i.e., angle between the clubface and a vertical plane). A spinning ball deforms the flow of air around it^[6] similar to an airplane wing; a back-spinning ball therefore experiences an upward force which makes it fly higher and longer than a ball without spin. The amount of backspin also influences the behavior of a ball when it impacts the ground. A ball with little backspin will usually roll out for a few yards/meters while a ball with more backspin may not roll at all, or even roll backwards. Sidespin occurs when the clubface is not aligned perpendicularly to the plane of swing. Sidespin makes the ball curve left or right: a curve to the left is a draw, and to the right a fade (for right-handed players). Accomplished golfers purposely use sidespin to steer their ball around obstacles or towards the safe side of fairways and greens. But because it's sometimes difficult to control or predict the amount of sidespin, balls may take an undesirable trajectory, such as hook to the left, or slice to the right (for right-handed players).