Mental Mondays: Adjust Your Equipment For The Course

A few years back, I spent a day at the Buick Open hanging out in the TaylorMade equipment van. It was a busy place, as seemingly endless stream of golf pros arrived (often on multiple occasions) to have their clubs tweaked for that week’s playing conditions.

Most just wanted an adjustment in loft and lie (TaylorMade could do this even on their metal woods—a neat technical trick); a couple, however, wanted a major change: a different shaft, head or a new club entirely. (One even wanted TaylorMade to put together a special putter with a flag grip that he could give as a gift to the President of the US, with whom he was having lunch the following week).

The lesson I took from this was the obvious one: that the course and its conditions should dictate the makeup of the clubs in your bag. Very few of us have the money or skills to do constant adjustments to loft and lie or to routinely swap out heads and shafts. On the other hand, nearly every golfer I know has spare clubs sitting in the garage that with a little local knowledge can be used to tweak their bags for better results.

During the passage of a season, I regularly play two different courses, each of which calls for a slightly different club mix. The first is a traditional course with parallel fairways, and no rough to speak of. Instead, the unwatered areas outside the fairways run very hard with very short scrub. On that layout, I typically set aside my long irons and add a seven and nine wood and a rescue style “six.” Because I can’t possibly dig the club into the ground, the flatter bottomed “woods” are more effective.

The other track is mostly a prairie course, with thick rough and foot tall prairie grasses guarding the edges. Here, I find that I need the long irons because the woods cannot cut through the grass to move the ball along.

Distances also factor into my thinking. On the course my league plays, there’s a par three that for me absolutely requires a five iron. I never use it on most other courses. That same track finds me with several hybrids in the bag—not necessarily for full swings, but for the bump and run shots I can use to get the ball to the green from the fairway, and from out of the rough under unkempt tree branches.

I also know a guy who carries two putters on a particular course because the greens are so large that he needs a “lag” putter and a “close” putter.

Before heading out to your favorite course in the future, think seriously about how your club mix fits with the course design.

About This Series:

In 1960, the average golf score was 100. Forty years later, in spite of all the innovations in clubs, balls and instruction, the average golf score is … still 100. In fact, only 20 percent of all golfers will ever break that mark.

Here’s the problem: Even with all the improvements, the one thing we haven’t been able to improve is the golf intelligence of the players. Most hackers—and more than a few better players—just play dumb golf. So here’s part one of a series on playing smarter golf. I’ve been collecting mental game golf tips for years in a series of notebooks, on my palm pilot and in various computer files. They’ve helped my game. I know they’ll help yours

This tip is an excerpt from The Five Inch Course: Thinking Your Way To Better Golf. The complete book is available in Kindle format at Amazon.com.