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Crafting stories from the ideas that tumble from my mind.
Putting is commonly understood to be the easiest stroke in golf. There’s no need to get the ball in the air. The face is flat. Just use your shoulders to swing the putter back and through and the ball will roll in the hole! Okay, okay – maybe it’s not that easy, but when compared to all the other club swings, it really is the easiest stroke to become proficient in.
A large percentage of the time when we hit an approach shot we miss the green and we have the choice – putt, or chip, or pitch it on the green so we can wield our trusty easy-stroke putter to good effect. However, getting the ball on the green can be done with a lot of different strokes and conceptually with any of the clubs in our bag. One of the paradigms of a good short game in golf is to choose to putt first, chip second, and pitch third. This is because the margin for error becomes larger for each subsequent choice. The method we choose comes down to, “how gnarly is it?” Is the ball sitting down in deep grass? Is the grass or ground between the ball and green smooth or clumpy or muddy or are there rocks or a sprinkler head in the way? Is there a bunker or other diabolical defense of the green present? Also factored in the choice is how much green is there to work with. Is the pin 30 ft away with lots room to roll or is it tucked up right in front of you with two feet of the smooth stuff to work with?
Personal preference plays a roll as well. A lot of my friends who are uncomfortable with chipping will pull out the putter even with 10 feet of wooly or bumpy grass between the ball and the green – and they often make it work because it’s in their comfort zone. For me, a putter comes out only when the fringe is immaculate, otherwise I chip or pitch. Today’s blog is all about the chip – the choice I take when it’s wooly between my ball and the green and I’ve got enough green to get the ball rolling to the hole.
I perused a few chipping videos on youtube prior to writing this blog to remind myself how many ways folks have developed to try to consistently get the ball over the gnarly stuff and rolling on the green. I saw Phil Mickelson expounding the hands way forward chipping style. I saw the Dave Pelz ball at your back ankle chipping style – “You’ll never hit it fat again” (Yes you will!) and another of the many England golf pro videos described the hands vertical to use the wedge’s bounce chipping style. And you know what? I’ve tried them all and with all of them I am equally able to hit a fat chip that chunks sod further than the ball traveled, or blade the ball over the green. I also manage to achieve good results a significant percentage of time with all of the methods tried.
Because chipping is so much like putting, it is heavily dependent on feel and confidence. But developing feel and confidence in chipping can be hampered because the weapons of choice and the styles of chipping are so varied that no one can but a pro can become competent in all of them. For the mid-to-high handicap weekend golfer this can lead to confusion – which club? Which style? If, like me they dabbled in this and dabbled in that, there’s not the opportunity to hone in on a consistent method to get the ball on the green and hopefully close to the pin (or in the hole!)
Having tried various methods and clubs for chipping I found that with any method I could gain some level of success with concentrated practice with the method. I can, and have, chipped with everything from a lob wedge to a hybrid. The frustration with my chipping comes with the knowledge that on any given round there will be several missed opportunities to score due to fatting a chip short or skulling a chip over the green for stupid lost strokes.
As I have mentioned before, I latched on to The Scoring Method (SM) as a way to lower my scores, with the result that my handicap has dropped five strokes in 11 months. One of the tenets of SM is to use a hybrid to chip. The goal is to get the ball on the green and the hybrid does the job without the risk of fats and skulls. After viewing the videos recommending this chipping method, I decided to give it a try. I definitely got a lot of looks and more than a few comments from my fellow players when I pulled out the hybrid to chip, but I did find that my fat chips were all but eliminated with the hybrid. Simplification works – up to a point.
The issue I had with using the hybrid is that no matter how much I practiced, I found I had issues controlling both direction and distance. The face of the hybrid is slightly concave and I needed very precise control of the face contact in conjunction with perfect back and through stroke in order to get the ball started in the right direction. And where, with any of my wedges I tended to leave the ball short of the pin, with the hybrid, I tended to blow the ball past the hole. There is so much mass and momentum with the hybrid that it only requires an extremely short stroke to get the ball moving and it takes a lot of practice to develop the feel for the length of stroke required for various distances.
During one of my Austin Golf Association tournaments I had the joy of playing with a member who used a chipping wedge to great effect from many locations around the green. The man was deadly with that one club consistently stopping the ball near the pin. I observed that the flight and roll of his shots fit my vision of how I like a ball to come out low, bounce and roll out to the hole. At that time I was really into the hybrid chipping and hands down, his chipper beat my hybrid every time getting the ball closer to the hole. I decided then and there to find out if adding a dedicated chipper to my arsenal would help simplify my short game.
As always, I did a great deal of research on several chippers and eventually selected the Cleveland Smart Sole 3C as the research winner. It got good reviews on youtube and blogs and it looks cool too. I call the club my “Cleveland Chipping Wedge” so in my post round notes I refer to it as CCW and will do so for the rest of the blog. The CCW has a loft of 42 degrees which is in the range of an 8-iron loft. It happens that my favorite chipping iron was the 8-iron so that factors into the comfort I have with this club’s flight trajectory. The 34 inch shaft length is exactly the same as my putter which means I’m setting up over the shot with the same visual alignment as I do with putts and I stroke the club with the same relaxed hands and wrists as I do with long lag putts. This leads to my having a great deal of comfort with using the CCW.
When I bought the smart sole, I worried about whether I would loose “workability” with the club. I mean this in the sense that with my sand wedge or gap wedge I have the ability to hit high and low, get a bounce and check-up flight, or with the sand wedge, lay the face wide open and hit a flop shot. With the CCW, I will never be able to execute a flop shot, but I did find that for chipping, I do have some workability by where I place the ball in my stance. When I place the ball center or even a bit forward of center, I hit a higher, softer landing chip, and when I place the ball back in my stance I hit lower, hotter running chips. These two setups give me all the tools I need to get the ball near the hole when a chip is the right shot for the situation.
That said, I’ve only had the club two months and have not practiced with it enough to develop my distance feel. Whereas I tend to hit chips with wedges short of the hole, I tend to hit the CCW long of the hole, but not as bad as the hybrid. The good thing about that is I get to read the roll for the break on the comeback putt. Also, believe it or not, it’s still possible to fat or skull the CCW. However, instead of one fat shot in 6-7 attempts I had with wedges, I may fat one in 20 shots with the CCW.
Statistically, when reviewing my last two rounds on Game Golf, I used the CCW on 15 holes with an average 24.5 yard shot to an average first putt distance of 18.8 ft from the pin. I never 3-putted any of those. However, I need to practice more with a goal to get that first putt distance within an average 10 feet from the pin. I know I am capable of that goal once I dial in the distance feel for the CCW which just takes time and experience.
Finally, though the CCW has become my go-to chipper, it will never be exclusively for that purpose. If I can putt, I will putt because if the fringe is friendly I always get putts closer to the pin than the CCW. And if I’ve left myself short sided, the sand wedge chip stops the ball a lot more quickly than the CCW. When the ball is sitting in a soggy patch, I learned that the hybrid is the perfect club to escape the mess without a wet sloppy chunk. Circumstances will always drive the shot selection that best meets the goal of getting the ball on the green and as close to the pin as possible.
The first time I pulled out the CCW while playing with my buddies, I immediately got the comment, “John’s got a cheater club!” I quailed to hear that because I knew that there is some disdain for golfers that don’t have the skills to whip out a lob wedge and hit that perfect backspin stopping chip. I can understand and relate to that mentality. But I must use the best tool to do the job – and the job is to lower my score by any means possible (within the rules of golf of course). Yes, I have practiced and can hit that lob wedge bounce and check shot, but my success rate for getting it close to the hole was very low. The simplicity of using the CCW with it’s loft and putting stance and stroke make it my choice as the tool to chip.
As a final note and observation – I really like and have had great success using the 8-iron to execute bump and run shots when I have a clear path up to the green from 30-40 yards and in. I decided in my last couple of rounds to try those B&R shots with the CCW since it has the same 8-iron loft. Over all I felt more in control of the swing with the CCW but I hit several a good ways past the pin. One of my goals is to take the 8-iron and CCW out and execute B&R tests with both clubs to see which one I am more comfortable with. I am always evaluating which tool best fits the task at hand. Performing these tests and evaluations is one of the reasons I have such a love for golf – the opportunity to satiate my curiosity never ends in this game!
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