Short hitter intimidated by Par 5's

As a golfer who seemingly always hits shorter than my fellow golfers, I found the length of Par 5’s highly intimidating. I would inwardly quake stepping up to the tee thinking, “I must hit three great long shots on this hole.” That thinking induced stress with the result that I topped or pulled or, with the Driver, sliced the ball putting me behind the count off the bat. Then, if I did happen to hit a good drive I would step up with a 3-wood trying again to hit a bomb off the deck. And as often happened the stress level led to the same type of disaster shots. The following Game Golf grab shows my first five Par 5 results in 2016, shortly after I bought the stat tracker and long before I started using The Scoring Method.

As my goal is to reach bogey golf, this shows how far I was from getting there. Less than a quarter of my Par 5 scores were bogey and below. The average score for these 5 games was 106.6. By the beginning of 2017, my Par 5 results had only marginally improved and I still quaked at tackling them. The first 5 rounds of 2017, again before adopting The Scoring Method is shown below and my average score was 109.6.

 By this time I had learned from Game Golf stats that I hit my driver functionally the same distance as my 3-wood but lost more balls so I took the driver out of my bag. I believe that helped a lot in lowering the really bad results from one year to the next, but I still hit triple bogey or worse more than a third of Par 5 holes.

The Scoring Method Par 5 Emotional Muscle Video

When I started viewing the video curriculum provided by The Scoring Method, I observed that Coach Will never hit the ball with a massive swing. His swing was a nonchalant, what I call, “la-di-da”, swing that easily advanced the ball down the fairway. Then, in the Par 5 video, he deliberately hit, off the tee box, a 75 yard clunker. He pointed out that bad hits happen and it doesn’t matter if you have, “emotional muscle” to move on to the next shot. There’s no need to pull out the big gun to make up for the disaster, just plunk another nice “la-di-da” shot into the fairway, keeping out of trouble.

That video I’ve watched several times because it was the answer to my Par 5 woes! I realized it’s not necessary to kill the ball to score acceptably well on Par 5’s. To demonstrate, the following is the Game Golf screen capture of my last 5 rounds Par 5 results.

I now have significantly reduced my blow-up holes (but still have work there) and lowered my stroke average from more than double-bogey over to  1-3/4 bogey over. My average score for the last 5 rounds was 98.4. I also decided to see if my claim that I perform better in tournaments holds up to this Par 5 analysis and the results below show 5 of my last 6 tournament round Par 5 results. (I dropped one disaster day/round).

I was pleased to see that my bogey golf goal is coming around and even under tournament pressure, I manage to keep the par 5 scores under control. My average for these five rounds was 97.0.

Parting Par 5 Emotional Muscle Tale

I recently had an opportunity to exercise my Par 5 “emotional muscle” when playing an Austin Golf Association tournament round at Plum Creek Golf Course in Kyle, Texas. The course is designed with an open, quasi-links style look with few trees and therefore lots of Texas wind to contend with. I had never played this course before and on the 9th hole, I made an error in judgement that could have lead to a disaster score on the hole.

I hit a 3-hybrid a reasonable 158 yards to the middle of the fairway. From there, I could see the cart path crossing the fairway and some weeds beyond the path. I could also see the 150 yard stake in the fairway and thought I could hit my 6-iron that far, no problem! So I visualized the shot gave it a whack and watched the ball fly straight over the path but was completely surprised to see a splash where the ball landed. There was a pond on the other side of the cart path I knew nothing about! It turns out I hit my standard 140 yard 6-iron distance. In retrospect, if I had lasered the stake, I would have realized I was trying to hit a 160 yard shot which is out of my 6-iron range.

However, on the emotional muscle front, I just chalked it up to a bad break. So I took the penalty drop in good grass near the cart path (straight line rule) and decided to just poke the 6-iron up the fairway as I didn’t have the distance to reach the green from there. Because I had so little stress on the shot I ended up hitting one of the 168 yard 6-iron bombs I wrote about before. That left me a 43 yard sand wedge to the green. I had the good fortune of a fellow player giving me a great read on the break with the result that I sank a 26 foot putt and pulled a bogey out of a hole with a water hazard penalty. So instead of trying the hero shot in anger after the “unfair” penalty, I managed a bogey with a calm head and a bit of luck.

The big learning here and on other Par 5’s I’ve played since SM, is that one bad shot doesn’t have to ruin a Par 5. If I do hit the occasional bad shot, I just work to get the ball back into play and try to limit the damage to a double bogey. The same thought process applies to Par 4’s. Let the bad shot go and move on.