Tiger Woods is as known for his escape shots as he is for his unshakeable focus and iron will. When Hank Haney wrote a book titled The Big Miss, Woods’s former coach wasn’t talking about his former student’s driving record. It was a reference to his infamously spotty driving.
How does a player who has, at times, in his career, struggled to find the fairway consistently dominate? It comes down to being a good escape artist. The best players can win even when their game isn’t everything it should be. They do this by leveraging a well-developed set of escape shots.
In this article, we take a look at how to get out of a wide variety of problem areas on the golf course. Read on to learn more about how you can become an escape artist.
The Tall Grass
While most people don’t actively think of the rough as a hazard—maybe because they are usually in it—this area of the course is where you will find yourself in the most consistent trouble. Yes, water and sand are nasty. No, you won’t always encounter them. Some courses don’t have these features at all. Most that do use them sparingly—particularly at the runs mid to high handicappers are likely to play most regularly at.
The rough is nefarious because it makes your shot shape less predictable. It’s harder to gauge trajectory—virtually impossible to measure correctly for distance if you don’t know what you are doing.
With a little bit of preparation, you can keep the ball in play, and maybe even hit some greens, even when you hit the ball in places where you can’t even see the fairway without a pair of binoculars.
Here’s what to do:
Step 1: Club Up: You won’t always need to do this. If you can still see all sides of the ball and you have a comfortable lie, you can often expect to get your regular distances. When the ball is a little more buried, clubbing up is more effective than swinging harder. For most amateurs—just about anything is more effective than swinging harder. If you’d usually be hitting a full eight, give an easy seven some thought.
Step 2: Put the Ball in the Back of Your Stance: The reason hitting out of the rough is so hard is because your clubface gets caught in the grass. You lose momentum. The face twists. You contact more grass than you do ball. Positioning your Noodle closer to the back middle of your stance increases your chances of making purer contact. More ball, less grass.
Step 3: Grip it Before You Rip it: Usually, in golf, it’s best to favor a more relaxed grip. This helps release the tension in your body and hit the ball more consistently. When you are hitting out of the tall grass, you want to make sure that the clubface doesn’t twist in the shaggy turf. Gripping a little firmer than you usually would will help.
Step 4: Accelerate: “Accelerate,” is not the same thing as “swing out of your shoes.” When you accelerate through the ball, you prioritize making sure that the peak momentum comes at the moment of contact. That’s pretty much always how you want to strike the ball, but it’s never more important than when you are hitting out of the rough. That extra clubhead speed will improve the quality of your contact and eliminate the extent to which your clubface gets tangled up.
Sand:
Very few of us are actually good at playing out of the sand. While it is true that bunkers are tricky, we believe that many obstacles owe either to anxiety or a lack of proper technique—probably contributing to anxiety.
To hit a good shot out of a greenside bunker, you first want to set up with the ball off your leading foot and open up your stance. This means setting up with your right foot—assuming you are a right-handed player. Your left foot, you will play slightly back.
You will then take a high lofted club—usually between 560-60 degrees, and open the face up. Swing following the path of your feet, striking several inches behind the ball with the leading edge of your wedge.
When done properly, the ball will pop right out of the sand, hopefully rolling toward the pin. Gauging distances is largely about feel. With practice, you’ll develop a sixth sense for it.
Hitting out of fairway bunkers is a little harder. In this situation—assuming you can make a full swing—your goal is to pick the ball out of the sand.
Start by choosing the right club. If there is a high lip in front of you, your primary goal will be to clear it. This will mean choosing a higher lofted club—fairway bunker shots often take off with a piercing trajectory. It’s better to get out of the bunker and come out short of the green than it is to skull a long iron deep into the lip.
If you have clearance, you can go ahead and pick a lower-lofted club. You’ll lose some yards, so consider clubbing up.
Position the ball squarely in the middle of your stance—this will increase your chances of striking it instead of the sand first. From there, swing naturally—if perhaps slightly easier than you usually would.
If you make clean contact, you’ll hit the ball pretty close to your standard distance. If you hit the ball thin, you’ll still most likely wind up with a decent follow-up shot.
If you the ball fat—well. Good news. You’ll get a chance to practice your fairway bunker shot again.
Hitting the Ball Low
There are lots of reasons to hit a punch shot. High winds. Low-hanging obstacles. You just love the way the ball looks when it's flying in that piercing trajectory….
Whatever your motivation, the shot is more accessible than you might first assume. Start by setting the ball in the back of your stance. Favor your front foot for weight distribution. Swing steady, with a focus on accelerating through the ball.
One thing you don’t need to do is that choppy, stunted, swing you see every 20 handicap using when they find themselves in the woods.
Here’s the thing: a slightly abbreviated swing will keep the ball lower. However, you also need to make sure that you are swinging smoothly. The closer you can get to your natural swing, the easier that will be.
Clubbing up is an easy way to keep the ball low. Less loft, plus your stance adjustments will equal a lower ball flight.
Now—the punchier you need to get, the more you may need to modify your swing. Clubhead speed creates backspin. Backspin gets the ball high in the air. The less clubhead speed, the lower your ball flight will be.
However, the goal is not to hit the lowest possible shot. It’s to think sensibly about your position. How much room do you really have? Where are you trying to put the ball? Think things through, and swing to accomplish more than just getting out of the woods.
Hit the Ball High
If you need to hit high from the fairway—clearing a branch on your approach shot say, you’ll want to position the ball up in the front of your stance. Put your weight on your back foot, choose a higher lofted club, and give your swing just a little more oomph.
In other words—pretty much the exact opposite of a punch shot.
But what if you want to hit a Phil Mickelson flop? Step one. Accept the fact that there is a seventy percent chance you will skull the ball into the next zip code. Step two, place it toward your front foot and open your stance. Open the club face, swing along the toeline, and activate your hands around the point where the grip meets your hip.
The key here is to accelerate. Your every instinct will tell you to swing nice and easy, but flops require full power.
Conclusion
The better you get at shaping shots, the easier time you’ll have getting out of trouble. Think about Bubba Watson snap hooking it out of the woods during a sudden death playoff. It doesn’t matter how good you are at punching the ball under branches or popping it out high above the tree line. If you can’t work it both ways, there are certain situations you simply won’t easily find your way out of.
That’s ok. Over time, you can get better at shaping shots. Until then, the key is to recognize your limitations. If you can’t work the ball like Bubba—and to be fair, most people can’t—don’t try it. You’ll skull your ball against a branch and wind up sixty yards back.
Sometimes, the smart play is to pitch out and work on limiting the damage. True recovery isn’t always about playing the hero. Sometimes, it’s a matter of making the best out of a bad situation and birdying the next hole.
Share:
Gearing up for the 124th U.S. Open
Scottie Scheffler Arrest: What's the 411?