Click On The Cover Below To Read This Quarter's Issue

Spring Training Is Not Just For Baseball !

Hey there might be snow, but it is time to think about spring training for your golf game. As we get ready to get back out there, consider getting with your local PGA Professional to get your swing in top shape as the season begins. Things like Grip, Posture, Turn and Finish are all simple instructional pints to make sure you do not fall into any bad habits.

Spring Training for your Golf Game is Now !

Tour Tracker: 4-way tie for Valspar lead

Tour Tracker: 4-way tie for Valspar lead

Matt Every took the lead early at the PGA Tour's Valspar Championship on Thursday near Tampa -- tied in the afternoon by Greg Chalmers, Danny Lee and Pat Perez. Recap the first-round highlights here!

more info...

10 Rounds with...the Adams Tight Lies

In the early years of Adams Golf, founder Barney Adams struggled to make a go of it until he figured out a way to fill one of recreational golfers’ biggest needs…a club they could hit 180 yards from most any lie.

 

Unlike touring professionals, amateurs didn’t then (and don’t now) hit long irons well or consistently so a long iron — indeed any club — they could hit with confidence would improve their scoring and enjoyment of the game.

 

Adams solution was to turn the traditional clubhead upside down.

 

It was still the same shape but rather than the weight being concentrated towards the top of the head Adams concentrated it near the sole, lowering the center of gravity which of course made it able to hit a ball from the fairway or rough. He also made the clubface a lot deeper which helped for solid contact.

 

The result was the Adams Tight Lies fairway wood which rocketed the tiny club company to the top of the category and as Adams said, “After all those years made us into an overnight sensation.”

 

Today Barney Adams is no longer with his old company. After becoming publically traded and with some initial success, Adams Golf couldn’t survive the collapse of the golf business starting in 2008 and was bought while in bankruptcy by the present owners TaylorMade-adidas Golf.

 

Since then research and development at Adams has been kept separate from the much larger parent so I was looking forward with some anticipation of putting the new Tight Lies fairway into play.

 

The idea of the “10 Rounds with…” series is to give readers a report of an objective experience with a particular club over an extended period of time — no mere rewriting of press releases passing for analysis or half a dozen swings on the range masquerading as actual time on the course.

So having said all that my opinion of the new Tight Lies is extremely positive.

 

The Tour 18 degree model instantly complemented my 13 degree 3-wood and fit nicely in with the 21 degree 3-iron I am using.

 

It gets the ball up in the air with almost unbelievable ease and over 10 rounds I only found one lie in the rough (3-plus inches of Florida’s finest Bermuda trying to hit it 175-yards over a bush) that the Tight Lies couldn’t handle. In case it’s of interest, that particular shot the club got the ball out and it came out straight but the grass was too heavy for me to advance it more than 25-yards.

 

The Tight Lies also was a champ at hitting shots from fairway bunkers. On two occasions with over 180-yards of carry (including once carry over water), it got the ball out cleanly and  set me up to make a par when I probably deserved something higher after those two drives.

 

There are two models of the new Tight Lies (regular $200 & Tour $230), both have the crown and sole slots that Adams pioneered with the Tour model have a slightly smaller head, deeper face and is biased to lower launch and lower spin.

 

Tight Lies in this most current of reincarnations is a very good club and deserves consideration by golfers of any skill level.

 

Tom Watson’s image and product images courtesy of Adams Golf

Woods 2 over at WGC-Cadillac; back 'a lot better'

Woods 2 over at WGC-Cadillac; back 'a lot better'

While his back felt much better, Tiger Woods played 10 holes in 2 over par before play was halted due to darkness Thursday at the WGC-Cadillac Championship.

more info...

Tri State Golfer Winter Edition

“Drive For Show—Putt For Dough.”

So says the old adage but Mark Broadie in his new book “Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes-Gained Approach to Improving Your Golf Performance and Strategy” shows this accepted wisdom just isn’t true. In fact he explains a new way for golfers to look at their games and help their make their scores lower.

It’s all based on the concept of strokes-gained and Broadie should know since he is the one that came up with the stokes-gained-putting stat based on ShotLink data from the PGA Tour. But the surprising fact is when applied to the other parts of the game like driving, long approach shots, short approach shots and shots around the green, putting accounts for only 15 percent of the difference in scores at every level—professional to rank amateur.

For those who may not be sure of what strokes-gained is, here is a passage from the book:

“If a stroke starts on a tee where, according to historical data, the average score is four, and if it finishes at a position in the fairway where the average strokes to hole out is 2.8, then the tee shot has moved the ball 1.2 strokes closer to the hole with just one stroke. The single tee shot has gained 0.2 strokes compared to an average tee shot, so it has a “strokes gained” of 0.2”

A simple calculation, just subtract one number from the other, but the devil is in the details. Getting the data was impossible until ShotLink.

Applied to recreational players about two thirds of the difference in scores between touring pros and weekend warriors is for shots from over 100-yards which of course places a premium for everyone to practice approach shots rather than driving and putting.

The message of “Every Shot Counts” is not that we recreational golfers are worse than tour players, we already knew that, but by using strokes-gained to analyze our individual games and then practicing to make our weaknesses strengths we will score a lot better.

Finally Broadie has the credentials for us to pay attention to what he says. Not only was able to discover the truths revealed by strokes-gained, he is the Carson Family Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, a member of the USGA handicap research team and a former club champion at Pelham Country Club.

“Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes-Gained Approach to Improving Your Golf Performance and Strategy” By Mark Broadie from Gotham Books--March 10, 2014 in Hardcover & eBook