Happy Monday Golfers; This week’s blog topic is about “The Tiger Five”

With the Genesis Invitational hosted by none other than Tiger Woods himself being this week I felt it appropriate to dive into course management. When evaluating how well a tournament went, Tiger tracked the performance of 5 key avoidable errors that led him to putting himself constantly in contention and setting a record breaking 142 consecutive cuts made and 281 weeks in a row as World number 1…Let’s dive deeper and look at how you could maybe re-design these for your own game.

1. Don’t Bogey Par 5’s

They offer great opportunities for golfers to lower their score, especially the big hitters who can probably look at these as long par 4s and who are probably wondering why it doesn’t say “make a birdie” instead of not making bogey. However, it’s important to remember that you’re not going to make an easy birdie all the time. Par is never a disaster, but a six on a par-5 is a sure fire way to kill any momentum in your round. Depending on your level, this might be better viewed as no net bogeys on par-5s. If you get a shot on the hole and make a six, then you’re probably doing fine.

2. No Double Bogey’s

We can often get sucked into playing silly shots to try not to make a bogey which can often result in making worse than that as our ball strikes a low-hanging branch as we tried to access our Seve for a moment. Bogeys are fine, but making a few doubles a round will have your score sky rocketing. We know from Arccos that a scratch golfer makes less than 0.3 double bogeys, on average, per round. That number jumps to nearly three doubles every round for a ten handicap player. Learn to take your medicine as you can recover from a bogey, but making worse than that makes the job a lot harder.

3. No Bogey’s With 9 Iron Or Less

When we have a 9 iron or less into a green, we can fall into the trap of trying to force a birdie, but firstly we should be looking to nail down that par. One of Tiger’s rules of scoring was to limit how many bogeys he made with a scoring club in his hand. Again, making a par in this scenario is absolutely fine. If you start dropping shots from this position, you’re not going to reach your potential.

4. Make Those Easy Up And Downs

Things get subjective here. For Tiger, an easy up and down might be different to what you think an easy up and down is. We all can appreciate that we are going to leave ourselves some tough up and downs that will be very tricky and expect to take 3 shots from there, but can you make sure you capitalise on those easier greenside shots? Another way of looking at this is to measure the number of double chips, rather than missed up and downs. If you’re missing the green with a chip shot, then you’re really going to start costing yourself strokes.

No Three-Putts

It might not be the most exciting part of the game, but lag putting is a key to scoring well. You’re never going to hit every approach shot inside 20 feet, sometimes, you’re going to have three times that distance. If you can learn to two putt from long range, your scorecard is going to thank you.

Now, keep in mind you’re never going to eliminate all of these mistakes from your game. Even Tiger reckoned that if he could make less than six of them in a tournament, he would probably win. That’s nearly two of these in every round. Rather than setting an unrealistic goal of getting rid of all of these silly mistakes, set a target to make less of them each time. I guarantee you’ll shoot better scores. – Coach Tim