The 2nd Cut Newsletter: Edition #22

Vacation Golf, Punch Shots, Shortening Your Driver, Chipping Techniques and Favorite Player Poll

Nov 16, 2023

“You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about.” - Bobby Jones

📰 Edition #22 📰

Welcome back to The 2nd Cut Newsletter!

I hope everyone had a good week of golf while I was away. We’re back to the regular scheduled programming.

Per usual, if you have any questions or comments about the newsletter, you can comment below or email me at the2ndcut@substack.com

📫 In today’s Newsletter: Vacation Golf, Punch Shots, Shortening Your Driver, Chipping Techniques, and Favorite Player Poll

If you’re new here, this newsletter is designed to provide valuable insights, tips, and ideas to improve your golf game from around the internet.

What you get:

1 - Newsletter every Wednesday
1 - Deep dive every Friday

🌴🍹 Vacation Golf 🍹🌴

Vacation golf is awesome. But sometimes, our expectations get the best of us. We’re excited, and we want to play well. It’s probably a nice course that we paid a decent amount to play. Maybe you are with family or friends that you want to impress. Maybe you are only playing once, so you really want to shoot a good score. It all leads to high expectations and pressure to perform.

Layered on top of those expectations is a new course with a style of golf you may not be used to. I’m used to hilly, wooded northeast courses. Then, all of a sudden, I’m hitting on Bermuda grass, surrounded by water, sand, and high winds. (Trust me when I say I did not chip well off the Bermuda)

This combination of high expectations and course conditions can be a deadly combo.

The Bottom line is you’re probably not going to play your best golf the first round of vacation. Lower your expectations, enjoy your time out there, and maybe play a bit more conservatively til you get a lay of the land.

Here’s the first tee from my vacation round in Turks and Caicos. It was a rough front 9, but a huge shout-out to Greg for hyping up the group and keeping things fun.

🐦 Tweets of the Week 🐦

I love this short clip from Jonathan Yarwood, where he explains how to hit the ball lower in windy conditions. Link

The setup is simple: get in a wedge shot stance, put the ball slightly back, open up a tad, and keep that nice smooth pitch shot pace. The only difference is you sub out the 54 for a four iron (or whatever low-lofted club) and choke down a bit.

This works great in windy conditions, but I’ve also found this method to be helpful when my full swing is a bit off.

Lou Stagner posted a tweet on the benefits of shortening your driver shaft. I’ve discussed this a few times in the letter, but I think now might be a good time for some of you to experiment with a shorter driver. Link

The gist is that by shortening your driver, you will hit more centered strikes. So even though you lose some distance and club speed because of the shorter shaft, you gain most of it back because of the higher amount of center strikes. This also leads to better accuracy off the tee, leading to fewer offline shots and penalties.

As you can see, the player in the example above only lost 3 yards of distance, but their accuracy increased.

When I shortened my driver I actually gained both distance and accuracy—a rare win-win. My driver was only cut down 1.5”, but it improved my strike quality and gave me more confidence to swing away.

Before you go cutting down your driver, go to your local fitter and see if you can test it out on a trackman. You might be surprised by the results.

📺 💻 T2C Media 📺 💻

I’ve been on a bit of a chipping technique kick. Below is a video from @hannahbogg explaining her toe-down chipping method.

By using the toe, you utilize the bounce of the club and avoid digging with the leading edge. She also does a great job of explaining the setup: close to the ball, shaft upright, and using your body to rotate.