Are You A FOODIE?

Learn The Game From the Green to the Tee

Private Lessons

by Darrell Klassen

Golf is an easy game! That’s what I said to a student who came to see me recently from Atlanta, Georgia. The gentleman plays to an 8 handicap and he traveled clear across the country to have me help him with his golf swing and game. He had read my book, “Golf’s An Easy Game,” and wanted to come to see if he could be made into a believer.

Two days later, he left to go back home with a smile a mile wide on his face. When I dropped him of at the hotel at the end of his sessions he looked at me and said, “This really is an easy game, isn’t it? Why don’t more golf teachers make the game this simple?”

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know I am self-taught and I played to a +5 handicap for a number of years. Tour players don’t get much better than that. This is not to impress you, but rather to pique your curiosity about the whole thing. I know what you are thinking right now. “Sure. Golf’s an easy game, all right. Then why do all of us struggle with it so desperately?”

That question is actually a very easy one to answer. Don’t get me wrong here. I am not talking down to anyone. I simply want you to stop and think, and to get into reality on the matter. Golfers struggle with the game because they do not have enough of the proper information, and then, to top that all off, they don’t practice properly.

Golf is a game where we are attempting to knock a little white ball into a gopher hole which has been placed some four hundred yards from our starting point. When a typical golfer sees or hears the four hundred yards, all he can think is, “I will never be able to hit a golf ball that far, even in two shots. I will be lucky to hit it that far in three shots.”

As a result, all one sees and imagines is the distance required to potentially bring this all to pass. They never take the time to consider the fact that once they have traveled all of this distance they still have to get the ball into the cup. As a result golf is typically taught from the tee to the green, just as it is played.

However, because I am self-taught, by the grace of God, my first goal was to learn to get the ball into the cup. Therefore, I learned to get it into the cup from one foot, and then from two feet and three feet. I have always had the theory that if I could get the ball into the cup from five feet almost every time, then I would probably also make a higher percentage of putts from ten feet than the average golfer.

That also seemed to relieve a lot of the pressure from around the greens when it came to chipping and pitching. There seemed to be very little pressure to chip and pitch it close, because I could make most of my putts. As a result of that, the relaxation over the chip and pitch shots helped me to knock a lot of those shots closer to the pin.

I hope you can readily see where I am going with this. Once there was no pressure to hit greens in “regulation” i became quite relaxed when hitting my fairway shots to the greens. All I had to do was to advance the golf ball to an area somewhere near the green, because I knew I could chip it close and putt the ball into the cup in two shots consistently.

When there is not pressure to hit great shots from the fairway, there is no pressure to hit perfect tee shots, either. How simple can it get?

Golf really is an easy game! We play the game from the tee to the green, but we learn the game from the green to the tee. When we change our thinking, we change our scores.