Golf  |
| Tom Cox (right) with Jeremy Dale, who recommends percentage shots with a seven or eight iron |
“Are you sure you want to do that?” says Paul Hughes. “He’s not going to be happy, you know,” adds Ben Lambourne, with a dastardly chuckle. To an outsider who’d just joined us, what I’m about to perform at the fourth hole at Burhill Golf Club in Surrey might seem like a simple 40-yard chip shot, but, as Paul, Ben and I know, it’s much more than that: it is an affront to everything the final member of our fourball, Jeremy Dale, holds sacred.
Dale’s back is to us at the moment, and I know that when he turns round and sees what I’m doing, he’s going to tell me off, so I play the shot quickly, with my lob wedge. I hit the ball crisply and hard with a long, wristy swing. It shoots towards the flag, then digs its feet in before doing a slight moonwalk back towards me, finishing four feet away. Paul and Ben squeal with delight. Dale turns round and offers me a rueful grin. I feel like a naughty show-off schoolboy.
The shot I’ve played is a preposterously risky one – the kind of stroke anyone who isn’t Phil Mickelson should need a permit to attempt. I know that, as someone who doesn’t practise very often, I will hit it as intended approximately one time out of five. “What I’m going to try to teach you today is a way of making your bad shots better,” Dale had told me earlier. As picturesque as my good shots with my 60° Callaway lob wedge are, my bad shots with it are as bad as bad shots come: heavy flubs that travel an eighth of their intended distance, bony thins that shoot through the green into heavy shrubbery, profane shanks that nestle under the lips of bunkers.
“So why do you continue doing it, when you could take a club with a straighter face – a seven- or eight-iron – and play the percentage shot?” Dale asks. “Because,” I say, “the good ones are just so nice.”
Five short-game scoring tips from Jeremy Dale
1 Contrary to popular opinion, the first thing to decide before you play a chip shot is not what club you’re going to use – it’s where to land the ball.
2 For short, medium and long pitch shots, try to use three different swings of consistent lengths – pace out how far each one sends the ball to the exact yard.
3 On long putts, try to measure your backswing, using your right ankle (if you’re a right-hander) as a guide.
4 The key to being more successful around the green is not making your best shots better. It’s about making your bad shots less damaging.
5 Remember that most players under-read the break on putts. Keep this in mind when lining yourself up.
Dale has the classic modern golf pro’s build – tall and slim – but he has a mind that seems unusually inquisitive for the trade. This is perhaps why, when he was doing nothing but play and teach conventionally at clubs, he never quite found success. In the mid-1990s, he branched out by studying for a psychology degree and learning to hit the ball left-handed as competently as he hit it right-handed (“There’s a school of thought that left-handers don’t really exist, and I slightly subscribe to that”). He moved to Australia and began to hone his craft as a trick-shot specialist. His most famous shots include the “Magic Chair” – where he hits the ball 200 yards while seated on patio furniture – and those he performs with “The Persuader”, a 6ft 3in driver which weighs more than some of the smaller adult members of his family.
In some ways his new venture, the Jeremy Dale Scoring School, might seem like the antithesis of his trick-shot displays. The latter are all showmanship, the former is about management and maths. But the tinkering and artistry that Dale has put into his trick shots have also given him an innate understanding of shots from 60 yards and less – shots that need to be manufactured, chiselled. These, he says, are the most important shots in golf.
The idea of the Scoring School is to offer alternative golf lessons with swifter results than those based on stances and grips and arcs. “I’m not going to try to change or deconstruct your swing,” Dale tells us. “Most golfers don’t have time for that. I’m just going to give you some simple routines and ideas that could reduce your score.”
I’m sure Dale has invited me along because he’d like me to write about it, but I suspect he has another motive. Since we’ve played together before, he knows that around the green I’m a little like a child who’s been given his first canvas (the green) and paint pot (the ball). Yes, I like it when the white thing goes close to the round thing cut in the ground. But I also like it when it makes pretty patterns on the green thing by doing a little dance. This, for Dale, is a challenge. I’m his lob-wedge Moriarty.
Not all of the Scoring School is based on shots from 60 yards in, but most is, out of necessity. As Dale points out, the short-game expert Dave Pelz once conducted some research into the PGA Tour, and found that it was not the pros with the best driving or iron play or even putting statistics who were winning the most money, but those who had the best chipping and pitching. As an example, Dale cites Tom Kite, who famously pipped Colin Montgomerie to the 1992 US Open by being a “chipping and putting bastard from hell”.
I never liked Kite much, and, as I tell Dale, for me the idea of being good at getting the ball up and down in two from around the green is tied up with the shameful idea of being a scrambler: the opposite of the smooth, long-driving, green-hitting golfer my friends and I wanted to be when we were 15.
“But you’re not 15, are you?” Dale is polite enough not to say it, but I can see he’s thinking it. And he’s right: in a golfing sense, I’m actually only 14¼, and part of being 14¼ is still thinking that wedge shots should be played by feel alone.
This means that when Dale tries to show me three measured swings that I can rely on for three lengths of pitch shots, I’m at first resistant. But then I reconsider: how many times does this mysterious subconscious part of my brain I so stubbornly believe in get the feel right, and put the ball close to the flag? Once a round, maybe? If that. With Dale’s three-swing method, I’m putting the ball consistently within 15ft of my target.
Similarly, his idea of measuring your putting stroke for long putts seems mechanical, but I find that by using it my long-distance lag putting is better than it’s been since ... well, probably since I was 14.
Perhaps the best thing about working under Dale is that it makes me more interested in my short pitching. There’s a greater awareness of what I’m doing, of being in the moment, and not looking forward to doing something I’m better at on the next tee, like hitting my driver or ogling fairwayside modernist houses.
It’s also a beneficial exercise in discipline that can filter into the longer game. In the afternoon, when we head out on the course, it feels like a rare treat to be able to open up the swing. On the seventh hole, I hit the eight-iron of my life: 182 yards, all carry, in windless conditions – about the distance Tiger Woods usually hits his.
It’s a lesson in golf’s crucial gear changes: it’s a game of restraint, where sometimes grasp should not exceed reach.
If I had heeded my lesson, the next day I would have hit more measured pitch shots, perfecting the mini-swing that gave structure and freedom to the full one. Instead, I decide to bash 100 hard eight-irons up the driving range. Not one of them goes anywhere near as far or as straight. n
Tom Cox is the author of ‘Nice Jumper’ and ‘Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia’
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The details
For details of the Jeremy Dale Scoring School call Jeremy on 07748 307849 or go to www.jeremydale.com
