Where the strokes actually are

Mark Broadie’s strokes-gained work, first published in Every Shot Counts, did something simple and overdue: it compared every shot against what golfers of a given standard actually do from that position, rather than against par. The effect was to strip away the flattery in a scorecard.

What it showed for amateur golfers is consistent. A meaningful share of the gap between a mid-handicapper and a good player sits in the shots played from inside a hundred yards — the pitches, the chips, the bunker shots and the putts that follow them. Not the drive. The drive is loud, memorable and occasionally humiliating, but it is one shot in a hole that takes five.

This is not an argument that driving does not matter. It plainly does, and Broadie’s own data is clear that long-game skill separates tour players from each other. It is an argument about where your next hour of practice earns the most, which is a different question entirely.

The up-and-down gap

The clearest way to see it is the up-and-down: miss the green, and how often do you still make par?

A good player converts a large majority of those. A mid-handicapper converts a small minority. The commonly quoted figures sit around 60% for low handicaps against roughly 20% for higher ones — and it is worth being straight that those are skill-band approximations rather than a single measured statistic. The exact numbers move with the source, the lie and the course.

The size of the gap is the point, not its decimal places. If you miss eight greens in a round — a thoroughly ordinary number — the difference between those two conversion rates is roughly three strokes. Three strokes, from shots you are already playing, with no change to your swing.

Why the range flatters you

There is a second reason the short game gets neglected, and it is structural rather than lazy. Range practice is comfortable: a flat mat, a clean lie, the same club forty times, no consequence. Almost nothing about it resembles a downhill chip off a tight lie to a pin cut six paces on.

We have written about that transfer problem in detail elsewhere in this series — it is the reason range form so often fails to show up on the first tee. The short game suffers from it worst, because it is the part of golf where lie, slope and nerve do most of the work, and the range removes all three.

What to practise instead

None of this requires a coach or a launch monitor. It requires changing what you do with the practice time you already take.

Spend half of it inside fifty yards. Not hitting the same wedge from the same spot — drop balls in awkward places and play each one once, the way you would on the course. One ball, one lie, one attempt, then move. The moment you hit a second from the same spot you have stopped practising golf and started practising repetition.

Then keep one honest number: out of ten missed greens, how many did you get up and down? Track it for five rounds. It is the single most useful figure an amateur can hold, and it moves faster than any other part of your game.

The marginal gain

“The woods are full of long drivers.” — Harvey Penick, Little Red Book

Penick wrote that decades before anyone had strokes-gained data, and the data has largely agreed with him since. The shots that lower a handicap are not the ones that get filmed. They are the dull ones from forty yards, played from a lie you would rather not have, to a pin you cannot get close to.

Practise those, and the scorecard changes without the swing having to.

Coming next

Mental · stop overthinking

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