Shot Shaping

You don't you start with trying to hit a draw or a fade on demand?
I think youtube could help..

I know it certainly helped me around a few trees once or twice...

Best shape shot I have seen (with my own eyes) was from shorthitter at Palm Resort. Forgotten what course though.

I was his caddy for one of the qualifying round for a competition. Its was a Par 4 Dog Right. He drove the ball and it landed on the right to the trees. He looked at where his ball was, walked to the fairway to assess, and then he asked for his 5 iron. Because his ball was behind a tree there was not way he could hit straight through. He aimed towards fairway left, and swung. The ball swerved along the fairway, and landed on the fringe.

I was like.....'WOW!!'. Seeing it on TV aint the same as a caddy's eye view.

watermyforrest wrote:

Oh My God!!!

Where? Where?

nientsu wrote:

Best shape shot I have seen (with my own eyes) was from shorthitter at Palm Resort. Forgotten what course though.

I was his caddy for one of the qualifying round for a competition. Its was a Par 4 Dog Right. He drove the ball and it landed on the right to the trees. He looked at where his ball was, walked to the fairway to assess, and then he asked for his 5 iron. Because his ball was behind a tree there was not way he could hit straight through. He aimed towards fairway left, and swung. The ball swerved along the fairway, and landed on the fringe.

I was like.....'WOW!!'. Seeing it on TV aint the same as a caddy's eye view.

BRAVO Shorthitter!

Yah Nientsu, nothing like seeing it with your own eyes, some more caddy's eye view.

weesern wrote:

The clubface is open at impact in relation to swing path or target line?

In relation to Target Line

This video explains the new ball flight laws quiet well

Here's a story on the Best Shot Shaper in the World.

An economist friend, who is also an accomplished golfer, recently told me the following story.

He and two friends had made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of golf: the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland. They had managed to secure a tee time and were just about to tee off when the starter stopped them and told them to wait — he had a fourth player who would be joining them. The three friends were disappointed; what sort of schmuck were they going to get stuck with?

After brief introductions, the fourth player asked them what their handicaps were. A handicap in golf more or less corresponds to how many strokes you shoot over par on average. They told him their handicaps, which were three, four, and seven (which by the way, means they are exceptionally good recreational golfers).

The fourth player, who was standing on the tee with a set of right-handed clubs, said “O.K., great, I get my left-handed clubs” — the implication being that if he instead played left-handed, it would be a more even match. He headed back to his car, grabbed a set of left-handed clubs, and true to his word, proceeded to shoot a three over par 75.

Who was this mysterious fourth player? None other than the dashing Spaniard Seve Ballesteros.

My golfing friend conjectures that maybe playing left-handed on occasion helped Ballesteros learn to hit those creative shots which won him so many championships.

For instance, when your ball stops right next to a tree trunk, sometimes the only option is to flip a club around and try to swing left-handed. It is extremely difficult, because not only are you swinging left-handed, but you are using a club meant to be hit right-handed. My accomplished golfing friend has practiced this shot quite a bit, and says he once hit it 60 yards this way, but he averages about 20 yards.

He asked Seve that day how far he could hit it when in that situation. “About 150 yards,” Seve said. “It depends if I want a fade or a draw.”

Here's another article that illustrates best what shot shaping is, the Ballesteros way.



On the opening hole of the Ryder Cup at Oak Hill against Tom Lehman, Seve Ballesteros hooked his tee shot some 30 yards left of the fairway. The gallery circled around Ballesteros as he played his approach, prompting Paul Azinger to say, “They might want to be careful. You know, he didn’t hit over here on purpose.”

Later in the match, Ballesteros was stymied by a massive tree on No. 5, and Azinger reported that his options were to pitch sideways or to play a sharp hook through a gap in the trees to the right. Defying logic, Ballesteros took it over the tree, with enough power to reach the green. He halved the hole with a par.

That all took place in one hour.

Consider the better part of three decades, and the stories of spectacular shots by Ballesteros are endless.

There was the bump-and-run that threaded the bunkers on the final hole at Royal Birkdale when Ballesteros was 19 and tied for second. He won three years later with a shot from the car park. One of the greatest shots Jack Nicklaus ever saw was Ballesteros hitting 3-wood from beneath the lip of a bunker and reaching the green from 245 yards away in the 1983 Ryder Cup.

Years later, he put on a clinic in the short game at The Players Championship.

“He was hitting these 3-irons from a greenside bunker closer than Nicklaus could hit his sand wedge,” Azinger said. “Jack got up there with a 3-iron and was skulling it into the bank. I don’t even think it’s arguable that Seve had the best hands of anyone who ever played.”

He’ll get no argument from Brad Faxon, who won’t forget his first “Seve moment.”

Faxon was 26 and playing only his second British Open in 1988, elated that his closing 71 at Royal Lytham & St. Annes put him a tie for 11th and made him exempt for next year.

He pulled up a chair in the clubhouse to watch through a tiny window as the final group came up the 18th fairway. Ballesteros was one shot ahead of Nick Price, but the Spaniard was in trouble, some 50 feet from the flag in an awkward lie in the rough.

“He was long and left and needed to get up-and-down,” Faxon said Tuesday. “And he almost holed it. It stopped 2 inches away, and that pretty much knocked out Price’s chances. I was young, and watching him do that up close, the way he reacted and the way the crowd reacted to him … I don’t think it’s the best shot I ever saw him hit, but it was the most impressionable.”

The best shot Azinger saw came during an exhibition at the Old Course in St. Andrews for a Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf match.

“He was in a fairway bunker on No. 4,” Azinger said. “It was only a 9-iron, but he cooked it out of the bunker, straight up in the air and onto the green. I walked over to the bunker, and realized it was absolutely impossible for me to do that.”

Bobby Jones once famously said of Nicklaus, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.”

Ballesteros played shots that no one knew existed.

“He was special,” said two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange, who lost all five times he faced Ballesteros in the Ryder Cup. “He truly saw shots that nobody else would see. He’d see a hole in a tree, a run-up on a links.”

What was the best shot he saw?

“Put it this way,” Strange said with a laugh. “He chipped in on me more than once. You almost applauded at times, because in a situation like that, you knew it was coming.”

Mark Garrod, the golf correspondent for PA Sports the last three decades, remembers Ballesteros hitting one shot so far right during the ‘93 European Masters that he was 3 feet away from a wall with a swimming pool on the other side. The situation looked hopeless until Ballesteros saw enough of a gap in the trees that he hit pitching wedge to the fringe, then chipped in for birdie.

Garrod later asked Ballesteros about the shot, and the response is worth remembering now.

“I just like to keep going forward.”