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Tiger Woods Breaks Down His Iron Game – Use These Tips

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Tiger Breaks Down His Iron Game

My swing and my game have evolved over the years, but one thing has remained consistent: I’m always confident with an iron in my hand.

I’m not one of the longest hitters on tour anymore­—I can’t hit a wedge 150-plus yards like some guys do—so my iron game is absolutely critical to my success at this stage. It sounds simple, but the best way to make birdies is to hit your approaches close. To do that, you need to have distance control, which is possible only with consistent contact. For example, I hit my irons so pure last year at Augusta, and because of that, I had a ton of good looks at birdie. Two specific shots from Sunday’s final round come to mind: On 7, when I needed a birdie to jump-start the round, I hit my trusted low, trapping fade to tap-in range. Then on 16, I hit a high-draw 8-iron that plopped down in the perfect spot, took the slope and finished about three feet from the cup. That birdie gave me a two-shot lead and firm control of the tournament.

Note that one of those shots was a low fade and the other a high draw. I’ve always taken pride in my ability to vary trajectory and shape the ball both ways. Very few of my iron shots look exactly the same. Still, there are a few basics I try to apply to every iron shot, and they’re principles you can use for your game.

The first thing I do is take a good look at the lie. Is it anything out of the ordinary? Is it above or below my feet?

Is it in a divot? If it’s in the rough, is it a flyer?

Once I assess the lie, I shift my focus to the green complex. I like to let the course dictate what type of shot I’m trying to hit. Where is the exact spot I want the ball to land? Generally, I tend to hit more draws to left pins and fades to right pins, but there are exceptions. For example, sometimes it’s more important to have the ball working away from a hazard than toward the flag. Amateurs don’t think enough about things like that before they start their pre-shot routine.

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J.D. Cuban

As far as my setup, because of all my back issues, I’ve tried to avoid side bend in my swing, and that all starts with how I stand to the ball. I like to find a balanced and athletic posture that’s free of any tension in my arms or shoulders.

A good thought for me, and one that should help you make solid contact, is to keep your shoulders, hips and knees stacked on the same vertical plane throughout the motion. My baseline is to be as neutral as possible at address, with everything square to the target—then I’ll make adjustments to my stance and clubface for a draw or a fade, or for a low shot or a high shot.

I play the ball a bit farther forward in my stance than the average tour pro—it’s just my preference—and as a result I tend to sweep my irons more than dig. I’ll move the ball one ball forward in my stance if I’m trying to hoist one up, and I’ll play one ball back of normal if I’m trying to flight it down.

J.D. Cuban

When I swing, my thoughts are pretty simple and more feel-oriented than technical. I don’t watch my swing on video too often. I prefer to feel things with my hands, then confirm with my buddy Rob McNamara that he sees what I’m feeling.

My backswing has changed quite a bit throughout the years. I used to load up much more on my right side and try to create as much width as possible. As a result, my weight would move to my right leg, and my head would slide laterally away from the target. That’s how a young man swings the club. Now, to put less strain on my body, I try to keep my head and chest more stable and turn more around my right side.

To a large extent, my backswing is a function of my setup. At certain times in my career, I’ve had my hands lower or higher at address. For me, lower hands resulted in an earlier wrist set, and higher hands resulted in a later one. Now I feel like I’m quite neutral with my setup, which leads to a wrist set that happens around rib height.

Once I’ve completed my backswing—which almost always stops short of parallel because I’m concerned with hitting the ball the right distance, not the farthest distance—my main thought is to push down into the ground and clear my hips. That’s one reason my latest knee scope was so important. Toward the end of the summer, pain in my left knee prevented me from pushing hard. I was sliding a bit, which made it nearly impossible to get the hip rotation I needed to hit my cut. My other thought is to not let my hands get stuck behind me, which leads to having to save the swing and manipulate the face with my hands—that’s no good. The best way to avoid getting stuck is to not let the lower body out-race the hands on the downswing. My thought is to have everything synced when I reach impact.

J.D. Cuban

I like to think that my follow-through determines how high the ball is going to launch. In reality, my follow-through is a result of my angle of attack. When I’m steeper and trying to flight it down, I feel like I cut off the swing shortly after impact. If I shallow it out to launch the ball really high, I throw my hands way up over my head and let them finish over my left shoulder.

Again, I’m a shotmaker at heart, and one of my favorite parts of playing golf is carving iron shots. I wouldn’t recommend amateurs try to work it as much as I do, but the basics I’ve laid out here will help you make better contact, which will allow you to hit the ball the right distance—and hopefully give yourself some tap-in birdies like I had at last year’s Masters. –with Daniel Rapaport

This article originally appeared on Golf Digest.

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Meet The Canadian Open Qualifier Tied To ClickIt Golf!

“This week was incredible,” he said. “A dream come true.”

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Josh Goldenberg doesn’t plan to quit his day job. But he had a great time dabbling in his old career.

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He gave up on pro golf, then qualified for his first PGA Tour event.

Read the full story here
https://golf.com/news/josh-goldenberg-rbc-canadian-open/?amp=1

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Bets & Babes: Betting on Birdies

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In this latest episode of Bets and Babes join me and my special guest Robert from the World Series of Golf as we tee up a whole new way to think about betting on the green.

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We break down golf betting basics, share hilarious stories and talk about how to bet in a way that might resonate with us ladies.

Whether you’re a total newbie or just curious how to make golf Sundays more exciting, this episode delivers fun, flirty, and smart tips to get you in the game. 🎧⛳💸

Click below to listen to the entire episode and leave your comments and suggestions for future episodes.

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The Bogey Man’s Guide to Accidental Course Exploration: Or, How I Found My Ball (Eventually) in the Rough of Life

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Ah, golf. The gentle game of precision, patience, and occasionally, profound personal humiliation. You know, the kind that makes you question all your life choices, particularly the one where you decided to spend your Saturday morning chasing a tiny white ball around 18 acres of manicured torture.

Boo here, reporting live from the depths of a particularly thorny patch of “rough” that I’m fairly certain wasn’t on the course map. My mission? To recount a tale of a golf shot so spectacularly off-target, it became less about breaking par and more about breaking new ground. Literally.

It was a glorious Tuesday. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and my swing felt… well, it felt like something. I was on the par-4 7th, a hole notorious for its deceptive dogleg and a bunker that swallows balls faster than a hungry teenager devours pizza. My plan was simple: a nice, controlled fade, landing gently just short of the green. A textbook approach, really.

What actually happened was less “textbook” and more “abstract expressionism.” My driver, bless its misguided heart, decided that “fade” was merely a suggestion, and “controlled” was a concept best left to professional pilots. The ball, a brand-new, gleaming Titleist Pro V1 (because, you know, optimism), launched with the trajectory of a startled pheasant and veered sharply right. So sharply, in fact, it cleared the cart path, hopped over the maintenance shed, and disappeared into what I can only describe as a dense, untamed jungle previously known as “the woods bordering the 7th fairway.”

Now, a lesser golfer, a more sensible golfer, might have declared it lost, taken a drop, and moved on with their dignity mostly intact. But I, dear readers, am Mr. Bogey Man. And the Bogey Man doesn’t abandon his children, especially when they cost $5 a pop.

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So, armed with a 7-iron (optimism again, clearly), a profound sense of misplaced determination, and a faint hope that perhaps a deer had picked it up and was using it as a chew toy, I plunged into the abyss.

The first five minutes were a blur of tangled vines, unseen roots, and the distinct feeling that I was being watched by small, judgmental woodland creatures. My pristine golf shoes quickly became mud-caked relics. My carefully tucked-in shirt became a casualty of low-hanging branches. I swear, I heard a squirrel snicker.

Then, a glimmer! A flash of white amidst the green. “Aha!” I cried, startling a family of robins. I pushed through a particularly stubborn bush, only to find… a discarded plastic water bottle. My heart sank faster than my last putt from 3 feet.

I pressed on, muttering to myself about the unfairness of golf, the existential dread of lost balls, and whether it was too late to take up competitive napping. Just as I was about to give up and declare the ball a permanent resident of the arboreal underworld, I saw it. Nestled perfectly at the base of an ancient oak, gleaming defiantly, was my Pro V1.

The triumph! The sheer, unadulterated joy! It was like finding the Holy Grail, if the Holy Grail was spherical and prone to slicing. I carefully extracted it, brushed off a few leaves, and held it aloft.

Then I looked around. I had no idea where I was. The fairway was a distant, hazy memory. The cart path? A myth. I was utterly, gloriously lost.

It took another fifteen minutes of bushwhacking, a brief but intense wrestling match with a particularly aggressive thistle, and the accidental discovery of what I’m pretty sure was a very old, very moldy sandwich, but I eventually stumbled back onto the course. My playing partners, who had long since finished the hole and were contemplating sending out a search party (or at least ordering another round of drinks), looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement.

My score on the 7th? Let’s just say it involved a number that would make a mathematician weep. But the story? The adventure? The sheer ridiculousness of it all? Priceless.

So, the next time your ball decides to take an unscheduled tour of the local flora and fauna, don’t despair. Embrace it. See it as an opportunity for accidental exploration. You might not break 80, but you’ll definitely have a story. And isn’t that what golf is really about? (Besides the frustration, the lost balls, and the occasional snickering squirrel, of course.)

Until next time, keep those swings (mostly) in bounds, and remember: even a bogey can be an adventure.

Boo

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