Golf News March 2007
Golf Instruction – Reach new heights with Dale, by Nick Bayly.
Although renowned for his daring trick-shot show, PGA pro Jeremy Dale has also perfected the dark art of reducing your scores without changing your swing. Now that is what I call magic!!
If I had a pound for every time some smart arse uttered the words “It’s not how, but how many” as they sneaked a par with a shanked tee shot, followed by a topped iron, a thinned wedge and a monstrous 50 foot putt, I ‘d be a rich man indeed. OK, maybe not but I’d be at least £7 up on the deal.
It is undoubtedly an incredibly annoying phrase, at least for the purist who would rather hit one perfect shot and walk off the hole with a seven, having failed miserably to get out of a fairway bunker.
Therein lies the heart of Jeremy Dale’s tale. Would you rather play smart, look to your strengths, think your way round the course and return a score that is pretty close to your handicap, or would you rather shoot three birdies, a couple of pars and then throw in four doubles and a couple of nil returns. Death or glory. Well, our Jeremy sees no glory in death and would much rather you parred your way to certain victory. And that in a nutty nutshell is what his recently launched Scoring Schools are all about; lowering scores.
The world renowned trick-shot maestro has put away his 10 foot long driver and replaced it with his serious PGA qualified professional’s hat. He has also joined forces with luxury Leicestershire resort Stapleford Park to offer golfers the ultimate ’stay and play’ tuition break. The one day course, which I attended as a fly-on-the-wall guinea pig (if such a thing is possible!), claims to offer club golfers the opportunity to learn to score better without changing the way they swing.
“Most teachers concentrate purely on the swing”, says Dale “Many believe that all people need is a perfect swing and that a video analysis comparing you to Tiger Woods is the way to achieve it. This is fine if you can work at it but many golfers don’t have time to make major swing changes. They need simple, easy to digest shotmaking strategies that they can take to the course tomorrow – and that is exactly what these Scoring Schools provide.”
We kicked off the session in the clubhouse classroom with a kind of confessional Golfer’s Anonymous meeting; “ Hi, my name is Phil and I can’t chip and am allergic to sand”………I’m Bob, I play off nine but putt like a 28 handicappper”. Our souls revealed, we were like putty in Jeremy’s gentle hands.
Central to Dale’s philosophy is that most golfer’s can hit a half decent tee shot and knock it somewhere near the green in two, but that it often falls apart from 80 yards and in. Thus we spent at least 80% of the day concentrating on the short game, learning the art of reading putts, where to land the ballot cope with slopes and different lengths of green fringe. We also learned when to keep the ball low to eliminate the effects of varied bounce and when to reach for the skies. Although none of the information on its own was earth shattering, the whole made us all question our own methodology.
Correct club selection is also a key part of Dale’s teaching. Do you really know how far your 9 iron goes on the fly? – but also in terms of asking yourself if the club you are using for a certain job is best designed for your skill level. Hence Dale will always advise a low shot from the fringe of the green when many of us are reaching for our wedges. It is all about percentages and boy does our Jeremy like to play them.
“sometimes you need to do what Tom Watson calls ‘playing bad golf really well’,” he says. As a past master of that particular school of golf, I knew exactly where he was coming from.
After sessions spent in the bunker, on the fringe, on the green and finally on the range for some iron play and heaven forbid – a bit of driving – all of us felt like we had had a real physical and mental going over. Jeremy couldn’t resist showing us a few of his crazy trick-shots at the end, but I could not help wondering which was more impressive: him hitting a duck hook with an upside down driver from a four foot tee or getting me to stop aiming at the hole with my putter even though I knew there was a six foot break!
My fellow pupils,whose handicaps ranged from 9 to 16, were equally impressed with the day, with everyone coming away feeling there had been a good balance between the theoretical and the practical, and that no one had had to make any significant changes to their swings in order to reap some instant benefits to their shot execution.
The long term effects of the school will be felt in the months to come when we take what we have learned onto the course proper. But I already feel I am a better player in my own head, which is surely half the battle.
