Last week, we focused on the sidehill lie, with the ball below your feet. It requires you to squat down, tilt your upper body and aim left just in case. Another challenging uneven lie is the downhill lie, where the goal is to get the ball in the air while gravity is pulling you down the slope.
The key with the downhill lie is to position your body and posture in way to make this lie perform as though it’s flat. We do this by adjusting our shoulders parallel and spine to perpendicular to the slope of the hill. It’s sort of like playing some type of tomfoolery with the ground. If you trick it by positioning your body so the lie performs like a flat one, you can use your normal swing and allow the swing arc to hit a successful shot.
However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Gravity will be pulling your mass downhill the whole time.
We move our center of mass to our lead foot during the swing on any successful golf shot. In the case of the downhill lie, our lead foot is the one farther downhill, so the lie will have both gravity and movement during he swing to the downhill foot, and that will wreak havoc with balance. To increase your stability, begin with a little more weight over your lead foot, creating a more solid base to support these natural forces.
The most common mistake made on a downhill lie is positioning your weight on the trail foot, or uphill leg, and then swinging up on the ball to help get it in the air. This set-up position will cause a swing arc that will likely cause you to hit the ground before the ball, and you’ll just have to do it all over again.
To help the bottom of the swing arc to be in the right place to strike the ball at impact, keep your backswing pivot centered, or even pivot around that downhill leg. When you’re set up correctly over the ball on a downhill slope, with your shoulders parallel, spine perpendicular and weight over the lead foot, the positioning of the club head will now affect your shot.
The downhill lie will cause there to be less loft on the club head, and the ball will fly lower than normal for that club. Play the lower shot and expect it to run out. Also, make sure you don’t try a longer-length, less-lofted club, as the slope itself will make that next to impossible to hit with purpose.
So don’t get fooled again by a downhill slope. Even better, a beautiful thing about playing a little tomfoolery with the slope by setting up correctly is that it works with both full-swing shots as well as chip and pitch shots around the green.
Good luck and enjoy the last laugh.
Peter Harris is the director of golf at the Fore-U Golf Center in West Lebanon. His column appears in the weekly Recreation page during the golf season.