When you have a deadline for something — say, a newspaper piece — and everything else in your world doesn’t stop requiring your attention, you keep your head down so you get it done on time.
Keeping your head down may be a good thing for getting work done and to control anxiety as the work piles up around you, but keeping your head down too long during a chip will lead to shoddy work with your golf shots.
A chip shot is a shot played from close to the green, usually a few yards from the putting surface, where you hit the ball up the air a little bit and the ball rolls forward four or five times the distance it flew in the air.
Most of our bad chip shots happen for the same reason. The club bottoms out behind the ball, and two possible misses result. The first is when the club digs behind the ball, resulting in a fat shot where the ball goes nowhere. The second type of miss is when the club bottoms out behind the ball and then bounces into it, causing a skulled shot where the ball rolls uncontrollably across the green.
I’m sure your friends have told you to keep your head down during a shot. This advice should be avoided most of the time.
When chipping, if you keep your head and body still like you would on a putt, you’ll restrict your body from rotating, basically ensuring the club will bottom out behind the ball before impact. A chip needs to be struck with a descending blow and requires some dynamic motion and body turn back and through the ball. Plus, keeping your head down well after a shot is in the air makes you look silly, and who wants that?
To get a feel for a proper chip, turn back and slightly hinge the club up to belt height, then swing through with a gentle pivot so the club travels waist-high on the follow-through. The goal is to swing the club from hip to hip while feeling the connection between the swing length and body rotation through impact.
As your body rotates and hips turn through impact, your eyes should move with the shot as the ball leaves the club face.
By doing so, you can save the head-down stuff for pressure putts and getting a job done well.
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.