Golf Digest senior writer Alex Myers is on a one-year mission to see how good he can get at golf through daily training, practice and playing. Read more from his “Late Scratch?” series here.
On a hazy day in July, I really connected with my driver on the long par-5 11th hole at Metropolis Country Club. And I was just as (pleasantly) suprised as my friend Mark when we arrived at our golf balls—and mine was about 10 yards farther up in the left rough.
“Wow, you got me!” he exclaimed. “Yeah, it only took me 20 years,” I replied.
I was not exaggerating. And in that moment, I was so proud of all the gym work and speed training I’ve done in the past year that I completely forgot about the double bogey I’d just made on the previous hole. But what happened next, as I’ve come to learn this season, illustrated both the benefit—and the drawback—of driving it farther.
You don’t have to be way off to be off
I swear I’m not writing about this to just boast about my distance gains, but rather to express my disappointment in that they haven’t translated to lower scores thus far. And to show why keeping detailed stats can be so important to understand where you’re losing strokes. I went into this “Late Scratch?” project hoping that an added 10 yards would shave a stroke off my handicap. And by the time I entered the season, I was hoping the extra 20 I wound up gaining would cut my handicap in half. But that hasn’t been the case.
On this day and on this particular shot, the mixed results from my distance gains (shout-out to trainer Mike Carroll) showed up. On one hand, my 313-yard poke (Yes, the wind was at our back) put me in great shape to play the hole and even after hitting a poor second shot, I just needed to pitch onto the green and two-putt for par. But being in the rough—on a day where the rough was particularly gnarly—definitely played a role in that poor second shot and kept me from having a real crack at going for the green in two.
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From the tee box, I assumed I had found the left side of the fairway—and the old me would have hitting it on that line. But with that extra 20-plus yards my ball ran into the high stuff, a recurring theme all day as I hit just one (Yes, one) fairway. But this is where I was happy to have a stat-keeping system like Arccos Golf so I could dig a little deeper into the numbers.
As you can see, I actually gained a full stroke to a scratch golfer with my distance that day, but lost 2.1 strokes due to accuracy for a -1.1 strokes gained total off the tee. Now, most golfers have realized that how many fairways you hit is arguably the most misleading stat in golf. And Golf Digest has written plenty about distance being more important over accuracy. But one fairway is pretty extreme. And while at some courses you might be able to get away with that, it made my approach shots that much more difficult all day.
You’re probably thinking, “You’re swinging harder and sacrificing accuracy for length, duh,” but it’s not that simple. The most surprising part that day was that I felt I had driven it great—I just hadn’t wound up in great spots. And Arccos Golf showed that with this respectable dispersion chart:
That chart is something course-management expert Scott Fawcett says players should use, not only to analyze how they’re hitting the ball, but also to predict where they’ll hit the ball on future holes.
“Start being aware of the width of your shot pattern,” Fawcett, the creator of DECADE Golf, told Golf Digest last year. “In other words, how far offline are your misses.”
This is definitely something I’m keeping an eye on for the first time. But it’s something that is greatly affected by distance.
“Think of shot patterns like a triangle,” Fawcett adds. “If you hit the ball the same number of degrees offline, but you hit it only 200 yards versus 300 yards, your shot pattern is going to be narrower.”
I decided to look back at my off-the-tee stats from a couple rounds last fall before my speed gains had started to kick in for comparison. And what I found gave me reason for hope.
The stats show longer drives are valuable
Let’s start with a round at Rye Golf Club in which I posted a similar overall driving performance of -1.5 strokes gained. However, how I got there was completely different.
As you can see, in that round, my lost driving strokes were split pretty evenly between distance (-.9) and accuracy (-.7). I hit 6-of-14 fairways, which isn’t great, but it’s certainly better than one. And look at this chart that shows a 34-yard dispersion pattern, significantly worse than my more recent round at Metropolis when I only hit one fairway.
And here’s a round I had a few weeks later in Hilton Head at the Palmetto Dunes Arthur Hills Course:
This time, I peppered the fairways—in part to them having much wider landing areas—and only lost 0.1 strokes in accuracy. Even though my dispersion pattern of 28 yards was wider than at Metropolis. The main difference was that my distance—or, lack thereof at the time—cost me 1.8 of the 1.9 strokes lost off the tee. That’s a pretty stunning difference.
So you can see how that 10-yards-of-distance-gains-equals-a-stroke works. From those early rounds to now, my 20-yards-plus increase has saved me some two-plus strokes. But now I need to use those gains more effectively.
There are multiple ways to capitalize on distance gains
So what does all of this mean? A few things. I definitely need to be more accurate off the tee—especially in tournament rounds—but I could also be more strategic with club selection. Especially if I’m going to continue to play the same sets of tees I’ve always played. Prior to this year, I rarely thought about hitting anything less than a driver on par 4s and par 5s, so that remains my mindset. Driving the ball farther has allowed me to carry certain hazards and play more aggressively at times, like when I drove it through the green on this 280-yard par 4 (Again, downwind) at Dutchman’s Pipe Golf Club during a Golf Digest Open qualifier in May:
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However, it’s also caused me to reach others or run through fairways where they get more narrow. But, overall, my driver dispersion over my past 10 rounds (Below) isn’t too bad. And I’ve pretty much eliminated the big-left miss, which was a point of emphasis for this season.
Regardless, Fawcett would say I should be using that chart to map out what to hit off the tee before I play my rounds. Yes, that takes some extra effort, but that would be a smarter strategy than just pulling driver on every hole. And Arccos has an AI mode that allows you to do this.
Of course, I could also play different tees. According to Golf Digest’s calculations based on how far you hit driver, I could definitely afford to move back a set from where I usually play and then I wouldn’t worry as much about getting burned by hitting the driver. But as I’ve previously written about, it seems that playing shorter, easier layouts is the best way to lower your handicap.
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Finally, there’s another thing that would help all of this: Better approach play. I’ll blame this on three factors with a general need to improve in this area being No. 1. Perhaps, swinging harder with the driver—and coming across the line at the top of the backswing like in that photo above—hasn’t helped with my irons. However, there’s also a possibility I need time to adapt to hitting different, shorter yardages into familiar holes. And to that end, as Sam Weinman has written about in his Low Net column, sometimes having shorter yardages—and feeling you have the green light to get aggressive with your wedges—can lead to bigger mistakes than if you were farther back and taking more conservative targets.
The good news is that distance gains are fun—and they’re more reliable from round to round than how many fairways you hit. A Golf Digest MythBusters proved it’s usually worth swinging harder like I did on that hole at Metropolis to hit it farther even if you risk sacrificing some accuracy. It’s like how you can usually expect a good iron player to give himself a bunch of birdie chances, but how many they make from on any given day can vary. So like mental coach Josh Nichols told me during a preseason pep talk, I’ll be nice to myself. And hope that, eventually, my nice distance gains will start paying off in the form of lower scores.
RELATED: Catch up on the entire “Low Scratch?” series
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
