You ever see something so obviously beneficial to your own golf game that you haven’t been employing yourself that makes you wonder, what the hell have I been doing all this time? That’s how many of us will be feeling after seeing this simple trick Lee Westwood uses with his irons.
In what has to be the most basic helpful move to his game, the Englishman writes out his stock yardages directly on the clubhead of each of his irons. In a video he posted to Twitter overnight Westwood shows the back of his 8-iron to the camera, and it reads “164,” written in black marker. Westwood then stripes one, then the cameraman checks the numbers and sees that Westwood is actually off by one WHOLE yard, his ball travelling 163 yards:
Now, the haters will say that this has zero relevance to the average golfer or the 90s shooter who hits their 8-iron anywhere from 120 to 150 depending on the strike, the weather that day, how many beers deep you are, etc. But we’d argue for the good player, and the player trying to become a good player, this move can only be seen as an advantageous one for your game. The other haters will say this won’t work at the range for us peons hitting yellow Top Flites, and to that we have no rebuttal.Â
But again, if you play enough rounds of golf with a go-to golf ball you can generally get a pretty good ballpark of how far each iron carries, which is the number Westwood is writing here – his carry yardage, as Golf.com’s Andrew Tursky pointed out in March when Westwood put in a new set of irons and wrote his yardages down. There will always be other variables like wind and course conditions, but at least having somewhat of an idea of how far it is going to fly in the air is extremely helpful.Â
