Three Shots You Can Learn from Royal Birkdale This Wee

Brown is the new green this week at the Open Championship, where Royal Birkdale's fairways are the baked, running-out shade of a links in an severe heat wave. Watch enough of the broadcast this week and you'll see three issues you probably face at your own course: ball sitting below your feet on a slope, a super-tight lie and wind hard enough that it forces you to change the trajectory on your shot. These solutions will help you tackle this situations.

When the Ball Is Below Your Feet

Birkdale’s fairways sit down in the dunes, so the flat lie is the exception here, not the rule. The instinct when the ball is below your feet is to reach down for it by bending more from the waist, which tips the whole swing forward and surfaces a potential two-way miss. Instead, widen your stance and add knee flex, lowering the entire body to the ball rather than diving at it with the upper half. A wider base offers support, and the extra bend in the knees gets you down to the ball without giving up your posture through the strike.

Get lower with your legs, not your spine.

Cleaner Contact Off a Tight Lie

The ultra-tight lies at Birkdale will punish any contact that isn't precise. Hit even a little behind the ball and the club will bounce. There's no forgiveness like plush turf offers. To improve the quality of your contact, you have to learn to shift your hips toward the target on the downswing. When the lower body stalls, the arms bend to rescue the swing, the low point of the arc drifts backward, and the club bottoms out behind the ball or catches it on the way up. To fix it, try this drill. Bump the hips toward the target before anything else, and rehearse it with short, slow swings. That single shift pushes the low point forward and, more usefully, to a more consistent spot.

Start the hips toward the target, and the low point follows.

Controlling Trajectory in Wind

When the wind blows enough to affect the trajectory of your shot — a common condition at the Open Championship — the reflex is to swing harder to punch through it, which adds speed, adds spin, and sends the ball higher and exposing it to more wind. Lower flight comes from doing less. A shorter backswing and a shorter follow-through take speed off the strike, less speed means less spin, and less spin is what keeps the ball down. Take one more club than the yardage calls for, move the ball back in your stance a touch, and let the smaller swing flight it under the breeze instead of fighting up through it.

More club, shorter swing—the ball stays under it.

Ready to stop guessing at these shots? Find your nearest GOLFTEC Training Center and see what 4,000 data points per swing reveal about your contact. Book a Game Evaluation to learn more.

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