In terms of approaching the game of golf, having a solid mental understanding is crucial. This is by no means a whole collection of every piece of the game as there are thousands of books written coming at golf from every angle conceivable, and to marry all of them in one place would make need for a library. This should serve however to give a brief understanding of a golfer’s approach to playing the game.

Driving:

The longest part of the game, this includes everything hit from the tee box apart from the shorter par 3s. A cliché saying among golfers is you drive for flash and putt for cash. As overused as it may be, this is the flashiest part of the game, and asking a person how far they can drive the ball is akin to asking someone at a gym how much they bench.

To count it out as a frivolous and gaudy part of the game though would be to greatly underestimate the importance of a drive. This is where a golfer decides entirely how they will approach a hole.

Out of even par 72 stroke round, 14/15 of the shots are in this section. Being a low percentage of the overall total, a larger percentage of practice time should generally be devoted to other areas, but a lack of focus here will negate your ability to play the rest of any hole how you planned or desired.

When swinging a driver, wood, or hybrid, a minor swing flaw can lead to a huge miss at the end of the shot. That should make sense as the farther a ball travels, an initial degree change has a much greater effect. In direct terms, a ten percent miss on a 100 yard shot with result in your ball ending ten yards away from the desired target. For a 300 yard shot, the same ten percent miss leads your ball to be 30 yards away from where it should be. On a drive that can be the difference between being in the fairway, and being in the hazard.

Above and beyond the simple distance a golfer can hit a ball off the tee, driving is about course management. This is what I referred to when I said driving dictates how you approach a hole. The best method to score in golf is to play each hole backwards, from green to tee, in your mind before actually executing shots.

With that in mind, just because you may have the ability to blast a ball 305 doesn’t mean it is the right shot to hit on every hole if you want to post a low score. If you are playing a short course where the average distance of the par 4s is less than 430 yards, and you aren’t comfortable hitting shots from 130 and in, it would be a wise decision to leave yourself a longer shot after your drive. When deciding how to approach the first shot of a hole, figure out what club you want to hit into the green, and from where, then hit it to that spot from the tee.

That one sentence is legitimately the sum of everything you need to know about why a golfer hits any tee shot the way they do.

Irons:

This is the area of the game where creativity comes most into play. There are a dozen different ways you could play nearly any iron shot and have it be considered a successful stroke. This is the hardest part though, you have to be able to actually hit all of those different shots. On command. Under pressure.

If your goal as a player is to be able to break 100,90,80, or just to stay consistent when playing for fun on the weekends, it is a different situation. If that is your goal, you need to get the most out of your likely limited practice time.

To do that, you need to focus on honing in the natural shot shape in your game, rather than building an array of shots. If you naturally hit a cut or fade( a left to right turning ball), practice that one shape with the goal being able to hit a clinically precise cut you can hit every time you step up to the ball. The same thing applies if you naturally hit a draw(a right to left turning ball).

With one steady shot you can trust and control, you can plan your rounds around that shot and work your way to being a consistently good player.

If your goal though is to be a competitive player in tournaments, look to be able to hit every available shot on the course. Being this type of player, you know there is still a certain direction of shot that naturally fits your eye, and that will be your go-to shot. That applies to every great player in the history of the game.

You cannot however succeed at the highest level if you are one-dimensional as a player. As courses become more difficult, they often require you to play shots in both direction, even on the same hole. Each course is designed to dictate much of what you can do, but after realizing what the designer wants you to hit, how you orient that shot is ultimately up to you.

It can be comfortable for you to hit a high ball that lands softly with minimal spin, or a low flighted shot hardly affected by wind that runs out toward the flag. You just need to be able to hit each different varied shot, with the same or different clubs, so you are never put into a corner by a course.

Keep in mind when choosing a shot path into a green, the most important factor in that decision is still a course management one; how much green do you have to work with given your angle and intended landing area?

This means while it may be possible to hit a 4-iron from 218 to a tucked pin and have it stop for you, often the better option is to hit a club up into the fat of the green to give yourself a reasonable 2-putt yet still a chance at draining a long one. In that, and most other situations, iron play comes down to creativity and confidence.

Short Game:

For ease of reference, I’ll have this section refer to shots shorter in length than a full swing, or under 75 yards. This is the area of the game that for nearly every player on the planet will require the most amount of practice time to be proficient with. The reason being almost every short game shot is unique in some aspect.

You could have an uphill 155 yard shot to the middle of a green 5-6 times within the same round, but not see the same pitch, punch, or bunker shot twice in two years. You have be able to hit those infrequently seen shots with the same confidence you hit the every day ones.

Yes, every single shot game shot won’t be a massively unique shot, and you will have a few basic pitches and chips with various clubs and trajectories you practice in every session, but one of the best ways to practice varying shots without being on the course is to throw balls into random spots and practice getting up and down from every one of them. Eventually you’ll get to the point when no matter where around the green you wind up, you can be confident in your ability to still make par.

Much like the next section, being a proficient short game player will allow you to make up for deficiencies in the rest of your game. If you want to be a great player, you need to be able to miss greens and still make pars.

Putting:

Above all else, putting can make or break a round or even a playing career. When looking at the highest level, over the history of the sport the most seemingly unbeatable players almost always were viewed that way because every putt they had was expected to go in.

Jack Nicklaus drained putts from everywhere and with such regularity he racked up 18 major wins and 19 second place finishes in majors. Jack always had a shot to win if he could put himself in position to putt his way to victory. Prime example is when he 1-putt six of the last nine greens to come from eight back to win the 1986 Masters.

In his prime, did Tiger even miss a ten foot putt that mattered? I’ll always remember Angel Cabrera’s US Open win in 2007, Tiger hadn’t played great but had a very long, multiple break putt on the 72nd hole to force a playoff. It was an impossible putt that no one had come close to making all day and everyone watching still assumed Tiger would hole it.

Most recently, our former Longhorn and Masters champion, Jordan Spieth crushed the field with outstanding and confident putting.

The putting stroke is the shortest of all, yet it has to be even more precise. Once on the green, a golfer is no longer worried about missing by yards or feet, but by fractions of an inch. A 99% perfect putt that starts an inch off-line can have the same chance of going in as a 60% perfect putt that starts 18 inches off-line. Both of which have zero chance of going in, to be clear.

Putting can be made extremely complicated, but essentially it comes down to the speed you roll the ball with, and how well you read greens. Much can still be said on both of those, but for the purpose of basic understanding, every putt can be holed in multiple ways depending on the combination of starting line and speed.

Course Management:

This is an amalgamation of both everything previously mentioned here, and an understanding of how golf courses themselves work.

It is knowing the direction and speed of the prevailing wind, as well as grasping how that wind will affect the distance a ball travels, spins, and turns relative to normal.

It is the difference the density and length of rough has on different shots.

Its recognizing there is a creek in the center of the property that all water travels to, which means even a straight putt will break slightly toward that creek.

Course management is being as or better mentally prepared to play golf as you are physically. Golf is a chess match between the player and the course, with course management being the homework a golfer has done to be prepared for that match.