[trilochana.nejman]

I don't know if this would qualify as my "best", but it was definitely my favorite:

I'm in the trees on the right side of a par 4. My ball is sitting on an almost bare lie in the middle of the tree line. According to my SkyCaddie, I have 184 yards to the center of a slightly elevated green (about 15 feet or so above my feet) and mostly trees between me and that target.

What I need to do is to hit a shot that will first go under the lowest branch of an oak which is about 40 yards away from me and then soar upwards high enough to go over a stand of mature oaks which are about 40 or 50 feet high and guard the green directly on its right front and then just have the ball "die" and fall onto the putting surface.

So the deal is that once the ball gets past the oak with the low hanging branches, there is a gap of about 90 to 100 yards of relatively open area (sparsely treed) before the stand of tall oaks near the green come into play.
There is a breeze of about 10 mph in my face which will actually help if I hit the shot I'm planning for.

So I decide that to do all of what needs to be done will require a very crisply struck 6-iron. I set the ball a bit farther back in my stance to make sure that I make ball-first contact and to ensure that the ball will fly out low to get under the branches of the first oak and I take a bit more backswing and I make sure that I hit the ball as solidly as I can.

The ball shoots off the clubface like a bullet, gets past the first tree and easily flies under those branches, then the spin begins to kick in and the ball catches the air (aided by that breeze) and starts to climb like it's on an escalator. It gets to the tall oaks and clears them by about 5 or 10 feet and then hits that 10 mph breeze head on and basically shuts its engines off and simply drops onto the green and ends up about 12 feet from the pin.

That shot is my favorite because I planned every move it made and not only did it work perfectly, but it was a nice payoff for all of those years of paying attention to ball flight at the driving range (even on the poor shots) and making mental notes of how to make the ball do certain things or what happens when I hit a ball a certain way.

I have a whole mental "Rolodex" of shots like that and this particular shot was special because I went through that Rolodex, selected the shot I needed for this situation and then put it into play. It was sort of like calling in to "Central Dispatch" and asking for a shot with a specific distance, shape and reaction to wind and "Dispatch" sent down something like "shot number 407 Low with extra spin".

Sadly, I missed that 12 footer for birdie, but I think that may have been because I was a bit too wrapped up in congratulating myself for that 6-iron shot, but even just a plain old par from where I was was fine with me!


-JP