64. Learning and practicing how to hit your opposite “Bad Shot” on the range, as bizarre as it may seem, helps you eliminate the destructive bad shot on the course. Facing and embracing the bad shots by learning to hit them and not hit them deliberately takes the fear out of them.  After all, it’s the shots we fear that we attract on the course

"How do you find the center between two points when you are only given one point as a reference to calculate from?" The answer is, you cannot do it without a second point of reference. You can have as many guesses as you like as to where the middle is but you can never know for sure. What has this to do with the game?

A player who slices will have good days when he hits acceptable fades but he will always be at the mercy of his destructive slice. There will always be a sense of anxiety as the player hopes the slice will not come back. Each drive is like a game of Russian roulette. This has serious limitations for the player because "Hitting and Hoping" is no foundation for building a better game upon.

In an attempt to find the answer to the golfing problem a player can also have many guesses, but just as in solving the math’s equation, you can only truly cure a slice and be free of its influence over you when you find the opposite point of reference. In golfing terms this is a hook. Ben Hogan and Gary Player, to name but two quite tidy players both suffered with a hook in their early careers. They only became dominant world class players when they learnt how to hit the fade/slice shot.

Stand any of the worlds top players on a practice ground and ask them to hit extreme shots and they will gladly oblige as they can do it deliberately. The reason they are world class is because they can hit them deliberately.  Obviously, it means they can not hit them deliberately as well. They have no fear of a bad shot because they have it under true control. In fact they practice these so-called bad shots because they form part of their tremendous repertoire of recovery shots. Top players are not "Hit and Hopers"

When you can hit hooks, slices, fade and draw shots deliberately, the golf course target zones become bigger. A top player hitting a drive with fade or draw will play the shot down one side of the fairway and the flight of the ball will come back toward the middle. On a fairway that is 30 yds wide, this player has a 30yd wide target and will hit it maybe 90% of the time. Compare this to the struggling player trying to not hit his slice and play it down the center, he has only 15yd yards of fairway right of his intended line to miss it into, after that, he sees his ball heading to the rough. When he does this 90% of the time, is there any wonder he suffers anxiety and poor performance. Good golfers see their ball moving into the target, struggling players see their ball moving away from the target.

Learning and practicing how to hit your opposite “Bad Shot” on the range, as bizarre as it may seem, helps you eliminate the destructive bad shot on the course. Facing and embracing the bad shots by learning to hit them and not hit them deliberately takes the fear out of them.  After all, it’s the shots we fear that we attract on the course.