How to watch golf and actually learn something

Golfers watch an enormous amount of professional golf and take almost nothing from it, because they watch the ball rather than the decision. A few deliberate habits turn four hours of television into the cheapest coaching available, and none of them involve copying a swing.

The reason the transfer usually fails is that broadcast golf is edited for drama. You are shown the shots that finished close, the putts that went in and the drives that carried a bunker, which is roughly the opposite of the information an amateur needs. What follows is a way of watching against that edit.

Watch where they aim, not where the flag is

The single most transferable thing in professional golf is target selection. On a back-left pin cut four paces from the edge, watch how many players in the field aim at the middle of the green and accept two putts. Commentators call it conservative; the statistics call it correct.

The reasoning is dispersion. A tour player’s 7-iron pattern is perhaps eight to twelve yards wide, and even that is too wide to aim at a pin with a bunker short of it. Your pattern is twice the size or more. If the best players in the world will not aim at that flag with a pattern half your width, the decision for you is not close.

If you copy one thing from watching golf, copy this. It costs nothing, requires no practice, and works the first Saturday you try it.

Time the pre-shot routine

Count the seconds from the moment a player steps into the shot until the club starts back. It will be almost identical for every shot they hit, including the one to win the tournament. Pick one player and time five shots: the spread will usually be under two seconds.

Amateurs do the reverse. They speed up when they are nervous, because they want the shot over with, and slow down when they are unsure, because they are still deciding while standing over the ball. Both are visible on the scorecard, and both are fixable by counting.

Your routine does not need to look like anyone else’s, and it does not need to be long. It needs to be the same length every time, which is a thing you can build in a fortnight and keep for a career.

Watch the misses

Television shows you the shots that finish close. Pay attention instead to where the bad ones go, and specifically to which side of the green they finish on.

Professionals miss on the side that leaves an easy next shot, almost every time. Pin on the right with a bunker beside it: the miss is long left, into thirty feet of green. That is not luck and it is not touch. It is aim, decided on the tee box or in the fairway, and it is available to a 20-handicap immediately.

The phrase to listen for from a commentator is short-sided, and the useful exercise is to notice how rarely it happens to the leaders and how often it happens to the players falling down the board.

Watch the wedges, not the drives

Driving distance is entertainment. For most viewers there is no lesson in a 320-yard carry, because you are not going to produce one and nothing about how it was produced applies to your swing.

Wedge play is the opposite. Watch the length of the backswing on a 60-yard shot and notice that it is nowhere near full. Notice how rarely a full swing appears inside 100 yards at all. Watch where the ball lands relative to the flag, which is usually short of it, and how much it releases on the second bounce.

That is the shot you face every round and never practice, and the televised version of it is a free demonstration of the two things that make it work: a shorter swing at a constant speed, and a landing spot chosen rather than assumed.

The short game around the green

Count how often the world’s best players use a putter or a low running chip from just off the green rather than a lofted wedge. It is most of the time, and it is the exact opposite of what most amateurs do from the same spot.

The principle is simple enough to state in a sentence: the less time the ball spends in the air, the less can go wrong. A putt from the fringe that finishes eight feet away is a far better outcome than a lob wedge that finishes four feet away one time in five and thirty feet away twice.

Watch which club comes out of the bag when a player has a tight lie and green to work with. It is rarely the 60-degree.

Watch the walk between shots

This is the habit nobody mentions. Watch a player who has just made a double bogey walk to the next tee. There is no visible difference from the walk after a birdie, and that is not stoicism for its own sake: it is a professional habit of leaving a hole where it happened.

The equivalent for you is concrete. Decide that the walk from the green to the next tee is where the previous hole ends, whatever it was, and that the card gets written there and not discussed afterwards. Amateurs lose more shots to the hole after the disaster than to the disaster itself.

What not to copy

Do not copy a swing you see on television. These are athletes with a full-time coach, a physiotherapist, a fitting team and thousands of hours, and a swing change taken from a slow-motion replay is how amateurs spend a season getting worse.

Two specific traps. The first is speed: what looks smooth on television is a swing at a speed you cannot reproduce, and copying the shape without the speed produces a different swing entirely. The second is equipment: a tour player’s 7-iron has a shaft, loft and lie built for them, and the flight you are admiring is partly the club.

Copy decisions, routines, aim and short-game club selection. All four cost nothing and transfer immediately.

Watching live is better

One day at a tournament teaches you more than a season of broadcast, because you see the shots the cameras skip and you get an honest sense of ball flight, green speed and how far the ball actually goes.

The technique is to stay put. Stand behind a green complex or a par 3 for an hour and watch fifty players face the identical shot, which is the single most instructive hour available in golf. Following one group for eighteen holes means walking six miles and seeing very little.

The practice days, Monday through Wednesday, are cheaper and better for this: thinner crowds, players hitting two or three balls, and a range you can stand behind for as long as you like.

Where to watch in the U.S.

For broadcast, the PGA Tour, the LPGA and the Korn Ferry Tour publish full schedules, and the LPGA is arguably the better watch for an amateur: clubhead speeds closer to a good male amateur’s, and the same decisions made with the same discipline.

The four men’s majors, the Masters in April, the PGA Championship in May, the U.S. Open in June and The Open in July, plus the U.S. Women’s Open, are the weeks with the most complete coverage, including featured groups that follow a pair for a full round. Those featured-group streams are the best learning material available, because they show every shot including the layups.

For live golf, the USGA’s national championships rotate around the country, and the tours visit most large markets at some point in a season. Below that, state and regional amateur championships are free to attend, played on excellent courses, and almost nobody goes. If you have never watched high-level golf in person, a state amateur an hour from your house is the cheapest way to start.

Volunteering gets you closer still, for less than the price of a competition-day ticket, and it is the subject of its own article. Panxis Golf has no commercial relationship with any tour, broadcaster or event mentioned here.

Three things to try next Sunday

• Pick one player and time five pre-shot routines. Note the spread.
• On the hardest pin of the day, count how many of the field aim at it.
• Count the full wedge swings inside 100 yards. There will be fewer than you expect.
• Watch which club comes out from just off the green, and how often it is a putter.

Watching golf will not improve your swing. Watched properly, it will improve your decisions, and those are worth more strokes than any swing change you were going to make anyway.