Learn to play golf in the wind

If any of you watch the professional tournaments held in Hawaii or Britain, you have probably noticed that the professionals were playing in severe wind conditions. Hopefully, you noticed several adjustments they made to combat the wind by giving themselves the best chances at maintaining their balance, hitting the ball low and keeping control of their swings.

Listed below are some helpful tips on how to adjust your set-up and golf swing to salvage your rounds during windy conditions.

Tee Ball: When down wind use a 3-wood not a driver. The 3-wood hits the ball higher, which in turn makes it stay in the air longer. The 3-wood is also easier to control because of the shorter shaft and added loft of the face. Into the wind, though, hit your driver because that club will keep the ball down, thus fighting the wind and causing the ball to tumble forward once it hits the ground.

Putting: Widen your stance, bend more at the waist, move the ball slightly more toward middle and shorten your back stroke. There is nothing more nerve racking when you are putting on a fast green with the wind howling. Besides watching the ball oscillate and listening to your slacks rustling in the wind, you have a hard time steadying your upper body. Therefore, by widening your stance, moving the ball more towards middle and bending more at the waist you stabilize the lower and upper parts of your body, get your eyes more over the ball and create a more balanced base. Try this next time and you'll become more stable over the ball allowing you to concentrate on producing a shorter, more solid stroke. Remember, too long a stroke in the wind will cause the putter head and shaft to wobble causing off-center hits. Shorten up the stroke and you'll notice more solid contact and improve your chances of holing the putts.

Full Swing: During the final round most players worked on keeping their approach shots down out of the wind. They wanted to control the ball as much as possible and not let the wind blow it all over. The best way to keep the ball down is to follow these few principles:

1. Play the ball slightly farther back in your stance (1/2 to one ball back of its normal position)
2. Narrow your stance, setting your weight more toward the front side. This will reduce your movement off the ball, shorten the arc and reduce the power shift, which leads to lower ball flights.
3. Grip down on the club. Besides giving you more control this also shortens the arc to create a shallower path and lower ball flight.
4. Grip the club with relaxed hands and swing smoothly, free of tension.
5. Take one or two clubs more depending on the severity of the wind and DON'T TRY TO KILL THE BALL but JUST SWING EASY!

Fresh New Callaway Sticks

FT-IZ DRIVER

Featuring a radical triangular design (buh-bye square), this driver is dubbed by Callaway as the company’s longest and straightest driver ever.


Looks and Feel: It has fighter-jet good looks—aerodynamic, sleek, mean. It’s also a cinch to align. The face angle seemed to sit shut rather than square at address even though we tested a 10-degree model with a square face angle, but that’s likely a function of the shape as it rests on the turf. As for feel, it’s the first carbon-crowned driver that doesn’t feel like one at all. It has a tremendous pop at impact.


Performance: It’s definitely long, just like Callaway says. But, in our test, we found it was a lot easier to turn this over and hit a hook than it was to hit a slice. That is, a lot of our misses were pull hooks. We suspect that’s not a mistake, since the configuration of the head shape and internal weighting, in fact, combine to make this club easier to square up at impact than, say, a traditionally shaped head. That took some getting used to, but once we did, we fell in love. As for forgiveness on off-center hits, the FT-iZ demonstrated a lot of give. We rarely missed big, and when we did, it was our fault, not the driver’s.


Bottom Line: If you want a driver that has a new-age shape, awesome forgiveness and is an inherent slice-killer, the FT-iZ is a solid choice. We didn’t test a Tour version (with a one-degree open face), but we suspect that one would have cured our hooks in a jiffy. That said, the FT-iZ remains a top contender for a 2010 GT Tech Award.

DIABLO EDGE DRIVER

The new Diablo Edge is a four-piece, all-titanium design that, like the FT-iZ, is hell-bent on adding more distance to everyone’s drives.


Looks and Feel: Callaway is really making strides in bucking against traditional driver shapes and trying something different. The Diablo Edge is aerodynamic and aesthetically pleasing, and both solid and missed hits feel pretty good. Our only criticism is of the S2H2 hosel configuration on the Standard model. We understand the point: Weight is removed from the hosel and redistributed in the clubhead. Then why affix a cheapish-looking ferrule on the short hosel? It takes away from the sexiness of the sleek titanium design. However, the Tour model, well, that has got to be one of the best-looking shapes (it has a traditional hosel) we’ve ever seen from Callaway. Booyah.


Performance: We only tested the Standard model, but our findings were impressive. The Diablo Edge produces a surprisingly penetrating ballflight, thanks to both a nine-degree loft and a square face angle (models above 10 degrees have one-degree closed faces). We saw a limited dispersion on our misses, and our solid bombs flew a long way, usually in the direction we wanted. In fact, we took a couple swats and tried to mis-hit and had trouble doing so—let that give you an idea of how forgiving this driver is. You may not always hit it straight (that’s up to your swing, not necessarily the driver), but you’ll definitely hit a lot of long drives with this club.