CHIPPING IS A GOOD WARMUP By Drew Powell Of all the things tour pros do differently than us, their warmup rou- tines are significant. We might arrive 15 minutes before our tee time, swing a couple of clubs to get loose and wonder why we need a mulligan. One neglected part of pre-round routines is chipping and pitching. Hitting chips before a round helps cali- brate your hands and feel and dial in the low point of your swing. You might hit some fat and thin, or take too big a divot, but you’ll start to feel crisp con- tact and a sense of how the club is in- teracting with the ground. The best part about warming up by chipping is that anyone can achieve this feeling of crisp contact, given it’s such a short swing. Even a scratch handicap admitted that if he had the option of taking five full swings on the range or five chips before a round, he would choose the chips. Some people hit balls to loosen their muscles, but stretching can do a better job. Tour pros say much of their warmup is done in the fitness trailers. The best way to find clean, centre- face contact is to hit different shots and learn to adjust with each. Hit a standard chip, then play the ball back in your stance and hit a lower shot, fol- lowed by an open-face high shot. The key is to never hit the same shot twice in a row. Repeat this to different pins. Mixing it up helps your hands, arms and body learn how they need to move to find clean contact. Chip from a vari- ety of lies in the rough and pay atten- tion to how the club is moving through and how the ball is coming out. So next time you have a few minutes before teeing off, grab a wedge. Even if you’re planning a longer warm-up ses- sion, start by hitting some chips before you move to full shots.
LIV IN BRIEF 54 players in 2024: 13 teams of four players, plus two wild cards each week. Wild cards can play their way into a team. The LIV Golf League consists of 14 events for an individual and a team championship. The team championship is decided at the final event in a knockout format combining matchplay and strokeplay. All teams are seeded for the finale. During the first two days of each event, the best three team scores count, all four the final day. $85 MILLION Prize money won by 11 Southern African players after LIV’s first 26 events, more than R1.5 billion. Branden Grace is the most successful, due to an $8m bonus for finishing second in the 2022 points standings. He and Charl Schwartzel won the first two $20m LIV titles, each $4m, at the time the
biggest first-place cheque in the history of golf.
SA TOP EARNERS Branden Grace $28.3m Louis Oosthuizen $15.7m Charl Schwartzel $15.3m Dean Burmester $10.1m Scott Vincent $6.8m Hennie du Plessis $4.5m
STINGERS Louis (captain), Charl and Branden have been team members since first LIV event in June 2022, which they won by 14 shots with Hennie du Plessis. Dean replaced Hennie in 2023. They won a team title at Tulsa in 2023 (celebrating below). MOST WINS 3 – Talor Gooch, Cameron Smith, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson 2 – Bryson DeChambeau, Joaquin Niemann
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 25
MARCH/APRIL 2024
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting