How important is your wedge game? Just ask Masters Champion Angel Cabrera. After hitting a tree on his second shot of the first extra playoff hole, he hit a wedge shot to about 6 feet and holed the putt to stay alive in the playoff. The rest as they say is history. The bottom line is that your wedges are important scoring clubs. They can help you birdie par 5’s and save pars on par 4’s when you cannot reach the green in two. Tom Kite made a great living on tour being a master with the wedge. In fact, he pioneered the three wedge system as he knew that wedging it the proper distance was the key to scoring.
Notice that barring a miss-hit or miss-alignment, you don’t hit your wedges off line. The misses tend to be short and long. Do you know how far you hit your wedges? Can you hit a 55 yard shot, a 68 yard shot, or a 91 yard shot? The tour players can. It’s not because they have super-human talent, it’s because they practice wedging the ball different distances. I want my students to be able to land their ball within 2 yards of their target so they have no more than a 6 foot putt left. This gives them a reasonable chance at getting it up and down. When I was a touring professional, I had 36 distances that I knew I could hit right on the number. I was excited when I had a wedge in to the hole as I knew exactly the swing that would get me near the hole. At that point, it was all about execution.
There a couple of very good methods to hitting wedges precise distances. One is to vary the length of your backswing. You can do this with several wedges to give you even more distances. This system made famous by Dave Pelz requires the player to maintain a consistent tempo. Another system is to find a comfortable backswing position and accelerate through at different speeds to adjust your distance. Both are effective but require practice in order to achieve precise distance control. When you hear about a player having great touch with his wedge game, it means that he has great distance control. Cabrera had great touch on that wedge shot at Augusta National.
I have found that the best wedge players are the ones who trap the ball and bring the shot in on a lower trajectory with more spin. They de-loft their wedge which allows the ball to rebound off the face and produce more consistent distances. For those of you who may scoop the ball or add loft at impact, the ball tends to run up the face and lose it’s distance. Paul Azinger is a great example of a player who traps his wedges and has great distance control. Find your best way to control your wedge distances and lower scores will be right around the corner. -jz
