Drive For Show, Putt For Dough

If you’ve been around golf for a little while you would have heard of the saying…

“Drive For Show, Putt For Dough”

And what that is implying is that you can drive great, but it doesn’t really matter that much. You’ll impress some people, look good, yada, yada. But it’s not that important because what really matters is putting – because that’s where you make your scores.

Now, there’s no doubt that putting is super important to scoring low. You’d be stupid to say it isn’t. BUT I’ve heard of great golfers saying that their most important club in their bag is the driver.

Why would they say that?

It’s simply because of this fact….the shorter the shot into the green the closer on average you’ll hit the ball to the hole.

So, if you’re playing a stock standard, straight away 400 yard hole and you hit your drive 250 yards on average then you’re obviously left with a 150 yard shot to the hole.

But what if you hit the ball 30 yards further and you had a 120 yard shot into the hole?

Do you think if you had 30 yards less into each hole you’d be, on average, closer to the hole?

Naturally you would because…
Your worst shot from 120 yards will ALWAYS finish closer to the hole than your worst shot from 150 yards out.

So if everything else stayed the same in your golf game, and you added 30 yards to your drives, you WOULD score lower than you would have otherwise. Because at the end of the day… it comes down to simple statistics.

The closer you get to the hole, the lower your scores will become – on average over time.

Obviously accuracy comes into the equation when discussing this, because if you add 30 inaccurate yards to your drives then chances are that your scores will go up, not down. I’m going to discuss longer drives, plus accuracy, more in some future posts – so look out for that.