The Scotsman.com’s John Huggan tackles a question about women professional golfers that has perplexed me for a long time:
. . . [W]omen, typically, own short games that simply do not bear close comparison with their male counterparts. Whether pitching, chipping, blasting from bunkers or putting, the ladies are markedly inferior.
Which is odd, when you think about it. In the areas of the game where innate touch and feel should have obvious advantages over pure strength, men still manage to make the women look inadequate.[ . . .]
Look at the stats. A 29 putts per round average barely gets you into the top 100 on the PGA Tour; on the LPGA Tour, that number has you in the top 30.
As Huggan notes, practice makes perfect and, for some reason, the women pros don’t like practicing the short game as much as other areas of the game. Who’d a thunk it?
Interesting point.
My short game consistently lags. I have a few reasons for this in my own life:
1. I’ve found it difficult to find really good short game instruction. It seems to me that there is less consistency in the way short game technique is taught versus instructors knowing what to do with you on the range as far as tweaking what you are currently doing. So, it’s hard to work on your short game if you don’t know what to work on.
1a. The Pelz short game school 1 day school really helped me a lot and gave me things to work on. The problem with his stuff is that a lot of teachers don’t teach that way, so if you want to work on that aspect of the game, you have to do a refresher whenever they happen to be back in town, or spend a zilliondy dollars at his school.
2. It is hard for me to hit it as far as my male counterparts. So, in order to be able to come close to it, I really do have to work on range stuff.
I don’t know if any of this corresponds to the pros at all, but they are just my own experiences. I am guessing that also part of this is the percentages. More male golfers in the world means that the ones that have all aspects of their game in order will become the top golfers in the world. As more women play golf, their play should improve. Just a theory.
-Steph
Stephanie, you make a good point about the lack of good short game instruction. Pelz’s “Short Game Bible” is probably the best book ever written on the subject. His “Putting Bible” is also quite good, but not as good as the short game book, in my view. About 20 years ago or so, Tom Watson wrote a good short game book entitled “Getting Up and Down” and Dave Stockton’s putting book is also a good resource.
Interestingly, the good women players that I have played with personally have all had very good short games. However, there is no question that the the short game of most LPGA Tour members lags well behind the PGA Tour members. My bet is that this changes over the next decade or so as the LPGA continues to gain in popularity.