Golf Pitching - 30 Yard Pitch Shots
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The 30 yard pitch shot is a very tough one for golfers at all levels. So what is the secret to playing this shot? Well, the first one is to never put yourself in a position where you are faced with this shot. In the 2005 British Open, Tom Watson asked Jack Nicklaus why he didn't try and drive a particular hole after Watson put his tee shot on the green. Nicklaus replied, "Because the 30 yard pitch shot isn't my best." If the best golfer in the history of the game didn't want to face this delicate shot, don't feel bad if you don't feel comfortable playing it either!
- Chuck demonstrates several approaches to avoid chunking a 30 yard pitch shot
- Use a hybrid with a fairly square stance, ball off the left instep, weight slightly forward, and a normal grip to carry most of the way then roll like a putt
- The 3 wood with the same stance, setup & stroke will carry a bit less and roll more
- With a 7 iron, the ball is a bit back, off the right big toe, to come down more sharply & fly all the way to the green
- With the 56 or 60 wedge you want to use the bounce to avoid digging into the ground
- Get the bounce to release down, allow the hands to release a bit, have the ball & divot up in your stance
- The wedge is a riskier shot, more suited for playing out of the rough for the first cut
Jack Nicklaus once said that the 30-yard shot, pitch shot, is the hardest shot in all of golf.
And for a lot of golfers, they just don't have a clue on what's the best way to hit it, what's the safest way to hit it from different lies and those types of things.
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
I'm going to show you several different ways to play it.
And we're going to start out with this tight lie here.
So this is mown tight bent grass.
So it's very, very tight lie.
It's very wet.
And it's on a little bit of an upslope and slightly into the grain.
Those things spell chunk for most hammeter golfers.
So it's a very, very scary shot because they're very afraid that they're going to stick the blade of the club into the grass.
So I'm going to show you the, really what's honestly the safest place once you learn how to hit it is actually with a hybrid or a three-wood.
And there are a couple of different options.
I'm going to show you the hybrid first because I've got about say five, six yards to carry here where there's a little bit of some rough spots in there that I don't really want to try and roll the ball over.
So using my hybrid, which has about 17 degrees aloft, I can get it to actually carry almost onto the green.
I don't want it to carry that far because I want it to roll like a putt.
But basically, this is going to allow me to read the green, play the slope of the green and have a very fail safe shot because I'm never going to chunk this thing.
The only thing that could really happen is I hit it too far.
That's what happens for most people.
So that's just a matter of learning to develop the feel.
And the good thing is, because it's pretty similar to a putt, it's pretty easy to get the feel of this guy.
So the first thing, obviously, you're going to want to practice this shot on the green, on your practice green as much as you can.
But as you're coming out, you need to start to find out where your stroke bottoms out.
And this will be predicated primarily on how much weight you have forward.
You don't want a tremendous amount of weight forward.
You maybe want to be 60-40 because you don't want to hit down on the ball because that's going to, too sharply, because that's going to drive the ball on the ground, have it pop up, and then it's not going to behave correctly.
It's going to have a chance of bouncing and skidding offline.
So we want to come through fairly shallow, which is why we don't want to be way out on our left side.
The second thing is ball position.
Again, we don't want to hit way down on it.
So we don't want the ball way back like this.
This is going to cause the ball to drive straight into the ground, pop up, and bounce offline.
So we're going to come through pretty shallow.
So I'm playing this kind of off my left instep here, and with a fairly square stance.
Now, my right foot is pretty square to the line.
My left foot is slightly open.
This just allows me to get a little bit of rotation, and I don't need a lot of rotation at all.
But this allows me to freely rotate and release the club down the line here, okay?
Second thing is grip.
For a lot of golfers, they like to use their putting grip, and that's perfectly okay.
That's going to take the wrists out of it a lot more.
For a shot of this length, 30 yards is a pretty good ways.
This is going uphill most of the way.
I'm going to take my normal grip, And that's going to allow me to release my wrist just a little bit.
To get a little bit of extra pop on the ball, to get it, to carry the whole distance or roll out the whole distance.
So let's start out with this guy and hit a couple little shots here.
So the ball is off my instep a little bit.
I'm going to make a little stroke.
Should take the break and start to come down the hill.
Not bad.
And you'll see that that ball carried probably about five yards, ended up just behind the pin.
Now, I can do the same thing with my three wood.
Now, the three wood, my three wood has 13 degrees aloft.
It's going to come out and start rolling a lot quicker.
I don't need to make nearly as big of a stroke here, but this is really good for really long shots or if you don't need to carry it over some of the fringe that might be a little rough in spots.
With my three wood, this is going to start to roll quite a bit earlier.
Same setup, same stance, same stroke.
So that one you can see skidded along the ground the whole way, ended up in about the same, almost exactly the same spot, but flew much lower.
The 17, the hybrid, popped it up in the air just a little bit, carried a lot of the rough spots and then rolled out.
So those are two great options because they're fairly fail safe.
You don't have to worry about chunking it.
You don't have to worry about laying the sod over.
You don't have to really worry about blading it.
And it allows, because of the thick sole on the club, it allows it to kind of glide through the grass if you don't make a perfect stroke.
It's a great shot.
Now I'm going to look at hitting it with a seven iron.
This is a fairly commonly taught shot, just kind of a little bump and run shot.
The basic key for this shot, you're going to play it back in your stance just a little bit more than you did with the hybrid.
You are going to come down a little bit more sharply.
You don't have the benefit of the big wide sole to bounce along the turf here.
But we don't want to have it way back in our stance like this either.
So it's going to be kind of off my right big toe.
I'm going to have a little bit of forward shaft lean, not much.
And then this is going to be a pretty simple little stroke.
And again, I'm wanting to practice in my practice strokes brushing the turf.
I don't want to sit here and start driving down into the ground and start taking divots.
You want to try and use the bounce as best you can, but you do need to hit down on it slightly more.
Okay, so now we're going to hit this shot.
This will fly all the way onto the green and then roll out.
And so that one flew all the way onto the green, a couple yards onto the green and missed by an inch.
Okay, so that's one shot.
And then the last one is between the 56 and the 60 degree wedge.
Now this is more of a preference play.
You can do either one.
My 60 degree is ground down.
I don't really have any bounce.
If you're not real comfortable with that, use the club with a little bit more bounce.
But because this is a really tight lie, this lack of bounce allows me to catch the ball really clean and not really worry about laying the sawed over.
Because the difference is for most people when they take out their 60, they play the ball way back in the stance and they just chop down on it and have their weight way forward.
And that's a great way to chunk shots.
I don't want to chunk this, of course, so I'm going to actually learn or teach you how to use the bounce of the club.
And, of course, the bounce is behind the leading edge.
This is the leading edge.
This is the trailing edge.
The angle degree, how much lower this part is than this is what's called the bounce angle.
You want to use the bounce because if you do that, the club can never dig in the ground.
So I could never really chunk this.
Now, of course, if I get a little crazy with it, I could start to blade it.
That's why I don't have a lot of bounce on my club.
That allows me to skim through the turf.
So now what I'm going to do is start practicing making little shots and releasing the club.
And when I'm doing this, you'll notice that I'm practicing my divot quite a bit forward in my stance.
Because again, if I have it here, I'm going to start to use that leading edge and dig.
So as I'm taking my little strokes, trying to get the bounce to release down, you'll see my hands releasing just a bit.
And that's what's going to allow me to release the club down.
Now with this shot, I'd probably not do this on this type of lie because it's very wet and it's very tight.
Two things that aren't going to be in your favor for this shot.
But if I had to carry it most of the way there for this 30-yard shot, this is going to be the shot that I'm probably going to resort to.
So now I'm going to take this.
The ball's up in my stance, kind of where I had my hybrid shot, off my left instep, left big toe.
And now we're going to fly this most of the way there.
And that's what can happen if you don't catch it clean.
So I took a little bit of a divot.
And again, why I probably wouldn't hit this shot, even trying to use the bounce, I didn't hit it hard enough.
So now I'm going to have to hit this a little bit harder and fly it most of the way there.
So that's a big risky shot.
I know it scares a lot of golfers.
It's one that you would really more want to play out of the rough or the first cut.
You don't necessarily want to hit it off tight lines unless the ground's really firm and you don't have a lot of other things working against you.
You can see out of the other shots, the hybrids and the seven irons and three woods, they all ended up really close to the hole without a lot of work.
This requires that you hit the shot perfectly.
And unless you have perfect turf conditions, I wouldn't suggest it.
So go back to the hybrid, the three wood, and then maybe the seven iron if you've got more that you've got to carry.
And of course you can hit eight, nine wedge.
But only go to the 60 in these circumstances when you absolutely have to, when you have to carry it most of the way there, when you have to fly it over something because it's the biggest, it's the most high risk shot for most golfers.
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