Golf is a funny game.
You spend your entire golf life learning and perfecting the art of delivering the club face into the back of the ball, no matter the lie or situation. The ball could be on a tee, thick grass, or the putting surface. The objective remains the same: prioritize ball-first contact.
And then you land in a greenside bunker and ball-first contact becomes your mortal enemy…
Don’t you just love this game?
We’ve all done it. The ball is sitting cleanly in a greenside bunker, level lie, nothing too difficult. You go to strike the sand first and... oh sh$t. You catch ball first, and now you’re 50 yards off the back of the green, and your simple up-and-down has become a struggle just to salvage a double.
Your otherwise well-played hole just turned real ugly, real fast.
Experiences like this might soon have you believing that bunker play is vital to scoring. Without it, after all, one simple mistake can blow up a scorecard.
It’s true that being able to escape the sand consistently is a great skill to have. But it’s worth asking how many strokes good bunker play actually saves the average amateur.
As I wrote in The Highest ROI for Your Practice Time, “practice time is finite. The list of things to work on in golf is not.”
So in this week’s Scoring Letter, I’d like to dig through some numbers and see if we can quantify how much bunker play really matters.
By the end, you should have a good sense of how many strokes good bunker play can save you, how much practice time it deserves, and how good you need to get at it to maximize your returns.