You Don't Hit Your 5-Iron 200 Yards
The perfect storm of ego and error that leaves you coming up short
As golfers, we are all prone to the occasional self-deception.
We justify the slippery two-footer as "gimme-range” and give it to ourselves. Or we round 80 down to 79 when recounting our score the next day with coworkers.
While these minor fabrications are largely inconsequential, the dynamic shifts when ego begins to obscure reality. Eventually, these small lies cross a threshold and evolve into a form of self-sabotage.
Today I want to talk about the most detrimental form of this self-deception:
The persistent lies we tell ourselves about our own distances.
What do I mean by that? I’ll give you an example.
Ask an amateur golfer how far they hit their 5-iron. What they’ll report is most likely not the average of their last fifty attempts. Instead, it’s the one from three weeks ago that they hit right off the center of the face, with help from the wind, and ran out on dry fairway grass another 30 yards.
That shot was real. It happened. But it’s also not how far that golfer hits his 5-iron. And it’s certainly not the distance they should be expecting when building a course management strategy.
I use the 5-iron as an example because outside of the driver, it’s the club I hear most exaggerated among amateur golfers.
I’ll get into all of the hard data later in the article, but to give you some sense for the complete lunacy we’re dealing with, for now you should just know this:
The gap between what the amateur golfer thinks he hits his 5-iron vs how far he actually does is about 20-35 yards.
Why Should You Care?
I’m not telling you that you hit your clubs shorter in order to attack you. I’m telling you in order to help you.
On certain shots, 10-15 yards can be the difference between par and double bogey, so it’s vital that your pre-shot planning is rooted in some level of reality.
Imagine a 180-yard par 3 guarded by bunkers, with plenty of room to miss long. You pull a 5-iron — a club you sometimes hit 180 if the conditions are right. Unsurprisingly, you come up short, end up in trouble, and walk away with a bogey. All because your assumptions about your distances were rooted in an ego-fueled memory.
Let’s look at some data to show you what we’re dealing with, how large the gap between expectations and reality is, and then you can decide how guilty you are.
I’ll also go into the psychology behind why this specific error is so stubbornly resistant, the stroked-gained data behind it, and then some actionable steps to help you course manage with this new information in mind.
Before we continue, I recently released A Putting Guide For The Thinking Golfer, which is a collection of my best writing on the putting process. If you’re a free subscriber you can get it HERE.
If you’re a premium subscriber you can read it for free HERE.
Ok let’s get into it.
