I Hit 43% of Par 3 Greens and 9% of Par 4 Greens. Same Swing. So What's Happening?

I have been logging my own rounds in Diary of a Golfer since March. Enough rounds to do some arithmetic on: every hole, the par, the score, where the tee shot finished, where the approach finished, putts, penalties. One hundred and ninety-four holes of my own data on my own game.

I went looking for the thing costing me the most shots. I expected it to be the tee shot. Every golfer I know believes their driver is the problem, and I was no different.

It was not the tee shot. And it was not a swing problem either, even though it shows up on the approach. It was a club-selection habit — the same decision, made badly, over and over.

Where the damage actually is

Start with the approach, measured as shots over par on the hole.

• On the green in regulation: +0.07 over par. Across forty-five such holes I did not make a single double bogey. Not one.
• Missed the green short: +1.54 over par, and 46 per cent of those holes became a double or worse.
• Missed right: +1.32.
• Missed left: +1.14.
• Missed long: +1.11.

Hitting the green is worth about a shot and a half over missing it short, and missing short does not recover well either. I get up and down 12 per cent of the time when I miss a green, and only 6 per cent when I miss it short.

Par 3s, par 4s and par 5s are three different games

Splitting by the par of the hole brought things into sharper focus.

• Par 3s: 43 per cent greens hit, 7 per cent finish short, average 0.76 over par.
• Par 4s: 9 per cent greens hit, 67 per cent finish short, average 1.29 over par.
• Par 5s: 26 per cent greens hit, 30 per cent finish short, average 1.07 over par.

On par 3s I hit nearly half the greens. On par 4s, fewer than one in ten — with the same scoring clubs, roughly the same swing, on the same afternoons in the same conditions.

That is the key finding, and it needs no clever arithmetic behind it. My par-4 approach play is where my golf is being lost, and it is a distance problem rather than a striking one.

What the tee shot actually does on a par 4

So let's go deeper on par 4s. Here is the picture, and it is not the one I expected.

• Hit the fairway from the tee: +1.18 over par, 13 per cent greens, 56 per cent short.
• Missed right from the tee: +1.13 over par, 13 per cent greens, 81 per cent short.
• Found the fairway bunker from the tee: +0.88 over par, across eight holes.
• Missed left from the tee: +1.74 over par, 4 per cent greens, 83 per cent short.

Read the first two again: on par 4s, missing right (1.13) is barely worse than finding the fairway (1.18) — and the fairway bunker, across a smaller sample of eight holes, was better again at 0.88. Only one tee shot on that list costs me anything real, and it is the one that goes left.

Missing the fairway does push me further short — 81 and 83 per cent against 56. But that is a small effect stacked on an already bad number: even from a fairway lie, with no recovery required, I am short 56 per cent of the time.

Does a fairway miss cost anything once I am short?

If being in recovery mode were charging me a shot, a par 4 where I miss the green short after missing the fairway should cost more than missing it short from a good lie.

• Short approach from the fairway: 1.50 over par, 41 per cent blow-ups (a blow-up being a double or worse).
• Short approach from the rough or a bunker: 1.53 over par, 47 per cent blow-ups.

Three hundredths of a shot apart. Once the ball is short of a par-4 green, it costs almost the same whether I got there from the fairway or from the rough. The trouble is not charging me twice. Its whole cost is spent making the approach harder, and my approach is a problem regardless of where the tee shot finished.

Why missing left is the expensive miss

So the fairway itself is worth almost nothing to me. But missing left from the tee is worth a great deal, and it is the one tee shot decision that actually pays off if I get it right.

On par 4s I take a penalty on 39 per cent of the holes where I miss left, against 10 per cent when I find the fairway. And a penalty does not cost one shot — across all my rounds a penalty hole averages 2.48 over par against 0.88 without one, and 92 per cent of them end in a double bogey or worse. Left is where the trouble lives on the course I play. That +1.74 from a tee shot missed left is a hazard number, not a rough number.

What I am changing

Feeding my own round data into AI pointed at four decisions I can make on the course, and not one of them is a swing change that would otherwise take months to show up.

Take one more club on the approach. I am short nine times more often than I am long, and the punishment for being long is mild. The club that feels right from the tee is one too many short from the fairway — an ego problem, not knowing my real distances, and not accounting for how much cleaner contact is from a teed-up ball than a fairway lie. There is also usually more green behind the flag than I think.

Aim away from the left miss wherever left brings a hazard into range, or take a shorter club off the tee to cut the dispersal. I know which holes these are from my own diary. This is the tee shot decision that actually matters, and it is about the penalty rate, not the fairway percentage. I am fine being in the rough almost anywhere — except on the holes where my miss tends to go left into trouble, where I need to play for the fairway even at the cost of a longer approach.

Stop trying to save the hole after a penalty. A 92 per cent blow-up rate off a penalty says I am compounding the error, not recovering from it. Take the drop, play to the middle of the fairway, and accept the bogey.

Care about the fairway, but for the right reason. Not because it is worth a shot in itself — missing right on a par 4 costs almost nothing — but because a fairway lie gives me three times the chance of hitting the green that a left miss does.

All four apply the next time I am standing over a ball with a tee in hand. None of them needs an hour at the range or a swing change — which is why recording what happened on the hole with your Diary will be the best-value thirty seconds on a hole you'll ever get to improve your game.

Disclaimer

Eleven rounds, one mid-handicap golfer (handicap 12), one course. This is not a study. Your numbers will say something different, which is the entire point of writing your own down rather than reading someone else's.

There is no launch monitor behind any of this. No GPS, no sensor, nothing watching my swing. Diary of a Golfer records where the tee shot finished, where the approach finished, the score, the putts, the penalties — thirty seconds after the hole. The arithmetic did the rest.

What I got out of it was not a swing thought. It was the end of an argument I had been having with myself for two seasons over whether to spend my limited practice time on the driver or the wedges. The answer turned out to be neither. It was better use of the numbers I already had: one more club on the approach than I would have picked for the same distance off a tee; playing away from the hazard side on the holes where my miss goes left, rather than fighting my swing to fix it; caring about the fairway for the green-hitting odds, not the look of it; and if a penalty happens, playing the next shot back to the fairway instead of a hero shot at the green.

— Marty