Now that you are fully prepared to start adding pressure to your practice. It’s time to start scoring with your wedges. This exercise will combine both wedges and putting, and will force you to raise the bar in your practice. The Title:
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a timed exercise. The goal is to “stay alive” for an entire 30 minutes. You start with $20 in your imaginary bank account. How you perform in this exercise will either add or take away dollars from your bank. The goal is to not go bankrupt. You’ll select chips and pitches that range from 10 to 30 yards from the hole (30 to 90 feet) and drop the ball each time to create a “random” lie. All you need is one ball (I do suggest you warmup with about a dozen or so chips or pitches before you start), your wedges, and a putter (you may change wedges as the shot permits or you feel the need to – no putting from off the green allowed).
Here’s how you earn or lose dollars:
- Chip-ins gain you $10
- Up and Downs (2 shots total to hole it) gain you $2
- 3 shot Total (missed up and down) loses $4
- 4 shot or higher Total (severe missed up and down) loses $10
You’ll notice the transfer of this to the golf course. You’ll experience a lot of the same emotions that come with missed greens and failure to get up and down, and you’ll notice too that the time frame extension forces you to learn how to hold it together, come back, or get ahead for an extended period of time just like you do when you play a round of golf. Getting it up and down once is fine and dandy, but you gotta do it over and over and over again. You’ll also notice that the reward values equate to making a 67% up and down percentage and that there are severe penalties for severe mistakes as well as big incentives for chipping it in!
See how long you can go before you go bankrupt and try to extend that time as you improve. Or, if you make it the full 30 minutes, see how high you can get your “monopoly” bank account!
Want to really have fun with it? Play it against someone and see who has the most money at the end of the 30 minutes or who goes bankrupt first!
Oh yeah, and NO GIMMES ALLOWED AND YOU MUST USE YOUR FUUUULLLL ROUTINE on EVERY SHOT INCLUDING YOUR PUTTS!!
