Golf Views

Do you ever find yourself during a round of golf, wondering why you always hit your fairway woods or hybrids fat? Or why you keep popping up your tee shots? When Bad Things Happen to Bad Golfers by Gary Pearson and T.J. Tomasi, looks to answer those questions and the 150 most troublesome shots in golf. Unlike other golf books, that focus on shots and techniques, this book provides proven solutions to specific problems that are easy to understand and execute. The book is a golf survival guide meant to carried in your bag, and help solve your golf problems right on the course-before your next shot.

Five Faces
The book shows you the “Five Faces of the Perfect Club,” a concept that helps you hit the ball out of any lie, from anywhere on the course, even if you don’t have a world-class swing.  What are the “Five Face of the Perfect Club”? The Five Faces is an instructional concept developed by T.J. Tomasi, that refers to combination of clubface positions (Square, Open, Closed, Hooded, and Laid Back), plus 3 ball positions (Forward, Middle, and Back), and 3 shoulder positions (Open, Square, and Closed). You can use any one of the forty-five positions to get you out of any predicament on the golf course. Once the five-faces concept is understood, the golfer can move to the second part of the book, which is a situation-by-situation description of just about everything that can go wrong on the golf course.  The rest of the book is divided into four parts, each representing the four main sections of the golf course: the tee, the fairway, the short game, and the putting green.

One thing you’ll notice is that many of the problems and solutions in the book do overlap with one another, which can lead to repetition and referencing of previous solutions to the problem at hand. While I did find this to be annoying at times, it does provide an advantage of providing a variety of solutions to problems that are similar, but not identical. For example, if your hitting your irons fat, but also topping your drives, you most likely have a weight shift problem. As mentioned earlier, the book is meant to be carried in your bag, I found the book to be a little to big to carry in my golf bag. On top of that, you’d probably get a few strange looks, if you pulled the book out of your bag after you hit a bad shot. I know I’d feel very self-conscious about using this book on the course. It would be nice if they offered a pocket sized version of the book that would fit in you shirt pocket or better yet have flash card version of the 150 scenarios that you could easily take with you. Overall I enjoyed reading the book and found some great tips for some troublesome scenarios I encounter often when I play golf. I’d recommend picking up a copy, even as post round reference and make your own flash cards to carry in your bag.

When Bad Things Happen to Bad Golfers $22.95