Problems With Fairway Bunkers

Video Transcript

"Ok, sometimes, my golfing friends, we get a really bad lie in a fairway bunker. So, we're far away from the green or relatively far away and we don't believe we have a shot. So, let's say the ball is up like on this. So, you're swinging downhill. What are you going to be able to do with this shot? Not much. So you're probably going to want to just pitch it out. You're going to attempt to take, absorb that stroke and move forward. Because if you try to hit some heroic shot out of this situation a lot of times you're going to dig the hole worse. They say if you're in a hole, stop digging. Or, if you're too close to this lip it's going to be very hard for me to hit a long iron out of here because when I hit it the ball's going to go into this, into the lip here. So I might have to use a sand wedge and just pitch it out of here, just get some distance but I'm not going to get what I need. So I'm going to have to take another stroke. Or, you can get a reasonably good lie but it's in somebody's footprints or it's caught and it's buried a little bit. So, when you're in these bad situations in fairway sand do what the pros do. They're not happy about it but they know enough that if they lose their mental focus they can ruin their whole round right there. So, when you get a bad lie in fairway sand, just say, "Ok," just take the appropriate club and just pitch the ball out of there so you live to swing another day. Ok, so that's, that shot's not going to put me on the green but it's pretty good shot considering what I had to work with. And that's what I want you to think about. Think of it as a chess game. If you ruin everything here you're out of the game. But if you at least pitch out and maybe hit a good shot on your next one and make the putt you can recover and have a good round after that."