Hard Pan: Golf Mid Irons

Video Transcript

"Ok, we're on hard pan now which you can run into on any course throughout the United States, especially in the hot summer months. So, what it is, is there's no grass and the sun has baked this dry. So you can see it's hard, almost like concrete. Now, these mid-irons are going to be a little easier to hit off of hard pan than the higher irons, because the higher irons with a great amount of loft, you're trying to get underneath the ball to hit it up. So, this is more of a mid-iron and I'm just going to try to hit the ball a reasonable distance. So, while I still want to get underneath the ball, and the hard pan complicates this, it's not quite as tough as a high iron. But, you have to be aware, that if you don't swing properly, because there's no forgiveness here because there's no grass at all, the ball is not sitting up on a little tuft of grass, if you hit the ground behind the ball a little bit you'll most likely will skull the shot and it won't be a very high quality shot. So you really want to make sure that you come right underneath the ball and virtually pick it clean off the hard pan. So let's see if I can do this. So I want to just line up, I don't want to think that this shot's any big deal. I want to be very relaxed because if I'm tense at all it means I'm going to muscle the ball and then if I do that I'm generally going to hit the hard pan and scull the ball. So I want to just be really relaxed and take a nice easy swing and I want to let the club do the work. Ok, so that was pretty successfully accomplished. So I got the ball off the hard pan to a decent distance and I didn't have as much spin on the ball as I'd like because I'm not able to get underneath the ball but I was able to deal with this. So practice off hard pan because you're going to see it when you play."