IMPROVE YOUR SHORT GAME AND PUTTING
   Golf is not rocket science. Unless you are short game guru Dave Pelz, that is. Pelz is a former NASA physicist who is credited by Phil Mickelson with giving him the short game and putting skills to start winning majors. He has turned his passion for chipping, pitching and putting into a cottage industry. The author of “bibles” on wedge play and putting counts the likes of Mickelson, Vijay Singh, Tom Kite and scores of other professionals – as well as thousands of amateurs – among his disciples.
    “I am basically a research scientist educated in physics,” Pelz says. “What better field to actually conduct research in than golf?”
    The former Indiana University golfer who lost 22 college matches to Jack Nicklaus quickly launches into the theorems of his research.
    “Sixty-five percent of shots are hit inside 100 yards and 80 percent of shots lost to par occur inside 100 yards,” Pelz says. “But every golf lesson I ever took focused on hitting my driver farther or straighter. There was never any quality teaching to help me get the ball in the hole better.”
    After spending 14 years at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Pelz decided to build a new career focused on the game he loved. “I decided to fish where the fish are and found out why people are so bad at the short game,” he says. “I’m trying to help people where they need help instead of trying to help them hit the ball farther into the woods.”
    Using the principles of research and data collection he relied on at NASA, Pelz started charting where average golfers and professionals hit their shots and where they threw shots away. After following six pros in 10 tournaments in the late ‘70s, he compiled empirical data and presented his findings to the young skeptics on the PGA Tour.
    “I knew every yardage from every sprinkler and every tree and I had cold, hard computerized scientific analysis,” Pelz says. “I showed them where their weaknesses were.”
    One of the six, Tom Kite, got excited by Pelz’s analysis. After adding a third wedge to his set and working on his game with Pelz, Kite won his first tournament. Andy North, another early Pelz disciple, won two U.S. Opens.
    “I measured where people in fact hit the ball,” Pelz says. “If your target is 250 yards in the center of the fairway and you hit it in the rough 25 yards off line, that is a 25 percent error rate. But if you have a 40-yard pitch shot that you chili dip and hit only one yard, that’s a 95 percent error.”
    Kite and North were among the first touring pros to add a third wedge to their bags. By 1990, Pelz says, more than half the players on tour carried three wedges and by 2000 nearly everyone carried three. Today, a third of the players carry four wedges. Pelz says so many players were bending their wedges into higher lofts, the club manufacturers finally started producing them for the masses in all manner of loft and bounce. Pelz also sells a line of wedges that bear his name.
    Pelz says golfers don’t perceive the short game as that important but said most players could improve substantially if they would spend less time practicing their long game and more time chipping and putting.
    That’s the focus of Pelz Scoring Game Schools around the country. The clinics are split half and half between wedge play and putting. Pelz-trained instructors share his theories and techniques with students.
    “We start with theory session because we want people to understand intellectually what they are trying to learn,” Pelz says. “We identify their biggest problems and give them the techniques to solve them, along with drills and exercises.”
    At the schools and the clinics the emphasis is on proper setup, the swing motion and a full follow through, no matter the length of the shot.
    “Most golfers tend to use their hand muscles and wrists too much on short shots, and they play the ball too far forward in their stance thinking they will hit it higher,” Pelz says. “What really happens is that they hit behind it.”
    Pelz also sees most golfers repeat the same mistakes when putting.
    “Most people swing their putter around their body instinctively because they do it with every other club,” he says. “If you let the putter hang in your hands from the shoulders, the putter will go straight back and straight through without manipulating the putter.”
    Pelz preaches the pendulum stroke and provides instruction and training aids to achieve it.
    Pelz is confident that most golfers, given the correct techniques and theories as well as a willingness to devote more time to practice, can improve their short games and lower their scores.
    “We’re making progress,” he says. “As more tour players like Phil Mickelson focus on their short games, amateur golfers are following suit.”