Eddie Young from the Classic Swing Golf School located at Legends Golf & Resort gives you a tip on how to stop chunking chip shots off of grainy Bermuda lies.
Eddie Young:
Hi. Eddie Young here from the Classic Swing Golf School in Myrtle Beach. We're going to talk about different short chip shots around the green right here with the Bermuda grass, and the Bermuda grass in August sometimes can drive you nuts.
So, a couple of different shots and reasons this would happen. I've got a 60-degree wedge in my hand. This is what I'd normally be playing for these little shots, but it has a very sharp leading edge and it doesn't have much bounce at all to it to begin with. So as I'm sitting here and making practice swings, I can see this grass is fluffing up down here at the bottom. So what's probably getting ready to happen as I hit this shot is I'd see that. And what happens a lot of times, the club hits behind the ball, even if you catch just a couple of little blades of grass, it rides right up the face and you ended up chunking it like that and you say, “Oh my gosh, what did I just do?”
Well, the good news is it probably wasn't you, it's just learning how to play this out of this tight Bermuda grass. So, your first thought, your first deal here is to find out which way the grass is growing. Now you can't legally sit there and fluff it up, but if I'm sitting here making practice swings beside my ball and I'm seeing that grass fluff up, red flags need to be going off. I probably don't want to hit this shot. So I'm going to get rid of the club with the leading edge and not much bounce, and I'm going to go to something with a little less loft to it. I'm using a nine iron right here to do this with, and I'm going to take the club and I'm going to … Or the ball, rather. I'm going to move it a little bit more forward in my stance.
I'm going to take the shaft instead of leaning it forward, which uses the leading edge, I'm going to lay it back a little bit. So the reason I went with the less lofted club, I've still got enough for the ball to jump off of here and get some momentum to it. So I'm setting up, weight a little forward, hands a little bit back, and then I'm just going to kind of pick this off the top and just let it roll out to the hole. And as you can see that got there and rolled nicely.
So once again, making sure that the back of the club is hitting the ground versus the leading edge, and that was the reason I was laying this back, just trying to hit my normal chip shot.