Dan Whittaker's Weekend Takeaway: How to hit your driver under pressure

I’ve picked two shots from the WGC-HSBC Champions this week that the club golfer often struggles with. Let me take you through how the pros tackle them…

Xander Schauffele’s tee shot at the 72nd hole

NERVES. OF. STEEL. 💪#WGCHSBCChampions pic.twitter.com/CFix5fUK56

— The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) October 28, 2018

My first thought with the tee shot is he chose a shot shape that he was comfortable with and that’s something that everyone should take out of this, he had a shot shape that he liked to hit, whether it was a little cut or a little draw. He will have really narrowed his focus down and picked a particular spot where he wanted to put the ball so he’s not had any other internal thoughts fighting for his attention to tell him about any water and any other danger that might be around.

He’s clearly committed to that shot, stood there with the shot shape he’s wanted to hit and has been 100 per cent totally committed to the shot.

Really good players’ pre-shot routines will involve a questioning process in their mind so it’s almost like they have a set of questions they ask themselves before they hit a shot. Where am I going to start the ball? What shot do I want to see here? Where’s the wind coming from? Where do I want to see the ball finish? So everything they are going to do and talk about is going to be positive reinforcement of the shot they’re going to try and execute and, once they have all those positive cues, it’s all about just hitting that shot.

What to practise: I think the problem with club golfers is that they don’t have the questioning process in their mind of what they’re going to do and how they see it? Instead, they choose the shot they want to hit and, all of a sudden, when they look up they see the danger and, because they don’t have a questioning process in place, everything that is negative is trying to draw their attention away from what they should be doing. If you have questions of what’s the shot, how am I going to play it, how am I going to execute it then you give yourself a good chance of hitting a good shot.

Patrick Reed and the three-quarter pitch

What an up and down 😲

That's why he's The Masters champion. #WGCHSBCChampions pic.twitter.com/P74ghHX7J3

— The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) October 26, 2018

When you look at it he hit it quite low with a bank in front of him, it grabbed on the second or third bounce, trickled over the ridge and ran out to about four feet. Brilliant. For this particular pitch shot the ball was on the back foot to help keep the ball low and to keep the flight lower.

The one thing you could really see was there was no weight transfer from foot to foot, rather he was very much staying centred and maybe a little bit over the left side. When the ball is back our weight tends to get a bit forward and then he’s committed to keeping the pressure on that left side, he wasn’t leaning but he has a constant point that he’s moving around and then he’s used the body back and through.

Because the weight is forward and the ball is back it helps de-loft the club going back and, on the way through, you can see that he maintains the loft on the face. So on the followthrough you can’t see the handle of the club but you can see the clubhead. His body was in charge of the clubhead and his hands never took over.

What to practise: Notice here that the followthrough is relatively quite short and the rhythm of the shot quite snappy. Amateurs get scared of over-hitting it with water behind the pin and they associate that with making a short swing but what they should be doing is use the body more.

Reed has a beautiful tempo and it always looks the same, whether he’s hitting one 40 yards or 80 yards and he matches his arms and his body beautifully. Lots to learn from here..