Dave Pelz: “Studying the game”

MY BOYHOOD BUDDIES, MIKE AND MIKE, were the kind of little rascals who shot spit-balls at teachers. They skipped A-block history, slept through Spanish and showed less pulse in biology than a dissected frog.

Nearly half a lifetime later, both have somehow become successful. But they still struggle with the fundamentals: writing, ‘rithmetic and reading greens. Their sand and wedge games are even worse. Watching Little Mike hit lob shots is like watching Shaq shoot free throws. Big Mike flails in greenside bunkers like a sexually frustrated orangutan.

dave pelz golf instruction

Like most average students — and average golfers — neither Mike had ever sketched a plan for self-improvement. Until this winter, that is, when they traded in their dunce caps for sun visors and flew to Florida for a three-day Dave Pelz Scoring Game School.

A poor pupil myself, I opted to join them. Childhood rivalries run deep, and I couldn’t let those bozos get the leading edge. The Pelz school, which opened in 1985, now has eight locations around the country, all of them born from a simple premise: most golfers go about the game bass-ackwards. We rush off to the range, pound drivers till our palms bleed, then light out for the course, fully expecting to shoot lower scores.

Proof that we rarely do isn’t merely anecdotal. It’s a scientific truth proven by Pelz, a former NASA engineer who has approached the subject with the single-minded focus of a…NASA engineer. Having spent the past three decades tracking golfers and compiling statistics, Pelz has concluded that 60 to 65 percent of all shots occur within 100 yards of the hole, and that 80 percent of strokes lost to par take place from within that same distance. Drive for show; chip, pitch and putt for dough.

Recite this adage to the members of your Sunday foursome and they’ll nod sagely, which isn’t to say they’ll ever change their ways. Pelz’s research shows that 80 percent of practice time is spent on the power game.

Or, as Big Mike put it, outlining his philosophy: “Me see ball. Me hit ball. Far.”

It was 8 a.m., and we were sitting in our classroom at the Country Club course, one of two 18-hole layouts at the Boca Raton Resort & Club (see sidebar). Six other students had enrolled for the long weekend, including four friends from Chicago with Da Bears accents and short games as volatile as Mike Ditka on ‘roids. Their high handicaps represented one end of a spectrum in a program that attracts a range of talent.

The Pelz pedagogy draws on enough numbers to make your head spin like a wayward Srixon, but our trio of Pelz-trained instructors made the information easy to digest, and insisted we have fun. “You’re going to leave here better than you were,” said Trent Reeves, our lead instructor. But first, he added, we were going to have a good time, filming our swings and razzing one another in the video room.

At this, Big Mike grinned. Aside from downing Bloody Marys, mocking playing partners is his favorite aspect of the game. We split up into groups and spent the next hour-plus on the practice grounds, rotating among stations: sand shots, chip shots, pitches, putts. Under close scrutiny, and with the cameras rolling, our weak short games grew feebler still.

By the end of the first day, after eight intense hours of theory and execution, a picture had emerged. It wasn’t pretty. Years of self-instruction had doomed both Mikes and me to the same bad habits that befall so many golfers: our short game motions were miniature replicas of our full swings, what Pelz describes as “throttled-down versions” of our power games.

On delicate shots, we brought our clubs back too far, then tried to finesse outcome through muscle control and deceleration. Sometimes it worked. But mostly it explained why blasts from the bunker remained in the bunker and soft shots over water wound up wet.

“Interesting stuff,” I muttered.

Big Mike nodded. For the first time in his years of formal education, he wasn’t snoozing or shooting spitballs.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I think I need a drink.”

When we rose with the roosters the next morning, my head was swimming with statistics and the Mikes’ were pounding with hangovers (they had “decompressed” hours earlier with a case or so of Heineken).

“Who here thinks he’s the best putter in the world?” asked Marc Albert, a Pelz instructor and Rocco Mediate look-alike, when we ambled into class shortly after sunrise.