Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

Dave Pelz has done a lot to identify the real physics of golf, especially the short game. Both his Short Game Bible and Putting Bible have information not available anywhere else. Because he is a physicist, the analysis he did for both is solid experimentally. And, because I’m an engineer, it all makes sense to my logical thought processes.

Dave has reached his limits, though, when he begins to describe how to take this information and put it to work. I don’t mean that his drills aren’t of value. They are. And probably of much more value than those developed by most instructors.

What bothers me is that many of them can’t be done by regular golfers. Dave seems to think we all have exclusive access to a practice green with a 100-yard approach area and various bunker configurations. I don’t. Nor does anyone else I know.

Dave likes to say things like “Set up a 10-foot radius circle around a hole on the practice green….” If I tried to bogart 314 square feet of practice green out at the course, those old guys would run me out of town. Today on Golf Channel Academy, one of Dave’s PGA friends showed how to work on putt alignment. He used a T-square to make a mark perpendicular to the putt’s line. And he made the mark by scratching it in the grass on the green. “Just tell the course superintendent the grass will heal itself in a couple of days.” Right. Course superintendents are so understanding when folks destroy their work.

I try to apply the things Pelz has found to work through research. I just doubt he’s done much research on course management attitudes.