Hi! I am Ben Throtborn and right now what we are going to do is we are going to talk a little bit about on how to hit a shot that is going to save you a bunch of strokes.

You can see the situation we find ourselves in, okay. Maybe 28 to 30 yards from the flag stick, which is just about as far as you want to try to hit this particular shot that I am going to show you. What we need to do is we need to get the ball up in the air quickly and get it down quick on the ground.

What we want to do is we are going to show is what is called a flop shot made famous most recently by Phil Mickelson and also Tiger Woods. Now, what I am going to do is I am going to show you how. It is not that difficult a shot to play with a little practice but you need to practice to shot a little bit before you try it on the course, otherwise you have to make a really big swing. I am going to hit this ball with this distance here; I have to make a really big swing to hit it at that distance with what I am going to show how to do. So, you got to get a little confidence in it, you need to practice before you try it but it is simple and can save you a bunch of shots when you are out on the golf course.

So, here is what we are going to do. First off is you got to have yourself a pretty good lie, you cannot hit this shot with a tight lie. So, you need a little bit of fluff under it, you need a little bit of grass. It is a shot that works very well from the rough if you play a course where you got a lot of rough around the greens, you play Bermuda rough, or you got rug grass that grows up; you can play this shot very well from those types of lies. If the ball is sitting down on a very tight spot do not try this shot. Go ahead and take your medicine, hit your pitch, hit the ball nice and solid, knock it on the green and go on take your medicine. But if you got a good lie, there is a little bit of grass, a little bit of cushion under the ball, this shot can save you some strokes.

So, what we are going to do is once again, we are going to aim the golf club down the target line. We are going to aim the golf club down the target line and we are going aim our hips, our feet, and our shoulders drastically to the left. And, we are going to swing out to end across the target line. Not too hard kind of like hitting a fade, only it is going to be much more out to end than this. So, we want to swing drastically across the target line.

Now, the other thing that you want to do to make this shot succeed is you have to release your hands on the way down and you are going to move under and through, and if you watch it closely, the club face is going to move under the golf ball and open up into a nice full finish. This is the only shot, you do not want to cast when you are hitting full shots. You have people call casting; you throw it from the top. We do not want to do that. What you want to do is you want to release the club on the way down. See how my hands are releasing, I want to cut under into a nice full finish and you are going to get a shot that looks like this (demo golf shot), it is going to fly very high and it is going to land nice and soft. It will take a little practice.

You could see from the camera angle there, if we have a good lie, we are in the rough, and we got a little cushion under it. We are going to set up with the club face squared to the line. We are going to set our feet, our hips, and our shoulders well to the left to that line and in an open position. We are going to swing the club across the line, more than that, we are going to release the club on the way down cutting under the golf ball and finishing nice and high.

So here we go, one more time. Square to the line, the hips and shoulders are well lift. Ball hits right by the pin and it is going to land nice and soft. It is going to give you a good chance to make a par. Practice this shot a little bit, practice the early release, the high finish, and you going to shoot better scores.