Hold On

How to get your swing back before it goes off the rails.

- Jordan Spieth

SAME AS ANYONE, I can get ticked off at bad shots. But I really try not to. Ups and downs are the nature of this game, and what separates great players from merely good players is the ability to coolly diagnose what’s going on in their swings—and then adjust. Is it going to take one or two missed shots on the course to figure it out, or are you going to shoot a thousand and need to plow through five bags of range balls after the round to get it sorted? Hopefully it’s closer to the first scenario, but I’ve also noticed great players don’t rely on hope. Rather, when the ball starts behaving unexpectedly, they have a systematic method for reassuming control. You start with the minor stuff that’s easy to fix, and then only move on to more dramatic shifts of swing thought if necessary. And you go through this process in the same order every time. This is how you prevent getting totally lost. I’ve got the Masters coming up—a tournament I love. Suppose I open bogey-bogey. There will be no value in getting upset. My only job is to collect information. What can the ball flight of a missed shot suggest about the swing that produced it? How about the next missed shot? There’s a way to fix a swing efficiently, and I’m going to show you my basic three-step method. If you apply this to your game, I think you’ll waste less time searching, which leaves more time for playing at a level where you can score. —WITH MAX ADLER