“Forward tees” are bent tees with a slightly higher loft to make them easier to hit. “Tee it Forward!” is the name of a golf magazine that has been, since it started in 1992, published by the same company that makes the “tee it forward” product. And the name of the magazine itself is a bit of advertising: you can buy the product cheaply if you order a subscription to “tee it forward.”
The magazine’s slogan is so catchy that it has become conventional wisdom: “If you are a good golfer, the tee will be forward.”
Tee it Forward! is a progressive game modification in which the ball moves forward from the tee box behind the hole. The original idea came from Bill Kennedy and was designed for golfers with limited arm strength. Tee it Forward! uses less clubhead speed and produces an increased distance, along with more control.
Tee it Forward! is a fitting tribute to the late Congressman Ken Kennedy, who died at the age of 58 after a long struggle with cancer.
This is a basic golf tip. On the tee you want to hit the ball as hard and straight as you can. If you take the shortest possible route to the hole, it will be easier to hit the ball where you want it. This is true for almost everybody, and it’s a good strategy for beginners too.
But a certain group of very good golfers has always taken the other approach: they lengthened their drives, so that they could get more distance on every swing. Longer drives tend to be straighter than shorter drives; but if they are longer, then they are further away from the hole, so they need more strokes to get there.
Every golfer who plays courses with short tees should add a few yards to every tee shot and take longer strides, also known as “teeing it forward.”
The new golf balls will have a dimple in the ball, similar to a dimple in a football. That dimple is called a Forward Tee and it causes the ball to roll forward slightly. The Forward Tee helps make the ball roll more easily off the tee.
The Forward Tee is like the trade-off that we all understand when buying a car: you get greater control with high price. The Forward Tee is small and easy to ignore, but it makes your shots better.
Some golf courses have “forward” tees, where the distance on the first tee is a few yards longer than elsewhere on the course.
I am not an expert, but it seems to me that if you are playing at a course with forward tees, and you hit your drive extremely well, you can use that knowledge to compensate for a disappointing second shot. You can leave yourself with a few more yards of putt than normal, and still make par. The difference might be only a few inches; it won’t affect whether you win or lose. But if you do hit your drive extremely well, then you will be pleased with the result.
If you are playing a course where the distance is longer in one place than elsewhere, then the only way to get a good second shot would be to play it badly. You can’t compensate for that by leaving yourself more putts, because any such compensation would mean that your first shot was not very good either.
So when you are playing at a course with “forward” tees, I guess don’t worry about hitting your drives too well; just hit them well enough. If they’re good enough for teeing up from, they’re good enough to hit over the green and into the hole.
Professional golfers tend to be pretty good at hitting long shots. This is partly because many of them have the same kind of physics background you and I have, and partly because they practice hitting long shots all the time.
So why don’t they hit them as well as they can? It’s not that they are lousy shots; it’s that they aren’t practiced. The average golfer rarely hits a long shot with sufficient accuracy and control to use it as a regular shot in his game.
Why not? Because he doesn’t know how. It’s not easy to hit a four-iron accurately and consistently out to 300 yards. But if you can do that, you can do other things: hit pull-hooks, draw or fade your fairway woods, hit fadeaway draws from 150 yards, and so on. These shots are all easy once you know how to do them.
The secret is that these shots require two things: accuracy with the clubhead (hitting it where you want) and control over the clubface (hitting it at the right angle). You need to be able to hit the ball with enough accuracy to get the exact distance you want, but then you have to be able to control the face of your club so that it ends
The golf course is open to the public, but the tee times are not.
The tee time is not for golfers. It is for people who want to see a course that does not exist. The tee time is for people who want to play an imaginary round. It’s safe to say that the people who come here are in the grip of a peculiar and powerful delusion. There’s a lot of money at stake, because it’s not just about golf (although some of it must be). It is about making something out of thin air, some bit of magic that will give them what they want—a beautiful and challenging course that does not exist….There are two kinds of people on this planet, those who can do this kind of thing, and those who can’t.
