The Rough

Aim: To give you a feel for the way the rough affects clubs right the way across the scale. You'll see how you can use loft to further improve your rough shots, and how to identify the best option when hitting out of the long stuff.

Early notes: Don't go here, hehe. Sadly, its an inevitable fact of Links that sooner or later you'll end up in the rough. The effect of hitting out of rough is to take off the spin on the ball causing it to roll much further than it normally would. The ball trajectory also tends to come out lower so your shots will chase on more. This can be no trouble at all if your approach into the green is unimpeded by bunkers etc, in which case you should take the right club for the distance but add a few clicks of loft, maybe 2 or 3 to help the ball stop a little on the green. If the shot is also downhill or the greens are firm/fast then I would actually take a club less than required and still apply some loft to the shot.On many occasions you will then still be able to hit the green or at least make the fringe from where you can chip. Don't be a hero if you have bunkers/water in the way as you'll invariably find thats what you'll end up in! Remember your ball is going to land quicker than normal and then roll on further so aim for a spot where the ball can land safely and then run on towards the green, and sometimes it can be useful to take an extra club or two, pump up the loft and let the ball carry onto the green (over the trouble!) and then off the back, but only if you think you won't hit a tough spot at the back ( ie a big downslope off the back or trees etc...). Quite often you'll find that you can use the extra roll out of the rough to your advantage and you'll be able to get close, but the main goal is to get somewhere near where you can get up and down in 2, hopefully for par. By the way, none of this section applies to the "wild grass" most commonly found on devils island, but also to a lesser extent on some other courses. The following is a chart taken from the rough at Dorado Beach to a fairway which was pretty flat, and also the lie on the shot was perfectly flat

Further Research: So, what can we learn from this ? First of all, in all cases the application of loft will send the ball out higher and generally softer. You can see that for the 2 and 3 wood, using loft actually increases distance, although the roll is less the ball carries further through the air more. This is because these woods have a very low trajectory anyway and use a sweeping swing plane, causing the club to snag in the rough and the ball to get caught...by adding some loft you are actually getting the club onto the ball cleaner and more on the upswing...so it actually goes further than without loft ! ( you can see the 3W distance is similar to normal, but the 2W is badly affected by the rough, as would the driver be). What we can also see is that the 4wood to 4iron go a similar distance to normal and the +4 loft setting begins to shorten and soften the shot (less roll)....by the time we come to 5iron and below we start to see the effect of the distance being more than normal, generally explained by the effect of grass between the club and ball reducing the spin....BUT, in this range the application of some loft starts to become effective in stopping the shot.

We must also realise that this effect of loft will be seen in any bad lies..obviously a bad lie in the rough will be more severe than on the fairway, especially the downhill lies which can cause you to hit real wormburners, but if we have an uphill lie in the rough, we can see by looking at the chart that a shot of 5wood or above will hardly be affected.....the effect of an uphill lie ( same as adding loft ) is not that severe for mid-irons whereas for the very short clubs, the effect of loft is as dramatic as if it were from the fairway so you do have to take care of those lies for shorter clubs. You really do have to have a bit more imagination when the shot involves going up or downhill a lot, as your shots are generally low running ones, so be careful of downhill shots running way past,especially on hard fast greens ( sometimes unavoidable ) and dont be surprised if shots to an uphill green "bump" into a bank at the front and come way short.

As a final note, it's not uncommon for some players ( and often in a strong headwind ) to purposely aim for the rough if they want to hit wedge into an uphill/sloping green to remove the effect of bad backspin........I would not advise you to do this until you are very experienced, and even then you'd be better advised to lay up even shorter and hit a less -spinning club. ( if you insist on trying this make sure you use your aiming pin to "feel" that you arent getting into a horror lie)

Top Tips: Avoid the rough, especially when you need to hit downhill shots onto hard/fast greens !
Understand which clubs are affected by loft (and therefore uphill lies) and which arent
Remember , in general, club distances are very similar to the fairway ones, but the "roll" part of the shot is longer
Beware bad downhill lies in the rough as these will skid along the ground and can get caught up and go very short.
Take a sensible route onto a green where you can use the roll to "bump and run" the shot onto the green...play safe here

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