Strategic Mistakes That All Golfers Are Guilty of Making
By: Derek Clements | Mon 17 Feb 2025
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How many times in your life have you stood over a golf ball knowing that you have the wrong golf club in your hands? And how often do you walk over to your bag and pull out the club you know that you should be using?
We have all done it. We have all hit shots that have ruined our scorecards and instantly regretted the decisions we have made.
And the truth is that even the world’s best golfers are guilty of it.
The World's Best Golfers Make Crazy Mistakes
Given the chance to play the 72nd hole at Carnoustie again, do you think that Jean Van de Velde would still have reached for a driver during the final-hole meltdown that cost him the 1999 Open Championship?
Needing a six to win the Claret Jug, had he reached for a fairway wood or long iron I can guarantee that he would have gone on to win. And if he had resisted the urge to go for the green with his second shot he would still have won the world’s oldest and best major.
Would Rory McIlroy hit a driver at the final hole of the 2024 US Open if he was given the opportunity to play the hole again? I very much doubt it.
The driver was the only club in his bag that could possibly have got him into trouble from the tee - and that is exactly what happened. Most people only remember the short putt that he missed. But it was his wayward drive that led to that putt.
(Image Credit: Kevin Diss Photography)
Time and again you see world-class golfers making elementary mistakes.
It happened to Pablo Larrazabal twice at the recent Bahrain Championship. In regular play he came to the final hole needing a par to win. He split the fairway with his drive and, with a wedge in his hands, put the ball in the one place on the green that brought a three-putt into play. And that is precisely what happened.
On the first playoff hole there was water all the way down the right side of a massively wide fairway. The one thing that Larrazabal could not afford to do was to hit his drive into the water. And yet that is precisely what he did, ending any chance he had of winning.
At the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am we saw Scottie Scheffler, the world’s undisputed No1, hooking a drive onto the beach at the 18th - with a huge amount of room on the right, this was the one place he could not go. He was lucky - the tide was out and he was able to clamber down to the beach, hit his ball and save par.
Tom Kim, another of the world’s best players, was not so lucky. During the final round of the same tournament he cost himself thousands of dollars by hitting his drive into the Pacific Ocean.
I always find it utterly mind-boggling when golfers who proclaim to be the best in the world (because they are) consistently make such basic errors. I have lost count of the number of times I have watched McIlroy miss greens with a wedge in his hands.
How many times have you watched in astonishment at The Masters when golfers hit approaches to the 13th and 15th greens and spin the ball back off the green? They know that the one thing they cannot do is land a ball on the front of either of these greens with any form of backspin but time and again we see them coming to grief by doing precisely that.
Bobby Jones famously said: "Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half- inch course...the space between your ears." And, of course, he was absolutely right.
The Strategic Mistakes That All Golfers Consistently Make
We all reach for a driver at times when we absolutely know that it is the wrong club - and we look on in horror as the ball sails into a lake, disappears into a forest or flies out of bounds.
We have all pulled out a fairway wood and attempted the 240-yard carry while knowing full well that what we should be doing is hitting a wedge.
We have all stood over a downhill putt and either race it 20 feet beyond the hole or failed to hit it hard enough to get halfway to the hole. We have all tried to be too cute with bunker shots. We have all tried to pull off the miracle recovery shot.
We have all gone for that massive drive and topped the ball 50 yards.
We have all stood in the middle of the fairway with a seven iron in our hands, knowing full well that we should actually be hitting a six iron.
Like it or not, golf is a strategic sport. I can absolutely guarantee that if each and every one of us changed our approach to the game that our scores would improve and our handicaps would tumble. But there is something about human nature that forces us to go for the impossible shots.
We all have a voice in our heads that tells us: "Go on Derek, you can do it." We also have another voice telling us: "No you can’t." But we always listen to the wrong voice.
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