PREFACE There is no better feeling the world to me than smashing a golf ball dead down the middle of the fairway over 300 yards and watching it fly with perfect balance. It gives a sense of joy and satisfaction knowing all the hard work, patience and persistence has paid off. As the ball rockets towards the green, there is also a sense of peace – that knowing that you have done something as good as it can be done...even by the best professionals in the world. Now wouldn't we all like to look, and DRIVE, more like this? This book will give you lots of useful tips on how to drive the ball straight without sacrificing distance. It will be much more helpful if you have already read its predecessor, '50 Tips for Hitting Your Longest Drives Ever!' These nuggets are gleaned from years of experience playing on the professional level, the latest technological advancements, and the most recent biomechanical measurements and understandings by highly educated scientists. Of course, I would not be anywhere without observing the highest skilled drivers of a golf ball, both on the PGA Tour and in Pro Long Drive, as well as other coaches. I cannot claim credit for every thought and idea I present here – I am just acting as the clearinghouse of good information. An apology in advance: I'm sorry if I write this text too much from the perspective of a right-handed golfer. I still love all you lefties out there. Please just flip around right and left when necessary. Someone once said, “The trees are full of long hitters,” and he was right. A long drive without some measure of accuracy is virtually worthless. If you put the ball way out there, but it ends up in the rough, the trees, the water, or even out of bounds – well then you have not gained any advantage at all over your competition, but instead bound yourself with a handicap starting off the hole that you most likely will not overcome. I remember playing a match against a fellow mini tour pro (who as of this writing is still grinding it out trying to make the PGA Tour) at our local home club. On the 11th tee I was 1-down looking to square it up on a hole I figured I had a pretty good advantage. The hole is a 490 yard par 5 with a down slope into a gully about 250 yards off the tee. The average pro would hit the slope and roll out to about 300 yards for a mid iron approach into a well protected, small green. A long hitter would have his big drive catch on the upslope of the dip and would only get a few yards of roll. Therefore the design of the hole essentially equalized the shorter driver with the longer. Needing the hole badly to tie the match and eventually beat the guy, I really let loose and killed one up into a 10 mph tailwind. I flat out carried the entire gully and got an enormous first bounce. After carrying around 330 yards, the ball rolled out to 392 yards and sat in the right edge of the fairway. Needless to say there was some shock and awe on the face of my playing competitor. Of course, this is the whole point of understanding an implementing this book! To continue, my opponent predictably put his 5 iron second shot onto the center of the green for an easy 25 foot two-putt birdie. With only 96 yards left, I had different plans. I wanted to stuff it in there a few feet for a conceded eagle and the hole. But alas, there was just one problem. Although I was in a 35 yard wide fairway (with OB on both sides) at over 390 yards, which I thought was a monumental feat of athleticism, a small tree decided it was going to grow a branch sticking just out into the fairway. One of my finest moments had become a conundrum – a real pickle. I could not make a standard pitch shot without hitting the branch. And the punch shot under found me trying to roll the ball through 5 inch deep rough onto an elevated green. Of course it got tangled up and stopped short of the surface – to a front pin which put me short sided. A good chip still left me a super slick downhill 6 footer that lipped out. No need for the par save as my opponent had already taken the hole. A nearly 100 yard advantage off the tee, and yet I was unable to cash in for even a tie on that hole! Simply because I did not split the fairway, but was around 14 yards from center. Needless to say, I lost the match 2 down, and had to pay up. But a valuable lesson was learned that day. “With great power comes great responsibility.” -Voltaire, or if you'd rather, Uncle Ben from Spiderman. Your new found distance that was discovered in my first ebook is nothing unless you can also put your drive into proper position. If you look at the geometry of it, a 200 yard drive that hits a typical fairway (say 40-50 yards) can stray offline over 7 degrees and still keep out of the long grass. Looking at the image on the right, you can see that at points E and F, we are still in the edge of the fairway at say, 200 yards. But the further we go on that line, the more into the rough we go! At 250 yards, you'll need a greater degree of accuracy. You can now only make about a 5 and ½ degree error in direction before you go off the fairway. At 300 yards, the rate of error is now around 4.5 degrees. So a push or a pull, a slice or a hook has to be substantially straighter to find the fairway. Just for fun, let's go the extreme and see what 2016 World Long Drive Champion Joe Miller encountered when he hit his winning drive of 438. My little triangle calculator tells me that Joe could only go 3.27 degrees offline to keep the shot in play. Those long drivers are actually straighter than we all thought they were! So we have to be as much as twice as accurate when we decide we're going to be long hitters! There's a lot more to this than I first imagined! What makes things even worse is that diabolical modern designers often pinch the fairways in tighter at longer distances. We might be hitting into a 30 yard wide area when we are gunning for more. Sheesh Steve, start the 50 tips already! 50 Tips for Hitting Your Longest Drives Straight! 1. Where you place your ball on the tee box will place you at an advantage or disadvantage for hitting the fairway depending on how your usual good shot (or poor shot) flies. If you typically fade or slice the ball, it is smartest to tee the ball up on the right side of the tee box so that you are hitting towards the left side of the fairway. This allows your ball to curve some and still finish up straight. 2. The shape of the hole should also influence where you place your ball on the tee box. Optimally we would like to use tee placement to 'straighten out' a dogleg. So given a hole that curves left, we would tee the ball up on the right hand side of the box so that we don't have to curve the ball so much to keep a long drive in the fairway. Keep in mind that you can actually stand outside the tee markers to hit a drive, as long as the ball is teed up in between. It is a little awkward, but may give you enough angle so increase your chance of hitting the fairway. 3. And one more thought about teeing it up. Unless you're playing on a really well manicured course, you have to be careful to find a spot where you can both stand flat and in balance, and where your takeaway will be unimpeded by any dips or bumps. Playing on a lot of public courses growing up, I figured out quickly that I didn't want my driver to snag or encounter resistance as I started back. This would ruin my rhythm and give me little chance to hit it dead straight. The same thing goes for foot placement – standing in a hole or on uneven ground will create an additional degree of difficulty. I will even go back a yard or two if I have to in order to find flat smooth ground. Remember that you can tee up as much as two club lengths behind the markers and still be within the rules. If your course looks more like this, this tip will come in really handy! 4. The less loft any given golf club has, the more that the face angle at impact will influence both the starting direction and where the shot lands. For example, a 7 iron has a loft of around 35 degrees. The angle of the face at the moment the ball is struck is around 75% while the path is 25%, given a centered strike. A driver, which is usually around 8-11 degrees of loft, goes up to 80% of the influence in the face and 20% path.