Is there anything more frustrating than hitting the perfect drive, you walk up to find your ball sitting up perfectly dead center of a well manicured fairway 125 yards from the hole, and you walk away with bogey or worse? No, no there's not! But let us tell you why you really shouldn't be angry.
According to Lou Stagner, golf statistician extraodinaire, even scratch golfers are more likely to make bogey in the above scenario than birdie. Utilizing ARCCOS data from thousands of golfers hitting hundreds of thousands of shots, a scratch golfer is only going to make birdie from 125 yards out 10% of the time. The chart below shows what happens in this scenario based on golfers with different handicaps.
| HANDICAP | CHANCE OF BIRDIE |
| 0 | 10% |
| 5 | 8% |
| 10 | 6% |
| 15 | 5% |
| 20 | 3% |
In fact, most golfers, regardless of skill level, are going to make bogey, double bogey or the dreaded "other" more often from center-cut 125 clicks out.
| HANDICAP | CHANCE OF BOGEY OR WORSE |
| 0 | 19% |
| 5 | 30% |
| 10 | 41% |
| 15 | 57% |
| 20 | 61% |
So if a scratch golfer is making bogey from 125 yards out almost 20% of the time why do you believe your 18 HCP lameo golf swing should be making birdie from that position more often????? Answer: you shouldn't! Golf is hard even for the top 1% of golfers on the planet.
At the end of the day, while that circled negative number looks sexy as hell on the scorecard, the key to shooting lower scores is avoiding the big numbers not making more birdies. So the next time you screw up the perfect drive, don't worry, be happy and try to salvage the hole!
Data courtesy of Lou Stagner Golf & ARCCOS Golf.