'Smarter' Geary ready to fire
Geary looks to move up a gear
Josh Geary will return to the Nationwide Tour older and wiser in January after he failed to progress to the PGA Tour for 2012. The 27-year-old Tauranga professional, who finished third at the BMW NZ Open at Clearwater to continue his good run of form at New Zealand’s signature event – he finished T9th in 2010 – has done some soul-searching as he looks to break through to golf’s most lucrative tour.
He is looking forward to executing a smarter game plan after burning himself out in 2011 trying to play his way back into form. He wants to make a tilt at the Nationwide top 25 and join New Zealand No 1 Danny Lee on the PGA Tour.
But while Lee, who finished sixth on the Nationwide Tour money list in 2011 to become the first Kiwi to qualify for the PGA Tour
since Tim Wilkinson in 2009, made the progression look like a walk in the park, the reality is very different.
Keeping golfers on the right track
Keeping golfers on the right track
Technology drives a multitude of modern-day industries, including those pertaining to sport, and golf is increasingly cutting edge when it comes to equipment and analytical development.
Advances in equipment owe much to space-age technology, with the combined talents of engineers, scientists and researchers creating materials and designs that put sophisticated golf weaponry into the hands of both the world’s best golfers and happy hackers.
But which state-of-the art club is right for you? Which one best suits your stature, swing, power and golfing ability? Fortunately, there are a number of systems able to analyse and assess your game and thus assist in ensuring you are correctly fitted in terms of the club you use. Not only that, they are also a useful coaching tool.
One of the best is TrackMan.
Putting life into your greens
Putting life into the greens
With winter well and truly behind us, we can look forward to the challenge of summer golf. As courses firm up and the turf plant responds to increased warmth and daylight hours so the playability of the course alters. Nowhere is this more noticeable than on the greens.
Most courses will have recovered from spring renovations by now and surfaces should soon be reaching their peak.
Rule changes ahead
As the current four-year Rules of Golf cycle comes to an end, the two governing bodies of world golf, the R&A and the USGA, have provided us with an insight into the changes that will be introduced on January 1 2012.
While the actual number of changes may be small, the impact they will make on the playing of the game is significant.
A number of situations unfolded on the European Tour, PGA Tour and recent majors that bemused the general golfing public; tournament officials had been left with no choice but to apply a penalty to a player who was deemed to have breached the rules through a ‘technicality’.
One of the most memorable cases involved Stewart Cink, who was penalised when his caddy smoothed out footprints in a fairway bunker the golfer had been forced to take his stance in prior to playing a stroke from a bunker further down the fairway.
Clearly the caddy had acted in the best interest of the following groups.