Stewart Cink explains how the bunker shot is the easiest shot in golf when you alter your mindset on how to play these types of shots. The sand shot is usually intimidating for amateurs but with a little practice using Cink’s tips, they can become much easier.
Show us how a major champion tries to get up and down out of the sand. The shot out of the bunker is the simplest shot in golf because you don’t even have to hit the ball. It’s the only shot in golf. All you have to do is hit the sand. Sand does the rest of the work. It pushes the ball out. But the trick is, and what I think a lot of people misunderstand is how do you hit the sand properly with the club? And so, um, I have a a decent little tip I think can help everybody out there and it’s something that I use even with my own shots. And the way to do that is to start with a wide open club face. I I always tell people, get in there and make the club look like a pancake. It’s really the right way to do it. You’re going to present the club to the sand the right way. Sand’s going to hit the ball the right way. You’re going to hit a shot that’s got nice trajectory, plenty of stopping power, and it’s going to enable you to get the ball close to the hole out of the bunker. And I like to use my left leg as like an anchor, like it doesn’t move in the shot. I’m basically going to swing an open face around that anchor. Okay? Like that right there with a lot of speed. And the loft stays on the club. Now, the club head passes the hands, but it’s a released open face. Not that way. I mean, that’s released, but that’s not what we’re doing here. It’s more that way. See how open that face stays? See if I can do one here. I’m just gonna let the club slide into the ball and out it comes. So that short follow through like that almost an abbreviated follow through where the club face stays open but around. Interesting. What about ball position? Uh ball position. Well, that’s another little bit of misleading thing with a lot of ammons I see. When they think of ball position, they think of where the ball needs to be and where you need to strike the ball. But you got to remember now, you’re not you’re not hitting the ball. You want to make contact with the sand about uh you know two three inches behind. This is in imperfect science, but couple inches behind the ball. That’s your position. Forget the ball. In fact, let’s just move the ball out of the way. You get in the bunker and where you’re going to contact the sand, that’s your ball position. Make some practice strokes and learn how to hit the sand right on that line you just drew. I made contact with the line every time. Now you put the ball in same distance from that line and just do the same thing. All right. So this is a 25 ft bunker shot. Let’s go 40T say. So you have to you have to double the distance here roughly. How are you going to dictate more distance based on what you’ve told us out of the bunker? Uh you can do it two ways. Okay. Uh, number one, you can just make a bigger version of the same shot and it’ll go farther. Second thing you can do is just use a different club. And it doesn’t have to be your other sandwich either. I have my lob wedge out here. This is kind of my go-to stock shot out of a bunker. But what’s the loft on that? It’s 62 degrees. Wow. Okay. So, if I needed to go a little farther and I needed some release, I might go back to my sand wedge. I might go back to my gap wedge or my pitching wedge or my nine iron, depending on the distance. Yeah. If I have a really long bunker shot, let’s say I put it here and the pin is over on one of those greens, 40 yards away, I might take my nine or eight iron and hit an explosion shot and I’m going to get a low shot that rolls. And uh now you’re probably not going to get that up and down very often, but you’re not going to make double bug either. Gotcha. All right, let’s see one more. All right, so if I needed to go let’s let’s uh add 15 ft to this shot. So I got to carry it just over the fringe right there. Now I’m going to do the same exact thing. My my anchor’s right here, right? It’s not going anywhere. And I’m just going to make a little bit bigger version of the same swing I just made. Boy, you make it look easy. There it goes. It is easy. Like we said, it’s the easiest shot in golf cuz you don’t even have to hit the ball. Well, you have made it look easy. You know, most amateurs think this is a nasty spot, but you’ve made it look easy because of your expertise, everything you’ve shared with us. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. You know, I enjoy this part of the game and it’s fun to perform these in front of the fans and uh it’s also fun to talk about it and help others get a little bit better at
2 Comments
If only every bunker had the same soft sand, and every lie in the bunker was the same, Stewart, come and play some English golf courses, you might need to remake that video 🤔
yeah, evrything lokks easy, but to have that swing is not