Anatomy of a bucket
'Dialling in' and all that entails
A little over a year ago, Australian Golf Digest published a minute-by-minute breakdown of one of Tiger’s range sessions.
Dialled to the minute, Drew Powell describes how the greatest-ever works through a logical progression of wedges, effortless shot-shaping with mid and long irons, before fiddling with new tech and launching a few drivers.
It’s twenty minutes of precision and purpose.
On Tuesday afternoon, I’d just knocked off after a day of writing about gymnastics and listening to Spotify-curated soul mixes. But since work just about backs onto Melbourne Golf Park and the sticks were in the boot, I figured hitting a bucket of balls wasn’t a bad way to wait for the traffic to die down.
Where 50 pellets used to be $7 back in the day at Bulleen driving range with dad, the good folk at MGP are clearly still paying off their sub-par redevelopment (I wrote about it here – I hadn’t been there at the time of writing, and wouldn’t be so generous again. It’s an unremarkable, wasteful missed opportunity), stinging golfers a smooth $21 for 50 balls.
Despite all bays being full on the icy cold and soulless bottom level, one upstairs and down the far end was free, and even came with a smattering of extra balls. Cop that, Tiger.
A couple of aimless “smooth wedges” later, my take on shaping gentle mid-irons turned into an exercise in recall: namely recalling what advice Ryan Lynch gave me when I last had a lesson in April 2024.
Ryan had encouraged me to “trust the face” of the club to release after years of diligently trying to play straight-bat cricket had taught me to do anything but.
Tiger prefers to hit these warm-up shots with his even-numbered irons, which leads to their grooves wearing out faster.
I also like to hit them with my eight-iron. That’s because it’s not broken like my seven.
All that said, I actually quite enjoy hitting mid-irons, and was happy enough to churn through a decent portion of the bucket confidence intact.
Unlike Tiger, my focus is not laser focused on the range; after all, I play golf more for the people and the stories it brings together, than for the possibility of hitting a consistent tight draw. With that in mind, and now half way through my collection of balls, I turned my attention to those with whom I was sharing the range:
The usual smattering of bros trying to outdrive each other, a few implementing tips from YouTube, a father-son duo where the kid was tallying the number of shots he hit further than 100m and what I think was a first date.
Kudos to them all, golf’s really is a changing face in Australia at the moment.
Crowd analysis complete, I was ready to tackle the last portion of the bucket. For Tiger, that’s tinkering with his new three-wood, and comparing it to his “gamer,” before unleashing driver.
I do not carry a driver because I am scared to hit it and the closest thing I have to a “gamer” three-wood is my SLDR 19-degree hybrid that I bought from the Kew Drummond Golf bargain bin in 2013.
Lucky it’s *mostly* reliable.
Generally my favourite club in the bag, the hybrid has been miserable of late, and I had about fifteen balls left in the bucket to sort it out.
To the surprise of literally nobody who has ever played the sport, some of those fifteen were good, some horrid, and the last one perfect.
Fingers crossed there’s at least one more of those perfect hybrids left in me first thing on Friday morning; the first tee shot at St Andrews Beach requires a decent bit of carry to find the fairway, and my miss – embarrassingly – is a top.
Whatever happens, once the bucket was empty it took less than half an hour to cross the city and get home.
So on that front, I’m willing to say mischief managed.