Expert Insight’s Short Game Golf With Jim Furyk and Fred Funk Review

Short Game Golf with Jim Furyk & Fred Funk

Grade: A
Teacher’s Comments: Not your run-of-the-mill instructional video, Short Game Golf puts you into the minds of two of golf’s better players as they analyze a variety of short game problems.

Expert Insight produces a line of instructional dvds that promise to get you “inside the mind of the expert.”  The company produces dvds on poker, blackjack, magic, and—of course—golf.

The Short Game Golf dvd offers a different—and refreshing—take on the instructional video. Instead of showing a guy at at driving range demonstrating technique, the Expert Insight dvd presents two top players—Jim Furyk and Fred Funk—in a short game competition.

For the dvd, Jim Furyk’s coach (who also happens to be his father) has set up a series of short game problems: balls in teh deep rough around the green, in bunkers, with buried lies, short side greens, etc. For each situation, both Fred and Jim played the ball from the same position, trying to get closest to the hole. Points were awarded for each shot (I won’t tell you who won).

What made the program so interesting was that on each shot, voiceovers from Funk and Furyk discussed their thought process, laying out their options, setting up the shot and playing it out. They also talked about what went wrong when the shot didn’t work as planned. Slow motion captured critical moments.

In most of the cases, the two played different types of shots. One would opt to fly the ball to the hole with a wedge; the other would play a running pitch. That was particularly useful, for it showed that therea re many ways to approach each shot. But even when they played the same shot, their approaches were very different.

One of the chapters on the dvd is a set of short game drills, but that’s just an add-on. The real value is in watching the players at their work.

It’s said that the quickest way to lower your scores is to work on your short game. And the typical response is to run through a series of endless drills—which is good as far as it goes. But hitting shots consistently isn’t any good if you aren’t choosing the right shots to hit. And that’s where this dvd comes in. Furyk and Funk’s analysis of each shot lets you see that there are options on every shot.

I like this dvd a lot, and recommend it.