Claude Harmon III
Son of Butch and grandson of Claude , the 1948 Masters winner , Claude has worked with Dustin Johnson since 2012 . Other clients include Brooks Koepka , Ernie Els and Yani Tseng . He is now ranked 12th on Golf Digest ’ s 2017-2018 Best Teachers in America List and is a Golf Magazine Top 100 instructor .
Claude Harmon has no difficulty pinpointing the moment he knew Dustin Johnson ’ s wedge game had come of age . “ It was last August at the Northern Trust , the first event of the PGA Tour ’ s FedEx Series ,” he recalls. “ Dustin was fighting his way back after an injury and loss of confidence , while Jordan had just won the Open . The 18th hole is 470 yards , dog-legging left around a lake . DJ had the length to carry it but it would leave him around
100 yards from the green , in a wedge zone that up to 2016 had been something of a weakness for him . But he took the drive on , hit a massive shot and was left with just 95 yards to the pin .
“ He just got up there , pitched it to three- feet and sank the putt for a winning birdie . That shot was the culmination of two years of hard work that turned his wedge game around … and took him from being a top-10 player to a top-one player .” Here
, Harmon reveals the process DJ went through to go from being an average wedge player to one of the best on Tour … and explains what you can take from it to tighten up your own play from 50-125 yards .
How did you and DJ arrive at the decision to focus on wedges ?
Mostly through looking at stats . The first one was simply an appreciation of just how many times in the course of a round or a year DJ is going to have a wedge into a green , given how far he hits it . But we also looked at his Strokes Gained performance on short approach shots ; in 2015 from 100-150 yards he was at 0.09 , so basically bang average for the PGA Tour . The main focus became to find a way to help him take advantage of his length and the yardages he was leaving himself into a lot of holes .
So how did you set about improving Dustin ’ s wedge play ?
Practising his wedges wasn ’ t exciting or glamorous or interesting to him . It ’ s human nature to gravitate towards the parts of the game we are already good at , the ones we enjoy , and for DJ that meant the driver and power shots . Dustin is also not a guy who will hit balls for hours a day ; he tends to practise for 90 minutes to two hours , and after this he just kind of checks out . So we needed to find an approach he found engaging and enjoyable , one that would allow him to achieve effective , targeted work . We settled on technology , and specifically the launch monitor TrackMan .
How did you and DJ use TrackMan ?
Quite simply , we used it to get consistent at hitting distances . Dustin has three wedges ( 52 º, 60 º and 64 º) and three wedge swings – half
, three-quarter and full-length . We created
46 GolfPlus lus AUGUST 2018