The Strategy of Match Play

Upon first thought, golf in America is stroke play golf.  With the exception of a few of the national amateur events, all of our tournaments in recent years have been decided over 72 holes, fewest strokes wins.  But, on reflection, the player is quite familiar with match play, in which the golfer who wins the most holes wins the match.  After all, that’s the way most amateur players compete against each other.

            The pure head-to-head competition of match play is as old as the game itself—a slightly different and more direct challenge within the playing group than stroke play.  Match play used to have its place in major tournament golf—until 1958 in the PGA Championship and until 1965 in the U.S. Amateur.  But the advent of televised golf, and some of its requirements along with the undesirability of elimination golf to a single final match in these days of big galleries, brought the switches to stroke play.  The British tour still has a match play tournament, the country hosts a fine event—the Piccadilly World Match Play Championships—and in 1971 it returns to the U.S. Tour in the form of a national match play championship with stroke play scoring to be held at the Country Club of North Carolina the last weekend of August.  Thus, unlike regular match play, the winner will be the one with the fewest strokes after 18 holes.

I prefer stroke play, although I do enjoy a match play tournament from time to time.  It’s an enjoyable change of pace and a real challenge, too.  But I feel stroke play is a little better test of a player’s total skill.  On any one hole, you might take a carload of strokes and only lose that hole in match play.  One such bad hole in stroke play and you are out of the tournament.

            The differences between the two styles of play are in strategy.  You certainly don’t change your game technically or mechanically.  In match play, you can take a risky shot that you would hesitate to take in stroke play.  Yet, at the same time, this is all related to the importance of the shot and the position of your opponent.  For instance:

            Your opponent has knocked his tee shot in the woods, pitched out and lies two.  You are in the fairway, but the pin on the par-four hole is tucked right behind a trap.  In such a case, you shouldn’t try to get too close to the pin with your approach since it appears a par will win the hole.  You know your opponent will gamble when it’s his shot, but be conservative with the advantage.  This is sound strategy in such circumstances most of the time.

            Always keep this in mind in match play: if you are one hole up in a match, your opponent must win two holes, not one, to get the advantage himself.  Naturally, you want to have the advantage and you should always be trying to get as many holes ahead as possible.  Once behind, but particularly on the later holes, the player must free-wheel it more.  With the holes running out, he must gamble more, knowing that, even if he fails, he will only lose one hole at a time and not the entire match.

            The head-to-head feature of match play does invade stroke play tournaments to some degree and, in some cases, can unsettle the best pros.  This is most evident in the sudden-death playoffs, in which I now I must employ match strategy.  An example:

            On the second hole of my playoff with Deane Beman in the 1968 Bob Hope Desert Classic, Deane missed the green badly with his approach.  Even though he may well have been able to salvage his par, I felt my move was to get the ball safely on the right side of the green short of the pin for an uphill putt, not to gamble trying to get it close.  As it turned out, Deane pitched poorly from a tough lie and I won with two putts.

            The nature of our pairing systems usually pits the front-runners against each other in the last two rounds.  The temptation is to slip into match-play thinking.  In fact, I remember well the third round of the 1967 U.S. Open.  I was leading Jack by a stroke at that point and we were paired together.  We began trying to beat each other and neither of us was doing very well.  Soon, two players had passed us on the scoreboard.  About halfway through the round, we both realized what we were doing and agreed: “Let’s stop playing each other and start playing the course.”  This decision worked particularly to Jack’s benefit.  He won with a record 275.