HOW TO HIT GREAT WEDGES WITH DUSTIN JOHNSON & COACH CLAUDE HARMON

Dustin Johnson's rise to the top of the game coincided with a massive improvement in his wedge game. Here, coach Claude Harmon III explains the process they went through to sharpen up his pitching... and how you can copy it

- 

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 threefeet 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.