Dave Stockton’s Unconscious Scoring Book Review

Master short game guru Dave Stockton is set to release his latest instructional title, Unconscious Scoring: Dave Stockton’s Guide to Saving Shots Around The Green. The book will be available starting on September 17.

This new book preaches simplicity as the key to Stockton’s success, and it accordingly breaks the short game into two basic components: low shots and high shots. Unconscious Scoring also features short-game examples and techniques that come directly from the week-to-week sessions Stockton conducts with professionals such as Rory McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, Morgan Pressel and others.

Early on in the book, Stockton offers a reassuring preview of what lies ahead: “I’m here to tell you that you can make your short-game life so much easier if you give up hitting those in-between shots and start thinking of every short-game shot as either a high shot or a low shot…For many of you, it’s going to be hard to accept that the short game can be so straightforward.”

From that point forward, Stockton offers practical insights and advice for raising your short game. Yet while this book is based around the tenet of simplicity, it does require you to dig in and pay attention. Some of the chapters might have benefited from subsection headers to break the content up a bit, but that’s a minor quibble.

After all, Stockton isn’t selling a quick fix. He’s offering a clear game plan for getting up and down. He points the way, but you still need to do the work. On that note, Unconscious Scoring also features numerous drills for nailing high and low shots, and for getting safely out of the sand.

Stockton covered putting in great detail in his previous book, Unconscious Putting, but this new book still devotes a chapter to putting. It also includes the following helpful drill, which embodies Stockton’s purposeful approach to practice: “You should pick an exact entry point for every putt you hit. On the practice green, you want to pick a very specific part of the hole where the ball will enter at the end of that path. When you pick that spot, stick a tee into the edge of the cup on the practice green, and then roll a few putts with the goal of bouncing the ball off that tee.” 

If you’re looking for a shot in short-game arm this fall, you’ll want to consider curling up with this guide from one of the game’s instructional giants.

The above excerpts are reprinted with permission from Gotham Books, a division of the Penguin Group, copyright © 2012 by Dave Stockton. The book is now available on Amazon via the PutterZone bookstore.