Debbie Doniger's Flop Shot: Two Tiers, One Release Drill, and Two Gaps

A Saturday afternoon at a practice facility on the outskirts of Surabaya. I stood behind the netting watching an 18-handicap player set up for his third shot on the 7th hole. The ball sat short-sided, the pin cut tight to the left edge, a green ridge about forty centimetres high directly in front of him. He laid the clubface almost flat open, pushed the ball back toward his left heel, and swung with everything he had. The leading edge buried itself a hand's width behind the ball. The ball flew across the green and rolled into the bunker behind. The teacher standing beside me said one sentence: "You opened the face more than you needed, and you swung faster than you trusted." I bring up that scene because it matches, almost detail for detail, what GOLF.com's new instruction piece describes. Debbie Doniger, a teaching professional on the outlet's GOLF Top 100 Teacher list, splits the flop shot into two versions: an easy one and an advanced one. That split, to me, is the most valuable part of the whole article — not the shot itself. The easy version is built on variance reduction, not maximising height. The face opens slightly, not widely. The ball sits middle to slightly forward in the stance. The handle raises so the toe sits down, keeping the face stable through impact. The arms stay wide both ways, and the feel should be a half to three-quarter swing. Doniger's stated goal is a ball that goes high and lands soft without unnecessary risk. This is a floor-raising technique, not a ceiling-raising one. The advanced version is where it gets interesting. A wider stance, the lead knee bent to create a stable rotation axis, the handle lowered to offset the aim bias created by the open face. Anyone who has tried a flop shot knows the trap: opening the face sends the ball high but points the aim right. Lowering the handle solves both at once — it adds loft and pulls the aim line back. That is a genuine biomechanical solution, not a marketing trick, and most amateur instruction is vague about it. But the drill I consider the highest-leverage element sits at the end: take both thumbs off the grip while practising. The most common amateur failure on a flop is deceleration through impact — the wrists stall, the clubhead never releases, the leading edge digs. Removing the thumbs forces wrist action and forces the clubhead through. That drill attacks the cause of the failure, not the symptom. Where I part company with the article is in two gaps. First, there is not a single line about wedge bounce or grind, and no guidance on matching the club to the lie. In Indonesia, where I have lived and worked for eight years, most amateur players are on firm turf with thin grass, and they usually carry low-bounce wedges. Teaching that player to open the face on a tight lie is an invitation to blade the ball. The same flop shot with a 56-degree high-bounce wedge on soft turf and a 60-degree low-bounce wedge on firm turf are two different shots requiring two different techniques. The article skips that entire decision layer. Second, there is no guardrail stopping the reader from turning the flop shot into a default greenside choice. The article sets the problem up correctly — short-sided, with an obstacle — then never returns to that limit again. Meanwhile the name "flop shot" carries a heroic, high-gloss connotation. Amateur readers will finish the piece wanting to hit it more, not less. I have watched enough to know: a golfer does not die from one bad shot, he dies when he loses the shared pulse of the course — and that pulse is maintained by boring chip-and-runs, not flop shots. The "easy" label also deserves a second read. It does not mean easy for a beginner. It means lower risk than the advanced version. The article is honest when it says the feel should be a half to three-quarter swing, but an inexperienced reader will compress the word "easy" into "no practice required". That is the widest expectation gap in the entire piece. One more point on authority. The Top 100 Teacher designation is a credential curated by the outlet itself, not an independent certification from a governing body. It speaks to Doniger's professional standing within instruction; it does not prove her method outperforms other valid methods. I do not doubt her competence. I am saying readers should separate reputation from evidence of efficacy. The fall in Indonesia did not cost me my career, it taught me how to stand back up in silence. It also taught me something about this trade: technique never exists in a vacuum. It exists on a specific lie, with a specific club, in the hands of a player at a specific skill level. Strip those three variables out of an instruction piece and what remains is still correct, but correct the way a blueprint is correct — not the way a real player can follow. From a market angle, instruction content like this transmits indirectly into the wedge segment. A reader finishes the piece and asks how much bounce is on the wedge in his bag — and that question leads to research, then to purchase. There is no product placement in the article, but the demand signal still travels. For someone in my line of work, that is the most interesting part: a technique lesson functioning as a soft sales channel for the short-game category. On the rules side, there is nothing to debate. Opening the face, raising or lowering the handle, widening the stance, bending the lead knee — all legal under R&A and USGA rules. Recent equipment reforms do not touch this shot. So the story here is purely about skill transmission, which is exactly why those gaps matter. If this piece has lasting value, it sits in the release drill, not the flop. That drill works for every shot around the green, not just the flop. It teaches the wrists to release, the clubhead to pass, and the speed to hold through the end of the swing. Thirty seconds of practice with both thumbs off the grip is worth more than three months of trying to make the ball go higher. The question for the reader, then, is not "should I learn the flop shot". It is: the last time you stood short-sided with a green ridge in front of you, did you have the courage to choose the low-risk chip instead of the glossy flop you had not practised enough? On a golf course, the voice of the community is never noise, it is the drumbeat of the arena — and that drumbeat does not reward the beautiful shot, it rewards the correct one.