This slice hack (and a skillet) helped me break the 80 mark for the first time

I wish I could say that the best solution to my golf swing came through divine intervention.

That an angel descended from above to give me the ultimate advice on how to heal golf swings, or that a wise old golf teacher whispered the mysteries of golf in my ear in his final act before slipping into the afterlife, Yoda-style.

“You have the tops.”

“You have to be closer to the ball.”

The truth is that it was the one piece of advice that changed my life as a golfer forever and gave the first one two Under 80 rounds of my career came from a source so achingly mundane and with a tool so achingly accessible that I’m mostly embarrassed to share with you.

But because I work for GOLF.com, and because my bosses have told me that our audience is generally interested in one-stop solutions that can transform an (otherwise ordinary) golfing life like my own, I will hold down my pride long enough to to tell the story.

The solution that saved my golfing life came from TikTok and only required a frying pan.

OK – before I lose you entirely, some backstory.

It was summer in England and some GOLF.com staff and I were out in the early evening after the Open Championship looking for a week of links golf. On our first night of the voyage we arrived in West Lancashire, a beautiful links test set along the Wirral coast.

It was allegedly It was going to be an epic round, and maybe it could have been… if I could have kept my golf ball on the ground. But, dear reader, I wasn’t able to do that at West Lancs, where the worst push-slice failure of my life left me running out of golf balls on the 13th hole.

It’s deeply embarrassing to run out of golf balls with five holes left on your round – even more so when you realize you’re surrounded by people who work in golf. Add to that the fact that you’ve been struggling with your golf swing for the past six months, and suddenly you’re on a full-fledged, existential golf spiral.

But there is also good news. Most of the people I play golf with are fairly skilled players, which means they’re pretty good at swinging as well. So when I woke up two days after our West Lancs tee time to a text message from my colleague Dylan Dethier with swing tips, I wasn’t particularly surprised.

“A little tip for all the slicers in this chat,” he had said.

I opened the text to see the TikTok below, which included a slice fix I’d never seen before.

In the video, a creator named TheConnectedInstructor shows how replicating your golf swing by grabbing a frying pan can reveal your swing tendencies. Essentially, those who swing the frying pan and upon impact find it facing them have an open face, resulting in cuts. Anyone who swings the frying pan and finds it pointing toward the ground upon impact has a neutral or closed face.

It’s a simple exercise that took me about 15 seconds to complete, and it turned out, not much of a surprise, that my clubface was more open on the way home from the bar than it was on a McDonald’s drive-thru.

I practiced the new move a few times and then headed off for another round. The change was already noticeable on the first tee. My swing wasn’t any different mechanically, but being locked into my point of impact position had made all the difference. Mega misses with my driver were now consistent fairway finders; shredded iron bullets were now washed away. Nobody, including me, could believe the difference.

The following week, I returned to New York and sneaked into nearby Bethpage Red for a late afternoon 6pm. As someone who’s done quite a few 15-minute tees in his life, I kept my expectations low…until I realized around the eighth tee that I was on three for the day. Just a week earlier I had scored a three-digit score at West Lancs. Now a 79 was in my sight.

I nervously fought my way to the Reds’ back nine, battling a strange new enemy (Pressure) and tapping in with a furious fist bump on the 18th to secure my first 79 of my life.

It was a euphoric moment – one I don’t think will happen more often in my golfing life – and that was thanks almost entirely to the TikTok I’d seen just ten days earlier.

Almost a month has passed since that first moment and I can safely say that the changes have not slowed down. Since making this correction, my scores have dropped by around the 80 mark and my consistency is at an all-time high. All thanks to a TikTok… and a frying pan.

I wish the story was better but when it comes to golf I can definitely say now that boring good is a lot more fun.

James Colgan

Golf.com Editor

James Colgan is News and Features Editor at GOLF, writing stories for the website and magazine. He runs Hot Mic, GOLF’s media arm, leveraging his experience in front of the camera across all of the brand’s platforms. Before James joined GOLF, he graduated from Syracuse University. During that time he was a caddy grantee (and perceptive looper) on Long Island, where he’s from. He can be reached at james.colgan@golf.com.