Review, Forget, Move On

UK Handicap; 3.6 USGA Handicap; 3.5

The dust has settled and I can now objectively look back at the weekend in a bit more detail, and fill in a few gaps.

What I haven’t mentioned so far is that on Thursday night I went out for 9 holes, playing 2 balls on each hole, and putted absolutely everything out as if it was competition conditions. I played the 18 holes in 1 under par, and the world was a great place. I was filled with renewed confidence in time for the Worman Sword competition on Saturday.

The top line of yesterday (Saturday) has already been detailed from my mobile posts, and the opinion side of things remain the same as it was last night – my performance was embarrassing. I was notionally 36 over par for 36 holes, and was 26 shots worse than last year.

There are lots of things I could try and blame my poor performance on, in reality it was just one of those miserable days, not just on the golf course;

• 2^nd consecutive 5.30am start; I am not an early person, and 2 x 5 hour sleeps in a row do not help with fatigue.
• Bank card; On the way to the course a cash machine in Hounslow decided to keep my bank card, leaving me with virtually no cash until my bank can send me a new one sometime this week.
• Hayfever; Yesterday was the first visit of my hayfever, without my havfever medication I just had to get through it.
• Being hit; I’ve only ever been hit twice by a golf ball, and yesterday was one of them. It’s a bit frightening when you see a ball hurtling towards you and know you can’t get out of the way before it hits you in about half a second.
• Knee; It is now sore all of the time on the course, which I’ll mention later in this post.

To fill in some more numbers, I hit 13 greens in regulation out of 36 holes. In the morning I hit 10 greens, which is alright although still well below the 14 I would expect to hit. My putting was awful and that helped to destroy my card. In the afternoon I hit a pitiful a 3 greens in regulation out of 18. In the absence of data to back it up, I would expect that to be the lowest greens in regulation I have hit in several thousand rounds of golf. I was absolutely in a positive frame of mind standing on the first tee of the second round, I just couldn’t hit the ball in a straight line.

Of the 13 greens that I did hit in regulation over the course of the day, only 2 were within 14 feet, and 6 in total were within 20 feet. You aren’t going to get many birdies if the ball isn’t going near the hole.

By the time we reached the last 9 holes my knee was getting very painful, and I wasn’t sure if it was affecting my swing or not.

The answer arrived this morning, when I woke up with my knee in agony.

Had I not had a competition and been drawn in a 2-ball, therefore feeling obliged to turn up to not leave my partner on his own, there is no way I would have played today.

As it was, I actually played alright, although a lot of that was down to a dynamite short game – I got up and down on several occasions from places I would not expect to.

I was round in 77 shots, which kept my handicap the same (although it went up 0.2 yesterday). In truth it was a bit of a scrambly 77, and to say that a 6 over par round is ‘alright’ gives some indication as to how far away from scratch I am, although there are extenuating circumstance in this case. I only hit 10 greens in regulation today, because I was unable to fully turn my knee, meaning I was losing a lot of distance and I was ‘steering’ my irons. This meant I was either arriving at the ball with the clubface open, meaning the ball blocked right, or I was overcompensating with my hands to get the clubface square, which resulted in a hook. Two of these such shots cost me 5 of my 6 dropped shots, a big hook on the 6^th resulting in a double bogey, and an absolutely massive block out of bounds on the 14^th resulting in a triple bogey.

As I write now my knee is fine when stationary, however is extremely painful whenever I try and move it. I don’t really suffer from injury and illness, I’m very lucky in regards to my health, so this is a bit of an unknown for me. The doctor will be contacted tomorrow, as I can’t continue to just say it is sore – I need to do something about it. I’m just nervous about what the verdict may be.