A Bit Of Hope & A Lot Of Practice

UK Handicap; 3.9 USGA Handicap; 2.6

It’s a stupid game sometimes, golf, although I should know that by now. A week ago I was in the throes of wondering why I bother, now I’m tuned in and everything I do is focussed on preparing for my last major competition of the year, The Craw’s Nest Tassie next week at Carnoustie.

Having said that, last week was a write-off, or should I say wash-out, when it came to practising. It poured down with rain every evening I had planned to practice. So I played in a competition on Saturday morning without having picked up a club since the previous Sunday. My long game wasn’t exactly brilliant, I hit 9 greens in regulation out of 18, but my short game was pretty good, I got up and down on 7 occasions to score a gross 3 over par 74, which should get 0.1 reduced from my handicap. Whilst there is room for improvement, it was infinitely better than the previous month. Since then I have dodged rain showers yesterday for a limited practice session, and then spent 3 hours hitting balls today.

I have my tee times for the two qualifying rounds at Carnoustie next Monday and Tuesday (one round on the Championship course and one over the Burnside course), and one of them is a ridiculously early tee off time. I am also playing early on this Saturday and Sunday, so in order to get used to the early starts (not my forte) and with the nights drawing in (the sun is now setting before 8pm around here), I’ve decided to practice first thing in the morning every day this week. I did a similar thing in advance of the club championship, and although that didn’t have the best outcome, I felt better for it, and more prepared when push came to shove.

I am only going to practice my long game this week, as the short game practice facilities at my home club are not great, and there’s no point tuning my short game to my home course when the conditions at Carnoustie will be very different. I will instead spend a couple of hours on the practice green at Carnoustie after my practice round on Sunday.

I’ll do a full preview of the Craw’s Nest Tassie later in the week, but one thing worth mentioning now is that the qualifying round over the Championship course will be played off the green tees, making it 6,400 yards instead of 6,900 from the white tees. This doesn’t necessarily make things any easier, as a lot of the fairway bunkers that are just out of reach for me from the white tees will be very much in range from the green tees. So it’s absolutely imperative that my driving of the ball is straight, as landing in a fairway bunker at Carnoustie means an instant dropped shot. If I can get the driving right then the course does become a lot easier, as I’ll be leaving 9 irons into greens instead of 5 irons.

This competition has given me something else to focus on other than my handicap, I had become a bit fixated about it and annoyed by the lack of progress despite the work I’ve put in this season. My latest tactic is to concentrate on my game and leave the handicap to sort itself out, hopefully this will result in me putting less pressure on myself and enjoying the game more.

Trying To Be A Category 2 Golfer

UK Handicap; 4.0 USGA Handicap; 2.5

I’ve had a bit of an up and down weekend, going through various emotions and opinions of my golf game, but hopefully I’m over the worst of things now.

I’ve played 2 competitions for my handicap in the last 3 days, and the eagle-eyed reader will notice that my handicap has increased 0.2 since the last time I posted, indicating that both rounds were quite unsuccessful.

The first 11 holes on Friday were actually alright, apart from a disaster on the 2^nd hole, but the last 7 holes were just pathetic. I managed a grand total of 4 stableford points on those 7 holes. For someone to play to their handicap requires scoring 2 points per hole, so I was 10 over my handicap for those 7 holes. I finished with one of my worst totals ever for 18 holes of golf, and I was quite down afterwards, especially because of having had a lesson and having practiced recently. I was confident though that my game had bottomed out at that point, it was at the bottom of a trough, couldn’t get any worse, and the good golf would start again shortly.

I was only half right. The first 9 holes today were just as bad as the last 7 on Friday. I had a grand total of 9 stableford points at the halfway stage, and for around an hour I was genuinely thinking about withdrawing from the Craw’s Nest Tassie and giving up the entire game indefinitely. I was planning how much I could get for selling all my equipment, and alternative hobbies I could take up to fill in my social time. At that point I just did not know where the next shot was going. Golf can be an extremely frustrating and depressing game if you are playing badly, are hitting the ball all over the place, and haven’t got a clue why it’s happening. But it is also a mysterious game, as there is no rational reason why I played the last nine holes today in 1 under par, making 21 stableford points and generally hitting ball really well. It just came from nowhere. If anyone discovers the reason why people’s games can just totally change from one hour / day / week to the next, they will make a lot of money from selling that knowledge. So on the balance of the weekend as a whole I am playing terribly, however on the basis of the last 9 holes I’m playing really well.

My handicap is now the highest it has been for 64 weeks, and I’m now closer to being a 5 handicapper than I am a 3 handicapper, not really what I had in mind when I started this blog; the plan was to get down to 1 this year with a final push down to scratch next year. Whilst I haven’t had the best of years so far, I hope this shows how difficult it is to get down to a really low handicap whilst holding down a full time job. To get down to scratch I need to be practising every single day without fail, and I just can’t commit to that. So I’ll keep trying my best, but even I am now realising just how difficult this task is.

To the people who start various blogs about trying to get down from 10 to scratch in a year; I’m trying to get from 3 to scratch in 2 years, and just short of halfway through I’ve gone from 3 to 4. I wish you all luck, but unless you can put your entire life on hold for a year it isn’t going to happen.

The Big Easy

UK Handicap; 3.8 USGA Handicap; 2.3

I’ve managed to get back into the practice routine over the last week, having 4 practice sessions and a lesson, which is more practice than I’ve had in the full month preceding.

The lesson went quite well, I’ve picked up a few things that I need to change, but as with any lessons the key part is what I do afterwards. What often happens is that muscle memory builds up, but the thought still remains of what needs changed. So if, for example, one of the outputs of the lesson is to take the club away more on the inside, the muscle memory may have built that up after a couple of practice sessions, but in the next practice session the mind is still thinking that the club needs to be taken away more on the inside, which has the overall result of overcompensating.

I’ve also decided to put less effort in to swinging a golf club. I was practising tonight, and having hit a few shots heavy and a few thin, decided to slow everything down dramatically, and just let the club hit the ball, instead of putting every sinew of energy into it. The end result was that everything was more balanced, the clubhead was meeting the ball at the right place, and after building up the effort a little bit more, but still only about 60% of my previous swings, the ball was going just as far.

What I now have to do is to remember all of this when I’m playing a proper round on the course. All the extra effort in a golf shot gets the combined extra distance of zero yards. I need to make my swing less like Bubba Watson (who, incidentally, I admire in huge amounts) and more like Ernie Els.

I have played one competition round since my last post, a rather uninspiring 79 around my home course, resulting in yet another 0.1 increase to my UK handicap. The damage was all done on my first 9 holes, I turned in 7 over par with two 6s and a 7 on my card. I managed to play the second 9 in one over par, but as so often this season, the damage was already done.

I’m still confident I can reduce my handicap considerably by the end of the season, but I have to take everything easy; both physically with my golf swing, and mentally with the amount of pressure I put on myself before a competition round. There are two chances to put this into action, on Friday and Sunday, hopefully there will be some good news to report by the end of the weekend.

Tales Of The Unexpected

I went out and practised tonight for the first time in well over a month, and after an initial spell of hitting the ball all over the place, when I realised that slowing my swing down may help, it got back to being semi-respectable. Seeing as it’s a fairly quiet week, I thought I’d catch up with some random and unusual incidents that have happened over the course of this season, that haven’t merited coverage in this blog;

- At Montrose I played with someone who played the first 9 holes in 1 over par, and the last 9 holes in 22 over par. I don’t think I’ve ever played with anyone who had such a drastic reversal in fortunes in the space of the same round.

- Also at Montrose, my other playing partner completed his two rounds in scores of 88 and 90, but each of those two rounds contained an eagle, at the par 5 6^th on day one, and the par 5 15^th on day two. I beat him by 21 shots but didn’t get a sniff of an eagle during the 2 days.

- A couple of weeks ago I went and played a round at a friend’s 9 hole course, and scored 9 consecutive pars. I’ve often talked about my goal of playing a round of golf without dropping a shot, but I think I’d be stretching it a bit to count a 9 hole course as achieving my target.

- At the Royal Montrose Open, I did mention that I got a 2 at the 235 yard 16^th hole. What I didn’t mention was that there was a magic 2’s competition, and with the extreme wind and difficulty of the pin positions on the 3 par 3s I was looking at a payout of between £50 - £100. Imagine my surprise when I got back to the clubhouse to discover that the ‘reward’ for getting a 2 was 3 Srixon balls, of the variety that I will never use, not even for practice. It must have been a very good money-making exercise for the golf club, bring in £150 in entry fees, and pay out 6 or 9 golf balls. It left a bit of a bad taste, seeing as magic 2s competitions are normally not for profit, it is generally the sum of the entries divided by the number of 2s, however it did give my friends the opportunity to make fun of me for weeks afterwards, comparing the measly reward I got compared with the fact I sweated blood to get that 2.

- During the Club Championship, someone managed to get an albatross 2 on the par 5 11^th. I have never played in a competition where an albatross was achieved, the player seemed fairly non-plussed by it afterwards, even though it was a 1,000,000/1 shot.

- Yet another one from Montrose; I religiously carry my golf clubs, avoiding push trolleys, power trolleys or carts wherever possible. When I got to the 7^th green at Montrose I picked my bag up and the strap completely snapped. The problem was that Montrose is very much an out-and-back course, with the furthest point from civilization being, yep, the 7^th green. A quick check of Google Earth shows that I was 1,995 yards from the nearest place where I could do anything about it. So I was left with a very uncomfortable carry for the rest of the round.

A lesson on Saturday and a competition round on Sunday will bring to an end one of the quietest weeks I’ve had for a couple of months.

Salvage Operation

UK Handicap; 3.7 USGA Handicap; 2.3

It’s been a very quiet week golf-wise, so much so that I have only played once.

The main reason for this is that, within 2 hours of getting back to London on Monday evening, my hayfever had reared its ugly head and I felt awful, a feeling that has continued up until today.

There are many good things about living in London, but the increased humidity, pollution, and temperature all conspire to make millions of people miserable in the heat of the summer. I had been absolutely fine for the 3 weeks or so that I was in Scotland, but I didn’t need to spend long in the London environment for it to arrive, and once it’s arrived it likes to stay for as long as possible. I do have medication for it, which has helped considerably, I would be unable to do anything without it. The outcome of the hayfever is that I am coughing every 15 seconds or so, and am totally drained, probably due to the energy I use up in coughing so frequently.

The game I did play was in a club competition on Saturday, and having not picked up a golf club in 6 days, it was no surprise that I played absolutely horribly. My handicap went up, but by some miracle I did actually manage to hit 13 greens in regulation, and also managed to break 80, albeit only just with a 79. I have absolutely no idea how I managed to hit 13 greens in regulation, as I was unusually very poor off the tee, my hiatus seems to have brought an ugly hook back into my game, and my iron shots felt bad, there was no smoothness or confidence in my swing.

The real damage was done with the putter though, I had 38 putts, on greens that were very poor for the time of year. They were cored and sanded in the third week of July, but 2 weeks later they have not recovered, and having played 8 other courses in July, there was only one course with greens in worse condition, and that was at Stonehaven where they hadn’t been cut.

Having looked back at my scores, 79 is actually my worst score in my last 23 rounds, so I must be playing alright if I’ve broken 80 on 23 consecutive occasions, the problem is that my consistency also hinders me; as mentioned previously my handicap will reduce by more if I shoot a 70 and an 85, rather than two 75s.

I’m at a decision point for my season now. There are 19 opportunities left to play for my handicap this calendar year. 11 of these opportunities lie in the next 7 weeks, with 3 in the following 3 weeks, and only 5 in the last 9 weeks of 2010. By the time the last of the next 11 handicap competitions are completed on 26^th September, the sun will be setting at 6.49pm, and any evening practice will be out of the window for 6 months. So although there are 8 further opportunities to adjust my handicap thereafter, without the opportunity to practice they hold limited value or appeal.

My handicap is now higher than I started the year, and my goal for this year of getting down to 1.4 is but a distant memory. I can either just turn up and play in these 11 competition over the next 7 weeks and see what happens, or I can get back into practice mode and use these opportunities as a chance to salvage whatever I can from the season, and maybe see if I can get down to 2. I’ve decided to go with the latter, and have built into my schedule 11 practice sessions which are aimed and timed at getting my performance back to somewhere near where it should be, to give me the best chance of going into the winter with at least some hope of achieving my goal of scratch by the end of September 2011. If I don’t do this then there is a very good chance that I end the season somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5, which is not acceptable having started the season at 3.2, so I owe it to all the work I have put in so far this year to have a final push to keep this goal alive, if not necessarily kicking.

From Monifieth to Home

UK Handicap; 3.6 USGA Handicap; 2.2

After the highs and lows of Montrose, it was time to play Monifieth Medal on Saturday and Sunday, the first time being a warm up for the 18 Hole Open the following day.
Monifieth is very similar to Montrose; east coast of Scotland, lots of gorse, 3 clubs sharing 2 links courses, par 36 out, par 35 back, same SSS, almost identical USGA Course and Slope Ratings (134 and 135, so they are tricky courses).

On Saturday I putted absolutely terribly, and lost a ball on the 9th costing 2 shots, yet somehow still managed to go round in 4 over par 75. Having played the course literally hundreds of times, it’s interesting to come back once a year and see the differences that maybe wouldn’t be noticed if I played the course every week. Because it is links golf, and dune based, the ground can move over a period of time, and slopes that were in one place 10 years have either disappeared or moved somewhere else.

On Sunday I never really got into 2nd gear, and we weren’t helped by the most torrential rain shower I have seen in a long time on the 4th and 5th holes. It only lasted for about 10 minutes, but it reduced visibility to about 250 yards, not because of fog or mist, just due to the density of the rain.

I made several bogeys in the first 6 and found myself 4 over par on the 7th tee. I rattled off 4 pars before hitting into 2 bunkers on 11 and walking off with a double bogey. Managed to make another run of 4 pars before finishing birdie, bogey, birdie for a 76 nett 72.
I don’t know my exact placing but it was in the region of 12th place, which is alright out of over 100 competitors, but not quite as good as my 5th place from last year. The good news is that I played to my handicap, so after a week of narrowing missing buffer zone and going up 0.1 each time, I was able to stop the rot.

This is one area where the UK system doesn’t work particularly well. I have spent most of the last month playing difficult courses, that I don’t know very well, that are set up for Championship play. It is not surprising that my handicap has gone up. The CSS at these competitions occasionally moves up 1 from the SSS, but even if it does, 1 shot is not an adequate compensation for the increased difficulty of playing these courses, compared with either a home player or an easier setup. In Scotland, if there are more than 20 home players and 20 visitors, clubs have to calculate two different CSSs, one for home players and one for visitors. Whilst this is one small step in the right direction, it has not been rolled out to the rest of the UK, probably because it is an admission that the UK system of handicapping is not transferrable from one club to another due to the lack of a slope system.

Playing in these Opens and have my handicap increase also raises another question; If I want to become a scratch golfer, why don’t I pick and choose my competitions to give me the best opportunity of getting cut? I suppose I could do that, but I wouldn’t be very comfortable with it; I’m a firm believer that a handicap should be representative of what actually happens, not some cherry picked competitions. I’ll play in conditions that mean I have virtually no chance of getting cut, but if that makes my handicap realistic then so be it. I’ll also continue to play at other courses, because it’s by gaining these experiences of playing against different, and often better, players, which will ultimately make me a better player if I learn from them, even if the short term outcome is that my handicap goes up.

What I’d like to see on a player’s handicap record is a number in brackets which contains the number of scores submitted away from the player’s home course for the last 12 months. It wouldn’t alter the handicap itself, but it would give some indicator to whether the player is testing his handicap in a wider environment, and whether it travels well, or if his handicap is reflective of his ability only on his home course. Too many people in the UK have a handicap that may reflect their ability to knock it around their home course, but put them somewhere else and their handicap should instantly double.

I’m on the train back to London now, where I’ll be for the next 4 weeks. As good as the last month has been, with trips to the Highlands, working at the Open Championship, Murrayshall, Montrose and Monifieth Opens, it will be good to settle down in the one place for a few weeks and try and regroup, before making my last golfing trip of the year back to Scotland in September, for the Craw’s Nest Tassie at Carnoustie.