Anyone Got Any Good News?

UK Handicap; 3.6 USGA Handicap; 2.2

Adjustment required; -3.2, Competition rounds; 75, Ratio; -0.043 per round

I don’t have a great deal to say this week, only the one game of golf has taken place and that hasn’t exactly inspired me to wax lyrical about my game.

I had a lesson on Sunday morning, followed by a competition in the afternoon. Now normally I would absolutely advise against having a lesson just before playing a proper game, but with the lack of daylight time available, and the general state of disrepair I found my game in, I didn’t see what alternative I had.

I got quite a lot out of the lesson, which focussed mainly on my setup. As a result, I have changed quite a lot, and to be honest at the moment it feels quite uncomfortable. I am now standing a lot further away from the ball, am doing some checking that my feet and the clubhead are facing towards the target, and am trying to get more of a turn in my hips when swinging. Standing further away from the ball is the most uncomfortable part of it, as it feels like I am miles away from it and have to reach to make contact with it now. The alignment of the clubhead is the most difficult part for me. I normally address the ball with the clubhead open (pointing right of the target for a right-hander like me), when I line the clubhead up correctly with the target it feels like it is pointing dramatically to the left. If I don’t change my swing then I will end up hitting everything left, but the other two aspects of standing further away and getting more of a hip turn should help sort them out.

The next thing I need to do is to groove this in, so I am planning on reluctantly spending all day this coming Saturday hitting golf balls. It will be boring, it will be a war of attrition, and I need to keep regularly checking that I’m still doing the right things, and haven’t either slipped back into old methods, or as often happens overcompensate. But if I can put in the spade work now then I will reap the benefits long term.

As for the game I played after the lesson, I scored 30 points, which is 6 over my handicap. Considering that I missed 4 putts of less than 3 foot, and the course was playing incredibly long due to the extremely wet ground and amount of mud on it, actually isn’t too bad. But you get an idea of whether you’ve played well or not, and I certainly didn’t play well. Had I not missed the short putts and scored 34 points, it would have felt like robbery. As often happens after a lesson, there was a real mixture of shots. I hit 5 really top drawer shots, 2 of which were chips (the putts of which I then went on to miss), 2 were mid-irons, and 1 was a fairway wood from 210 yards onto a green. However there were some absolutely abysmal shots, we’re talking beginner shots here. When I get my new setup right it works, but it’s few and far between at the moment until it becomes second nature.

In my vain (bit negative there, who knows what will happen this year) attempt to get to scratch by the end of September, I’m going to start tracking how much I need to reduce by, and how many competition rounds I have left. If this ratio becomes higher than 0.1 for every competition round, then it’s goodnight Vienna, ideally I want to keep it at 0.05 or less. This should be a laugh.