Another week, another 0.1 added to the handicap. Might have to rename this blog ‘Trying to play like a complete hacker”. Having said that, the 0.1 that I went up Sunday was just daft, and could have easily been avoided. I got to the eighth tee 1 over par, having played really nicely for the first seven holes. 8-11 is an easy stretch of my course, I would always aim to be 1 under par for those four holes. So going bogey, par, bogey bogey wasn’t in the script. All 3 dropped shots were caused by being just a couple of yards off line, on another day they would have all been pars. I battled back from then on, needing a par 4 on the last to avoid the 0.1 increase. Having nailed a drive down the middle of the fairway, I was left with 85 yards to the flag and 3 shots to get down in. I could do this with my eyes closed. However, not this time. For some inexplicable reason, I hit an awful wedge onto the green about 30 feet from the hole, and took 3 putts to get down, having putted really confidently up until that point.
It was one of those ‘I can’t believe I just did that’ moments, but there’s no point dwelling on it, it’s just one of those things.
The game on Sunday was the first competitive game since I saw my swing for the first time. I had another lesson on Saturday morning, and the video camera was brought out as part of it. I haven’t had lessons for over 15 years, and the technology that has evolved since then makes it a completely different experience.
Seeing my swing on video was an awakening experience; there were some things that were much better than I could have imagined (still head on the backswing, good swing plane), but there were some things that absolutely horrified me. I take the clubhead back in a closed position, and I can work on that fairly easily, but the main thing that surprised me was my weight distribution – it is completely wrong. I am right handed, and it makes sense that I should have my weight on my right side on my backswing, and transfer it over to my left side during the downswing. This generates power into the golf shot. I do the complete opposite, I transfer my weight onto my right foot during the downswing. This does go someway to explaining why I haven’t been hitting the ball as far as I think I should be.
Having been given some things to work on, I have played on the three days since. The first game is detailed at the start of this post, the second was a practice session the following day, which started terribly before I realised that transferring weight is a gradual process, it doesn’t have to look as if I’m trying to chop down trees by shifting my entire body weight from one leg to the other in under half a second. Once this notion clicked into place, the shots got a lot better. It’s also worth giving credit where credit’s due. I blogged at the end off last week about how bobbly the greens were at my course, that practising putting was next to impossible, well in the space of 3-4 days they are like different greens, there is still work to be done to them but they have made a massive improvement, the whole course is looking quite good at the moment. Long may it continue.
Tonight I played another course just for a change, my friend is the head greenkeeper so we scooted round in under 3 hours, and for the first time in a long time I can confidently say that I didn’t hit a single destructive iron shot. I was round in 5 over par 76, which isn’t exactly the course record, but considering that it was very windy and I hadn’t played the full course before so wasn’t entirely sure on distances and reading greens, it was one of my best rounds in a quite a while.
I’m getting a sense of déjà vu here, but I’m confident I’m hitting the ball well and have a good mental game at the moment, so sooner rather than later my UK Handicap will start to reduce. Next attempt is this Sunday.
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