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.