Three Is A Guarantee

UK Handicap; 3.3 USGA Handicap; 2.0

As we get to the end of the season, everything seems to get a little bit more difficult. There’s only 9 hours daylight per day at the moment, limiting the amount of golf that can be played. The ground is a lot wetter, meaning the ball doesn’t roll so far. The temperature has reduced dramatically also, meaning that an 8 iron that would have travelled 150 yards just 6 weeks ago is now travelling about 135 yards instead.

The penultimate competition of the year yesterday resulted in a score of 36 stableford points – exactly on my handicap. Normally I would consider 36 points as a waste of 4 hours of my life, but yesterday it seemed like an achievement. There are 3 reasons for this. Firstly, as detailed above, with the more difficult conditions it is much more difficult to play to my handicap when the ball is travelling much less distance. Secondly, I actually recovered quite well. I was 3 over par after 6 holes and then played the last 12 in level par. Thirdly, keeping my handicap static and not increasing 0.1 yesterday means I will definitely be playing off 3 at the end of the year – not exactly my dream last April but certainly better than having to call myself a 4 handicapper for the next few months.

After the satisfaction of yesterday’s round, I played again this morning, unusually for me in a social game. It’s wasn’t a competition, nor a club match, just a game of golf for the sake of playing golf. Having played the first 9 half decent, I played very poorly in the back nine, and tailed off to a disappointing 79. Having said that, in the last couple of months my good rounds have been in the non-qualifying games and my poor rounds have been in the competition rounds, so I should be grateful that I scored 74 79 this weekend and not 79 74.

My US Handicap took a bit of a jump this weekend, as 20 rounds ago I had a couple of very good scores, and they are being taken out of the equation and replaced with my current rounds. Although this week it has taken a jump from 1.3 to 2.0, over the next 10 rounds it can’t go any higher than 2.9, no matter what I score. The problem comes after those next 10 rounds, as of my current 10 counting rounds, 9 of them are consecutive. When these scores stop being included in the equation my handicap has the potential to jump up dramatically, hopefully I can put in the occasional decent round over the winter to keep things respectable.