Not So Sweet Sixteen

UK Handicap; 3.9 USGA Handicap; 3.7

Another two competitions this week, and guess what? Another 0.2 on my handicap. Both competition rounds were gross 78s, which again, is not a disaster, but is still some way off the pace I need to be setting. My last 8 rounds at my home course have actually all been between 74 and 78, I need to maintain that consistency but about 4 shots less.

The Friday round carried on the thread from last week, I struggled to hit my irons and relied on a good short game. The anti-inflammatory tablets are still working brilliantly, so I had virtually no pain in my knee at all. However, I still only hit 7 greens in regulation out of 18.

I had a lesson first thing on Saturday, and it was the best lesson I’ve had so far. I don’t want to bore anyone with the technical details, but as opposed to the previous lesson, I just “got it”. I stayed out for a while after the lesson and after another hour I was pinging 7 irons at will towards my target.

I came to today’s round with renewed confidence over my irons, and I did hit them a lot better generally, hitting 13 greens in regulation. I was about 6 inches from a hole in one as well. Unsurprisingly, as I have mentioned before, the plate spinning means that as soon as I sorted one aspect of my game, another part went. This time, very unusually, it was my driving that went. I dropped 10 shots in total today (3 birdies got it back to 7 over par 78 in total), and 8 of those 10 dropped shots were caused by 3 poor tee shots. I am normally fairly solid off the tee, I generally don’t have to worry about, or practice, tee shots. I am convinced that, having made changes to my setup / swing for my irons, these same changes are influencing my driving, although this time having a negative effect. I sound like a broken record here; but there is very nearly a good score in there just waiting to get out, hopefully with a few more tweaks, this time to my driving, I can get to where I need to be.

This is a part where I need to remember how difficult it is to improve at this level whilst holding down a relatively responsible full time job. I’d love to play or practice every day, but in the next 10 days I have to be in Newcastle, Liverpool, Newcastle (again), Doncaster and Belfast. There is at least 5 days where golf is totally out of the question. This puts me at a massive disadvantage compared with the students, gap year kids, and people who don't have to worry about working full time. There are moments of severe doubt on occasion, is my target (and the whole purpose of this blog) actually achievable, and realistic? My best score this year is 2 over par 73, a lot of people will never get near to going round a golf course in as few as 73 shots, but if I have any chance of reaching my goal I need scores like 73 to be a bad day at the office, not a season best. Who knows? I’ll keep on trying, but as I have started to mention more often recently, it is time to turn thoughts and theory into action.

To finish on a minor stats note, I have now played my home course 20 times this season, so I thought I’d look at my stats. My mean average round is 77.45, but the thing that absolutely stands out is that I appear to have a complete mental block about the 16^th hole. I was thinking this was the case before I saw these stats, I’ve not parred it in my last 7 attempts. It’s strange how different holes can play with your mind for a period of time, it’s happened before on other holes (14^th, 10^th and 1^st, all of which are now in midfield of my difficulty rating). I think I just need to play through it, par it a couple of times to give me positive mental images that I can refer to when I play it in future. I’ve never been averaging as high as 1.1 over par for a hole after 20 rounds of a season before this, when I only get 4 shots per round I can’t afford to throw 1.1 of them away on the same hole, time and time again.

A Healthy Service

UK Handicap; 3.7 USGA Handicap; 3.5

I’ve not hit a golf ball since my last post, but there have still been a couple of ups and downs.

The down is that my handicap has managed to go up another 0.1 without even playing. I found out that the Competition Scratch Score wasn’t the provisional figure I had been told, for a competition I played in a couple of weeks ago, so my handicap had gone up instead of staying the same. There is a kind of perverse pleasure when my handicap goes up, and it gives me more scope to get cut further. That defies all sensible logic, I should want my handicap to be as low as possible, but I feel like my handicap going up gives me a slingshot for a good run of getting it reduced. Having said that, the way this season has gone, I need one of these slingshots sooner rather than later.

The up side is that my knee is on the road to being mended. For any American readers who have heard the Republican claims that the NHS is “evil and Orwellian” over the last year, below is my experience of the services it has provided me.

Monday 9.20am; Phone doctor

Monday 10.20am; See doctor, prescribed anti-inflammatory tablets and referred to knee specialist

Monday 11.00am; Pick up medicine from chemist

Tuesday 2.00pm; Arrange appointment with knee specialist

Next Tuesday 2.00pm; Appointment with knee specialist

I’m not going to suggest that my experiences are replicated across the country 100% of the time, but I would have been hard pushed to have got a better level of service anywhere else in the world.

The anti-inflammatories (which I had within 2 hours of first contacting my doctor) have worked fantastically so far, my knee is in no pain whatsoever, and the underlying cause should be investigated next week. The total cost of all this? £7.20 ($11) for the medicine. Had I been younger, older, or a vulnerable member of society, I wouldn’t even have had to pay that.

Thanks to the NHS I’ll be playing on Friday and Sunday in competitions I didn’t think I’d be anywhere near being fit enough to play in.

Review, Forget, Move On

UK Handicap; 3.6 USGA Handicap; 3.5

The dust has settled and I can now objectively look back at the weekend in a bit more detail, and fill in a few gaps.

What I haven’t mentioned so far is that on Thursday night I went out for 9 holes, playing 2 balls on each hole, and putted absolutely everything out as if it was competition conditions. I played the 18 holes in 1 under par, and the world was a great place. I was filled with renewed confidence in time for the Worman Sword competition on Saturday.

The top line of yesterday (Saturday) has already been detailed from my mobile posts, and the opinion side of things remain the same as it was last night – my performance was embarrassing. I was notionally 36 over par for 36 holes, and was 26 shots worse than last year.

There are lots of things I could try and blame my poor performance on, in reality it was just one of those miserable days, not just on the golf course;

• 2^nd consecutive 5.30am start; I am not an early person, and 2 x 5 hour sleeps in a row do not help with fatigue.
• Bank card; On the way to the course a cash machine in Hounslow decided to keep my bank card, leaving me with virtually no cash until my bank can send me a new one sometime this week.
• Hayfever; Yesterday was the first visit of my hayfever, without my havfever medication I just had to get through it.
• Being hit; I’ve only ever been hit twice by a golf ball, and yesterday was one of them. It’s a bit frightening when you see a ball hurtling towards you and know you can’t get out of the way before it hits you in about half a second.
• Knee; It is now sore all of the time on the course, which I’ll mention later in this post.

To fill in some more numbers, I hit 13 greens in regulation out of 36 holes. In the morning I hit 10 greens, which is alright although still well below the 14 I would expect to hit. My putting was awful and that helped to destroy my card. In the afternoon I hit a pitiful a 3 greens in regulation out of 18. In the absence of data to back it up, I would expect that to be the lowest greens in regulation I have hit in several thousand rounds of golf. I was absolutely in a positive frame of mind standing on the first tee of the second round, I just couldn’t hit the ball in a straight line.

Of the 13 greens that I did hit in regulation over the course of the day, only 2 were within 14 feet, and 6 in total were within 20 feet. You aren’t going to get many birdies if the ball isn’t going near the hole.

By the time we reached the last 9 holes my knee was getting very painful, and I wasn’t sure if it was affecting my swing or not.

The answer arrived this morning, when I woke up with my knee in agony.

Had I not had a competition and been drawn in a 2-ball, therefore feeling obliged to turn up to not leave my partner on his own, there is no way I would have played today.

As it was, I actually played alright, although a lot of that was down to a dynamite short game – I got up and down on several occasions from places I would not expect to.

I was round in 77 shots, which kept my handicap the same (although it went up 0.2 yesterday). In truth it was a bit of a scrambly 77, and to say that a 6 over par round is ‘alright’ gives some indication as to how far away from scratch I am, although there are extenuating circumstance in this case. I only hit 10 greens in regulation today, because I was unable to fully turn my knee, meaning I was losing a lot of distance and I was ‘steering’ my irons. This meant I was either arriving at the ball with the clubface open, meaning the ball blocked right, or I was overcompensating with my hands to get the clubface square, which resulted in a hook. Two of these such shots cost me 5 of my 6 dropped shots, a big hook on the 6^th resulting in a double bogey, and an absolutely massive block out of bounds on the 14^th resulting in a triple bogey.

As I write now my knee is fine when stationary, however is extremely painful whenever I try and move it. I don’t really suffer from injury and illness, I’m very lucky in regards to my health, so this is a bit of an unknown for me. The doctor will be contacted tomorrow, as I can’t continue to just say it is sore – I need to do something about it. I’m just nervous about what the verdict may be.

Worman Sword Round 2

Okay, I need to think before I say that things can't get any worse, because this afternoon's round was just chronic. I sprayed the ball all over the place, I hardly hit a straight shot all round. I didn't complete my card, but if I had taken the most likely score on a hole where I lost a ball I would have scored 91. That is 22 over par. For a 3 handicap golfer. I'm embarrassed even writing that. The funny thing is that I have another competition tomorrow morning at my home course, I may well shoot the lights out and wonder what today was all about.
I hope that happens, otherwise I am going back to the drawing board in a big way.
For the moment, I'm on an underground train on my way home, looking forward to a nice hot shower and anything to take my mind off golf.

Worman Sword Round 1

Well, that was an unmitigated disaster. Round in 83, my worst score around Wyke Green. I had 6 three-putts, despite the excellent greens, and generally threw shots away all the way around. I also got hit by a wayward tee shot on the 9th from some numpty who didn't shout fore. The round has been forgotten about now, this afternoon is a no pressure round to enjoy.

Worman Sword Preview

The Intro;

The first of my major competitions of 2010 is the Worman Sword on 8^th May.

This is a 36 hole strokeplay event played at Wyke Green Golf Club.

The Background;

Wyke Green hosted the Middlesex County Championships last year, and in preparation I decided to play in this competition, as I hadn’t played the course before. I thoroughly enjoyed the course, and the County Championships a couple of weeks later, and decided at that point to make it a regular fixture in future years.

The Location;

The course itself is certainly not somewhere to get away from it all; there are planes, trains and automobiles wherever you look. The M4 motorway runs by the side of the 11^th and 12^th holes, it starts 2 miles east to take cars out of London, and will continue for another 180 miles until Swansea has been passed. The skyline on various holes, most notably the 3^rd, has aeroplanes virtually on the horizon, as they make their final approach into Heathrow Airport. In addition, if you ever fly into Heathrow and get the London Underground Piccadilly line into London, in between Osterley and Boston Manor you will pass through the middle of the golf course. Some people don’t like it – I absolutely love it, it is a reminder that you can get a golf course in one of the busiest cities in the world.

The Course;

The course itself is quite different from the front nine to the back nine. Holes 1-9 mainly consists of long par 4s, it’s all about keeping a card together with pars. The back nine is the opportunity to score, it’s filled with par 3s, short par 4s, and a short par 5. The par is 69, and the SSS is 70.

The Competition;

The maximum field is 72 players, and 10 of them will win prizes. The prize fund is £1,500, with the overall winner receiving £500. 58% of the entry fees go back into the prize fund, meaning that the green fees, lunch and sandwiches in the evening cost around £15 to each entrant – an excellent deal.

This year will be the 31^st time the competition has been played – in the last 26 years 25 different people have won it, and no-one has successfully defended it.

The Target;

Last year I shot 77 & 71 for 15^th place. This year I would like to finish in the top 12 places.

Updates will appear here at about 2pm and 7pm (UK) on Saturday.

Motivation Only Runs Sofa

UK Handicap; 3.4 USGA Handicap; 3.6

Long time readers may recall me setting out some loose targets for the year, based around 7 competitions that I am playing that I have called “My Majors”. These are 7 competitions that, although not the be all and end all of my season, are certainly competitions that I want to prepare for and perform as well as I possibly can. The first of these 7 competitions is next Saturday, and they following fairly regularly every 3 weeks or so for the next 4 months.

Having played an average of 5 times per week in the last month, it is somewhat unhelpful that in the last full week before my first "major", I have played once, and have spent the rest of the time sitting on my sofa eating chocolate. Okay, well maybe not all of the time eating chocolate, but it feels like it. I intended to have a couple of days off because of my knee being sore, but it’s amazing how that couple of days can extend, and soon it quickly becomes 5 days without hitting a proper golf shot. Once you are in that state of not playing golf at least every 48 hours it is amazing how difficult it is to quickly regain that motivation.

I had another lesson on Saturday, and I have to admit that I didn’t get as much out of it as I should have. This was entirely my fault, it was early in the morning, I wasn’t zoned in as much as I should have been, I didn’t write down notes straight away afterwards, and to be honest, it was difficult. Every lesson I’ve had so far has been about basic things I understand, this one was a bit more technical, which is something I’ve never really had to deal with before. I will try and see if I can get a 5 minute refresher over the next couple of days, write it all down, then start working hard on it.

I finally beat the motivation back into me today, with 18 holes in a club competition. The course was set up probably as hard as I have ever seen it, the flag positions were very difficult, and there was a very strong northerly wind, which is the most difficult (and coldest) wind direction.

I managed to hit my irons terribly, hitting 8 out of 18 greens in regulation (2^nd lowest of the season), yet my short game was pretty sharp and helped me knock it round in 77, net 74. This was good enough to be the best net score among the group of 12 people I played with by 2 shots, and the best gross score by 5 shots. Although normally a net 74 would mean my handicap going up, because of the conditions I reckon the CSS (Competition Scratch Score) could go up, meaning my handicap will remain at 3.4. If my handicap does go up then it means I’ll have an extra shot to play with on Saturday, so it wouldn’t be a disaster. It would have been easy to deliberately score badly to get my handicap up that 0.1 in time for Saturday, but that’s not how I believe golf should be played – you should always play and try your best, if my handicap has gone up today it wasn’t for the lack of trying to keep it as low as possible.

This week I’m determined to practice a bit more, Tuesday and Thursday are the only days I can manage due to work, and then it will be an early start on Saturday to get to Wyke Green. I’ll post up a bit more about Saturday’s competition during the week. I am also going to give mobile blogging a go at the weekend, to post an update after the first 18 holes and again after the afternoon round. It should be easy to do via my BlackBerry, and if it works well then I’ll do this in all of my “majors”.

One final thing, good luck Tony for your trip to the States, you have a lot of people (me included) very jealous of going and hitting golf balls for 3 months solid. Make the most of it, enjoy it, and make sure you’re a scratch player when I see you at the end of the summer.