I walked 18 on Sunday morning, 3/27/2022. It was right at freezing when I started, and was only about 35 degrees when I finished. There was a steady breeze throughout the round, so it definitely felt cold.
The greens had just been aerated this past week, and only one of them had been top dressed yet. However, I had one of my best putting rounds in recent memory. I only had 30 putts for the day, and no three putts. I also drained a couple of 9-footers and a 12-footer. It’s worth noting that all of these longer putts that I made were lefty. I stuck with the routine where when I take my practice strokes, I start each practice stroke from a dead stop. I used to just swing back and through a few times, but I’m finding that beginning from a dead stop really helps me with the pace. My hypothesis is that when I rock back and forth, I don’t get a good feeling for the effort I need for the back swing. I don’t keep detailed enough stats to know this for certain, but I’m beginning to feel like my lefty putting may be as solid as my righty putting. Ironically, I was playing with a ball that I found that was stamped “Three Putt”.
I did not do as good of a job swinging smoothly in this round as in my last round, particularly on right handed tee shots. I started the first hole with a righty tee shot hitting a 4H into a headwind. It didn’t come close to making it up to the top of the hill, so I decided to call that a breakfast ball and hit a driver. I managed to make a smooth swing and hit it very well, up the middle to about the 150 yard marker. That ended up being my best righty tee shot of the day. On hole 3 I sliced it while trying to hit a fade, and I cold-topped the driver on holes 7, 9, and 15. On hole 11, I topped my 5H, and on hole 13 I hit a weak, heel slice. I ended up making a triple on two of these holes, and a double on another. I would guess that my righty driving cost me somewhere between three and five strokes today.
On hole 15, after topping my righty driver, I teed up another ball and made a nice, relaxed swing. The ball took off like a rocket, going about as far as I could ever reasonably expect to hit it, regardless of effort. I made sure to make a mental note of that (and am making a “physical” note here as well). I don’t know how many reps it’s going to take for me to fully internalize this, but the sooner I can accept that swinging aggressively doesn’t help, the better.
I ended up shooting a 90, which works out to a differential of 23.1. I had three triple-bogeys (4, 9, 11) and two double-bogeys (8 and 15). Three of these holes were with righty tee shots. It’s clear that the biggest thing I need to work on at this point is fully internalizing the notion that I need to stop swinging aggressively off the tee, particularly right handed. I simply myst stop trying to force it off the tee right handed.
This keeps my trending handicap at 18.0. Looking at my scores in GHIN, one score that’s being used will come off after my next round, but the next round after that one as the same differential – i.e. my handicap won’t go up after my next round no matter what. There shouldn’t be much, if any movement in the round after that, but then there is the opportunity for the handicap to drift upwards up a bit unless I am able to start posting some good scores. I’ll need to start posting some scores in the lower 80’s in order to get the handicap moving back down.
Alternate Golf 