Clearly I have not yet ingrained the habit of being prompt with weekly posting, as I’m starting to draft this four days after I intended to publish. I played a solo round on Saturday, and for perhaps the second time in a month, I may well have been the only person to have played a round at my course that day. I finished around 1 pm, and there was still nobody else on the course when I left. It was in the low-mid 30’s, with a pretty steady wind. Certainly not the best weather, but I’m still surprised that nobody else made it out to the course.
I played a pretty solid round, shooting an 83 for a differential of 16.3. Given the conditions, I was really happy with the score. The sample size is still small, but I do feel like the drills I’ve been doing with the lefty training grip are paying off. My lefty grip felt more comfortable than it ever has before, and I made a number of very solid lefty swings. It’s always difficult to make a change and do indoor drills, and then try to take that directly out to the course. I’m feeling pretty confident that if I get the chance to put in a few range sessions, I’ll be able to really make some progress with my lefty swing.
One of the most interesting parts of the round though was related to putting. I don’t wear a glove, and when it’s cold I use some mittens between shots. Normally I take off my mittens for putting, but for almost all of my putts in this round I left the mittens on. These mittens are not very thick, but they are quite large. I also have a string running between them so that I can more easily lay them across my pushcart between shots.
While the sample size is small, I think I putted just as well with the mittens on as I do without the mittens, and I consider myself to be a pretty good putter. I only had one three putt, I made a couple of putts in the 12 – 15 foot range, and left a couple more from that range on the lip. I suspect this is due to the fact that I’ve made a concerted effort to take my hands out of my putting stroke as much as I can. This stems in part from when I decided to try using a regular, round golf grip for my Bullseye putter instead of a paddle grip. With the round grip, I found that I really needed to lock my hands/wrists to avoid twisting the putter. With a standard putter grip, I think the flat surface on the front, combined with the shape of the grip itself provided a reference for allowing the hands/wrists to load and release. As a result of locking my hands/wrists, all of the feel in my putting stroke is from rocking my shoulders back and forth. It just doesn’t seem to matter what’s going on with my hands/wrists so long they just don’t move around.
Alternate Golf 