The solo trip to visit my parents and play some golf was a great success. I managed to get in four round and spend a lot of good quality time visiting with, and helping out my parents.
I decided at the beginning of the week that I would just play whatever tees the rest of the group was playing, unless they were playing something longer than about 6300 yards or so. While I certainly wanted to focus and play well, I also wanted to be social and enjoy whoever I might get paired with.
For my first round I walked a nearby course that I had never played before. The first round was fun, but not particularly great from a scoring perspective. More on this later, but interestingly enough, I had my highest score / differential of the week, despite the fact that it was the one round where I hit balls on the driving range before teeing off. The two guys I played with, both of whom were also singles, were a lot of fun to play with. One thing that gave us all a chuckle is that one of the guys didn’t notice I was switch hitting until the 17th hole.
I played a different course the following day with my sister’s neighbor, a retired Navy pilot. I had met him a couple of weeks earlier when I stopped by my sister’s house. She made the introduction and told him I was coming to town soon for the week of golf. I’m very glad that he followed through with the invitation to play with him and a couple of his friends who were also retired Navy pilots. We played from the senior tees, and as an introduction to these guys I jarred my second shot from about 100 yards on the first hole for eagle. The front nine was a bit shaky after that, but I got it together on the back nine to shoot a 76 for a differential of 13.2. The guys were a hoot to play with, and I learned some new expressions.
The next day I walked a different local course that I had just played once before. The gentleman I played with for the front nine was about my age and is living with Parkinson’s disease. He was also really fun to play with, but as he only planned to play nine holes, I had the back nine to myself. I played really solidly all day, and managed to close out the round with a birdie on a fairly tight closing hole.
This last hole was one of my proudest moments on a golf course in some time. After hitting a righty 2 hybrid safely into the middle of the fairway, I was faced with a lefty approach shot from 130 yards over water. Knowing that I had a good round going, I briefly thought about just chipping a lefty wedge short of the water to leave a short righty wedge. That would almost certainly take double-bogey out of play. However, I decided that I was going to just hit the shot. One of the things I’ve been really trying to focus on is acceptance that there is variability with the outcome of any shot. While I don’t want to be reckless, I also don’t want to let fear either create too much tension, or to force overly conservative shot selection. While it would be irresponsible to try and carry a lefty shot over the water from 200 yards at my present lefty skill level, a 130 yard shot over the water is not overly aggressive.
The flag was on the left side of the green, with a bunker just left of the green. With water short and right, this was one of those rare situatios where the safe shot was actually to aim directly at the flag. I managed to make a really good swing without any fear and flushed a tight draw right at the flag. It stopped quickly, about 3 feet from the flag and I drained the putt for a birdie. I finished the day shooting an 84 for a differential of 14.1.
The next day I played my fourth and final round of the trip, going back to the course from day two. This time I was able to quickly join up with another single who was playing from the senior tees. This gave me a chance to reverse the sides – i.e. for the first round I had teed off on the odd holes lefty and the even holes righty. In some ways this made it like playing a totally different course, as some tee shots were very different given my relative skill /distances between lefty and righty. The scorecard was identical for birdies, pars, and doubles, but I made one extra bogey that took the place of the eagle from the first round. The result was a 78 for a differential of 15.4.
I somehow managed not to lose a single ball across all four rounds, only replacing the first ball after it was scuffed badly on a cart path on its 54th hole. I’ve gone four rounds with a single ball a couple of times many years ago, but those rounds were on courses with no water, just play right-handed as a 6 handicap. These courses all had water in play on a number of holes, so this was a pretty shocking occurrence for me.
Using just two Kirland’s for four rounds of golf is a cheapskate’s dream. While I generally like the performance of the current Kirland model, I also sometimes play (and prefer) the Maxfli Tour X. This got me thinking that it may just be time to move into the Maxfli full-time once my current supply of Kirkland’s runs out.
I mentioned at the beginning that when I started reflecting back on these rounds for this post, one thing that stood out for me was that the highest score/differential was the round where I hit balls before teeing off. Before round two, I literally only had time to roll fewer than ten putts. I did chip and putt for a 30 minutes or so before round three, and for the fourth round I went straight to the tee box after checking. I was starting to think that maybe I shouldn’t bother hitting balls before my rounds. Then I pulled up all of the scorecards and noticed that for the three rounds where I didn’t hit range balls, I was more than three times the number of strokes over par on the front nines than the back nines – 20 vs. 6. It’s still a pretty small sample size, but this has me thinking that getting in a properly structured range session may actually be really important.
When all was said and done, these four rounds dropped my handicap index from a 14.2 to a 13.6. Even though I generally try and avoid focusing on performance oriented goals, I’m fining myself thinking again about how cool it might be to try and get to single-digits playing half lefty. It certainly seems achievable in the next year or so if I can just stay healthy and get fortunate enough to be able to put in enough time on the range and particularly the course.
