Month: April 2012

A good golf week this week, as the play improved, and I got in course no 65 this week. We went to Suncrest, which is just south of Butler, Pa. and was about a 50 minute drive. The course plays 6300 yards from the mens tees, and has very small greens, and no sand traps. Even though the greens were small they had some good slope from front to back, and vice versa. The ran a 5.5 on the stimp, and were very smooth. Overall, the course was in excellent shape and the roughs were good, with little or no bare spots. It has many holes that are tree lined and is more of a rolling course rather than a hilly course. This was a very enjoyable course to play, with many interesting and challenging holes, despite only being 6300 yards. The par 3’s were particular good, with the last one being 219 yards uphill. I shot 80 and David shot 91 as we both had troubles off the tee, making some of the  easier holes play much more difficult than they had to be. I particularly butchered the par 5’s on the front with back to back bogeys. The hot dog at the turn was just fair, but the overall day was quite nice as we had a cool, but beautiful day to play with very little wind. There are many courses very close together on Route 8 and we haven’t played many of them yet but this course was worth the trip and hopefully it could be tandemed with another course for a very nice day. My scores this week were 39, 80, 78, and lookout 75 today. Today was the best ball striking day of the year and even though I 3 putted 4 times today I had some fortunate encounters with trees today, that made the round just about what it should have been. I hit 14 greens in regulation today and 2 of my missed greens were right on the fringes. The short game wasn’t bad and the putting really was not as bad as it sounded but that kept it from being a really good round. However, I had trees spit my ball back in play not once not twice but three times. WOW. Obviously though I let things happened today and trusted my swing totally without trying analyse things too much and the ball striking except for those tee shots was right on. So we will see what happens as we continue with the goofy game and hopefully will add some courses this week. Sixty five down and 25 to go.  

Well another weekly wrap up on a Monday but the weather has turned bad and I knew I would have this afternoon to do the blog. Another disappointing week with scores of 44 80 80 and 82 and each one of those were worse because the courses were easier with each round. There are many possiblities that the game has fallen on hard times. The short game still continues to be a problem. I think the biggest reason is that I am trying to analyse this new thing I am doing too much. I still am having a hard time believing that something this simple is working as well as it once was. I am still debating how much to incorporate it  into my short game and even my putting. The other thing that is happening is that I am runny through a period of bad luck where every bad shot ends up in something that is worse than it could be. It ends up right behind a tree or in a terrible lie in the rough and lip outs are routine. Every golfer has had that experience when you are shooting a really good round. You hit a bad shot and it hits the tree and comes back in play or in the woods and is in a perfect spot to give you a clear shot at the green. Everybody remembers when Fred Couples hit the shot at no. 12 at the Masters and his ball did not roll back into the water. When Vjay won his first PGA he hit a shot in the last round on a par 5 that rattled around the trees and came right out on to the green for an easy 2 putt birdie and he went on to win his first major. When you are going bad everything just seems to bounce wrong at times but it will even up in the end. Despite these recent struggles I still think I have got something here but only time will tell. One thing about golf, the numbers never lie. Despite the early week being quite bad it looks like the rest of the week will be fairly nice. Hopefully we will be getting to course no 65 soon.

The weekly wrap up is one day late as a busy Easter Sunday did not allow me to blog. The week was rather disappointing, which could be another reason I was not too fired up to put the week into print. The scores were 35, 80, 79 and 81. The 80 was the best score as it was done at St. Clair Country Club which is a pretty difficult course. In a nut shell it was an up and down week on all levels. I still feel I am on the right track but execution just does not seem to there, at  least for now. It was a great Masters. What a great golf course. It is the best designed course in the United States. I am not talking about it being the toughest by any stretch of the imagination but the possibilities on each and every hole is phenominal. The course is what makes this tournament so great. Going out to San Diego to see the grandkids for about a week on Wednesday so golf will be taking a back seat for awhile. The answer will be coming.      

It might be awhile before we hit one of the 26 remaining courses with Easter on the horizon, and I am out to California to see the grandkids from the 11th to the 17th. I thought I would start doing a weekly wrap up on Sunday nights covering what I did during the week and some inane observations of whats going on in the world of golf. I played 2 and 1/2 rounds of golf this week shooting 77, 36, and 81. It was a particular disappointing day today as I took a step backward on the process of searching for the answer. I think what I am doing is sound but today was a lack of execution especially in the tempo department. I am still having the short game blues which does not help as I am trying to incorporate this new swing thing into the short game with mixed to terrible results. I don’t want  to say that this is starting to get to me but I threw my sandwedge into the woods today. Later in the round I was between clubs. The one in my bag and the one in the woods. Even though this has been a physical search for a better way to swing the club, maybe it should be a search for the mental approach, which if you been watching the PGA tour lately has not been discovered. It was nice today to watch nobody choke down the stretch today. I don’t like that word choke even though I just used it because it is the popular term to use when someone either messes up down the stretch or screws up the entire round on the last day. It seems no one is immune to it. Even Ernie Els a couple of weeks ago missed 2 short putts and hit a terrible shot on a par 3 to blow a tournament. The only player that really seemed not to blow tournaments was Jack Nicklaus. I have read most of Jack’s books and I don’t find them all that enlightening on the subject. Even Tiger has taken the big Apple but sometimes he gets away with it. Even though he made that unbelievable chip on 16 a few years back at the Masters, he still finished bogey,bogey and if Demarcos chip goes in on 18 instead of lipping out they would still be talking about the Masters that Tiger let slip away. I think it boils down to some kind of disconnect between the mind and the body. In the last 15 years there have been 3 golfers who made triple bogeys on the last hole to get into a playoff  when a double bogey would have won the tournament. Just what the hell happened there. I bet you could give Ernie Els that putt he missed on 18 a hundred times and he would make it a hundred times. But when it counted he did not even touch the hole. There is no question the answer has not been found.