Yes, I am still playing and playing often. So far this year I have played 135 rounds of golf. Besides the Pirates taking up most of the blog space during the spring, summer and early fall, I really have not found anything knew or exciting about how to play the game. As usual, there have been times that I thought I found something that may be of benefit to my game as well as to others struggling at this game. Whatever it was, it was short lived to be filed in the trash bin like about 500 other things I thought might have some merit. Over the next month or two, golf will be the main topic of the blog as I will discuss some things I have talked about in the past. There are some ball striking views and how to play this game, I have tweaked over the years. I had a really up and down year as you will see with some of the same old problems rearing their ugly head.
The good news is that I shot my age, 74 or better, 18 times. The majority of those rounds were from the gold tees. The highlights were a 72 from the white tees at South Park. I hadn’t done that for about 2 to 3 years. I shot a 2 under 70 from gold for my low round of the year. On the other side of the coin, I had 42 rounds between 80 and 88 with the remaining 75 rounds between 75 and 79. My handicap index started the season at 5.7 reached a high of 7.1 in mid May when I had the most trouble with the yips but then took a steady decline until the end of October to 4.7 but jump up to the present 5.0. I have about 5 rounds to go in posting scores as the last day is November 14th. My driving continues to be the best part of my game by far. My iron game as been good to awful, but never great. By far the most erratic part of my game. The short game has not been bad when I do not yip. My putting has been the 2nd most erratic part of my game. Even when I do not yip I will have bad putting days. A lot of the issue is my green reading, which continues to deteriorate. During my age shooting rounds my putting was spot on. In my other rounds including rounds that I shot in the 70’s my putting kept me from having more age shooting rounds. That was the story of my year. A very inconsistent year with the yips rearing their ugly head way too many times. I will go into more depth on that in a later blog.
I consider the 72 from the whites the best round of the year. I had 5 birdies to offset a poor iron shot and chip yip double bogey on the 9th hole. I have proved the saying it’s not where your good shots go but where your bad shots go that is the key to scoring in golf. Some of my shots can be ranked up as horrid. What is amazing to me is that they can come up even in the middle of some of my best rounds of the year. I have tried a lot of stuff this year. I have not swung the same for more than 10 days tops. Our weather is looking good so the season is far from over and I will do a final post at the end of the year. As I stated before, the blog will be about golf for the next 3 months unless the Pirates do something unusual in the off season like acquire a major league player. I am going to revisit 3 of my most popular articles, grip pressure, you cannot overswing, and how to start the downswing in the next blog. I think all of those articles need a bit of an update. Stay tuned.
The Goofy Game of Golf/Life Searching for the Answer 