My season of playing golf has been typical. Lots of ups and downs with some hot streaks and right now I am on a cold streak. I usually do not discuss all the thought processes I go through during a season, but I thought I would this year just as a change of pace. I am not going to discuss all of them because my fingers would cramp. Before I go into all of that lets get into the basic raw data. First off, the weather like everywhere was a little crazy this year. Rainy in the spring and then a slight dry spell but then an unusual amount of rain in August and September. October and November brought some of the best weather of the year. Unfortunately, my game did not appreciate the weather. I have played 138 rounds this year thanks to the recent great weather. For a while there I did not think I was going to come close to getting in 150 rounds but that now looks like it may be in reach. I have shot my age 53 times this year which is already 3 more times than I did last year. Of course it is one stroke more at 76. Overall, my game has been as much of a rollercoaster as the weather. My index started the season at 4.8. By the end of May it was up to 6.4. On June 4 it hit 7.1. By the end of June, it slid down to 5.6. It hung around 5.5 to 6.0 the month of July. It got down as low as 5.2 but ended August at 6.0. In September I got hot and went down to 4.2 where it stayed until Oct 20th. Since Oct 20th I have been in a very bad scoring slump which has seen the index climb up to 6.7. My ball striking this year has been the best it has been in about 5 years. I will go into more detail in a later blog. My short game has not been great but not terrible. The yips on and around the green have been for the most part controllable but I have had some bad days. As usual putting is the main culprit for most of my scoring slump. My putting this year has not been horrible but it has not been great. I have had worse stretches of putting by far, but I have not really had a real stretch of what I would call great putting. Even when I went through my hot streak in September and the 1st 3 weeks of October it was due to some great ball striking particularly with the irons. I have been fishing around so much with my putting that I think it finally affected my ball striking that has led to this recent slump. Like everyone that is going through a bad time with their game I feel that it is on the verge of turning around. Time will tell if that is only a pipe dream. Now let’s look at some of things that I tried that I thought would “help” my game. All of these things eventually stop working or failed.
Up to April 1st I had played 13 rounds. I had tried letting my legs control the swing, weakening my grip and lifting my left heel. None of these lasted very long and I did not have a round under 78. April and May were not much better. April was my worse yip month. Tried to get into controlling my body better during the swing and various tempos but was mostly lost as I headed into June. My putting was particularly bad in May. In June I went through a yip training period but more on that in a later blog. I thought shot planning was a key for a while. As June came to an end I had shot my age 14 times but really was not too consistent. I was about the same through the middle of August. I stood closer to the ball, tried to watch the putter all the way through the putting stroke even after contact with the ball. I started something toward the end of August that I called instinctive golf. I am not too sure what that even was, but I think it had to do with going with your first impulse and sticking with it. Just letting your mind flow freely and not trying to over analyze the shots. This did work for a while. I shot my age 14 of the next 17 times including 5 rounds between 70 and 73. For some reason I declared instinctive golf over on September 15th. Then I thought about making a complete golf swing. In other words, making sure that I had a controlled follow through. I was making the golf swing, a swing and not a hit. This worked fairly well for a while as usual but again I abandoned it. Right now, I am trying to find out what works best on a particular day. I like the saying don’t try to find your golf game on the course it will find you. Obviously, the season is winding down but I still think there are about 20 rounds left. Over the next 10 days there looks like there are about 7 days that are playable. What will I think of next? It is a little scary.
