18 Holes
Today, I finished playing an 18 hole round of golf for the first time. I’d previously played many 9 hole courses and finished a 18 hole scramble. I’ve also started this course before, but have never quite finished. I scored a 123. Par is obviously 72. I’ve had my clubs for some 8 years now (holy cow!), but I have only been seriously playing and practicing in the last year.
Some bullets:
- My wedge was feeling very comfortable today. I was swinging it well and swinging it with confidence. Shots were pretty much headed in the direction I wanted. Unfortunately my distances were off (short). I’ll just need to spend some time bonding with the club.
- I was driving pretty well. Unfortunately my longest club that has acceptable consistency is my 5 wood. So everyone else was out driving me. But I was making fairways the vast majority of the time, and golf is a lot easier from the fairways. I will need to practice more with 3 wood and my driver. I am already planning on dedicating a couple weeks to my driver come December.
- I was relatively happy with my iron play. I will likely put more emphasis on practicing with my 3, 4, 5 irons than my other irons. I don’t play my long irons because I am not consistent enough with them. I can think of a couple of places where a longer iron would have helped (but only if I can hit it straight).
- I was able to stay out of trouble for the most part. I did loose one ball off a slice. I hit it in a couple of sandtraps, but I don’t fear those anymore. Though I did hit one into a fairway bunker – that probably robbed me of a stroke.
- Shiz scored a 119. I was contending until I putted 11 times in a span of 2 holes. Ouch. I blamed the ball and switched balls after that and it was all good. One of my mental golf goals is to minimize the mistakes. Getting birdies is difficult, but have a hole explode is pretty easy. I need to manage my mistakes better and keep bad holes from becoming outrageous holes. This is largely a mental exercise.
- I’ve been keeping a couple of spare clubs in the apartment. This allows me to exercise my wrists/forearms and get used to manipulating the club at various (slower) speeds. A couple times a day as I am walking by, I’ll pick it up and play with it. I’d like to attribute my confidence with my wedge to this. The clubs I have in the apartment are far longer and thus are more difficult to manipulate than the wedge.
Getting under 100 (baby steps):
- Get rid of those 6 putts and 5 putts.
- Farther off the tee.
- Get the distance right with my wedges.
Certainly the score isn’t great, but I felt good afterwards (aside for the couple holes of atrocious putting). There wasn’t one area that stuck out poorly like a sore thumb. I guess it is now largely a matter of practice and refinement.