mirv

shot 75 in the club championship today, which was good enough for 2nd place in 1st flight.

77 on my home course today (par 72, 6300 yards). our club championship is coming up this weekend and it's match play, so to get adjusted to that kind of play, before i began my round i filled out an imaginary opponent's score at the bottom of my card, giving him birdies on the 2 easiest holes and bogeys on the 4 hardest. i made it through 16 holes 1-down to my "opponent" before pulling my drive OB on 17 and taking a double bogey to lose my fictitious match 2 and 1. went ahead and played the 18th and undid a little of the damage closing with a birdie.

78 today (par 72, 6300 yards). this is twice now i've played with a group of guys who are mostly single digit handicappers, and both times i've lost money to them. i shot 77 last time and lost $10. only lost $2 today, but still... i'm beginning to suspect the guy keeping track of the "dots" might be smudging the numbers a bit because he's always the one everyone winds up handing the money to, and i know he isn't playing more than a stroke or two better than i am overall.

this evening i worked on hitting sand wedge shots between 50-75 yards. this isn't something that gives me much trouble, but i always try to find a day or two a week where i just hit about 30-40 little "feel" shots and try to make sure i'm not developing any rust.

i played a guy the other day who was a hybrid of almost all of the listed qualities. he kept dispensing unsolicited "advice," most of which was either half- or totally wrong. kept talking about what a great player he was. when he'd miss a shot he'd get really mad, then when he'd calm down he'd start making excuses. he never finished a putt inside of 4-5 feet. he took a mulligan every four or five holes. he played pretty fast, so i can't hold speed against him, but he was a very irritating golfer.

played a links-style course today that i've probably only played a dozen times in the past several years. off the tee it's very forgiving, but the greens are all heavily guarded by bunkers, so a missed approach shot is usually trouble unless you're pretty handy with a sand wedge. i just couldn't quite get a feel for my swing today, everything was leaking a little right and i didn't have my usual distance with my irons, but i still somehow managed to get in with a 78 (par 72, 6550 yards).

the single biggest help for me was that i started keeping track of my statistics. every time i go to the course, on the scorecard i write my name on the first line, fairways on the second line, GIR (green in regulation) on the third and putts on the fourth. every hole, i write down Y or N (for yes or no, obviously) as to whether i hit the fairway or GIR and then i'll write down how many putts i took on the green. if i miss the GIR but still save par, i write down N for GIR, but then i circle the N to let myself know i got up and down. once i get home, i put all of that info into myscorecard.com , which is like $10 a year and will calculate your handicap as well as your averages in all of these stat categories. here's an example of what my scorecard looks like at the end of a round (though this is an exceptional scorecard, the best round i've ever played in my life to date. also, yes, i realize i only hit 9 fairways but mistakenly wrote down 10 as the total): so after putting several scores in and getting an accurate assessment of each of the major parts of my game, i looked up the tour professional numbers. they hit 12 greens per round on average, i was hitting 5. they get up and down for par 60% of the time, i was only getting up and down 30% of the time. they take 29 putts per round, i took 34. so i told myself, okay. i want to get my greens in regulation and scrambling both up to 50% and i want to get my putts per round down to 30. i've been working on those goals for about six months now, and i'm pleased to report that as of this moment, my GIRs are 49%, scrambling is 42% and my putting average is down to 31, so i'm pretty close to all of my goals. all of that put together has taken my average score down from 85 to 78. obviously it takes practice and work in conjunction with knowing your stats, but for me, it was key having concrete numbers and equally concrete goals that really allowed me to progress forward. it wasn't a matter anymore of "gosh, why can't i post lower scores? what do i need to work on? is there some magic swing key i just don't know about?" now i knew i needed to hit more greens in regulation, so when i would go to the range, i would take a gap wedge and an 8 iron with me. nothing else. no more of the pulling the driver out and just slamming balls to the back of the range business. no, i'd hit about 100 balls with the gap wedge and 8 iron and then call it a day. likewise, i knew i wanted to take fewer putts and that i needed to work on my chipping and pitching, so i spent considerably more time on/around the practice green working on those things.

golf really got me started on losing weight and getting in shape, too. when i took up the game, i weighed about 350 lbs. i was so heavy and out of shape that initially, even with a cart, i was wore out by the end of 18 holes. as time went on, i started forcing myself to walk, and next thing i knew i'd shed the easiest 20 lbs you ever heard of. over several years, i got my weight down to a little over 300, but in the past few months i've pretty radically altered my diet and joined a gym, and as of tonight i'm down to 284. all that being said, my routine in the gym pretty similarly matches a lot of what's already been said. the staples of my workout are 30-60 mins on the elliptical (cause i've still got a lot of fat to burn off), push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, planks, jumping jacks, squats and lunges. every other trip to the gym i do light work outs on the bench press, lateral pull downs, shoulder press, leg press, triceps and biceps, cause i want to tone everything up, but i don't want to go all Arnold Schwarzenegger with it. and since i started going to the gym, i've suddenly gained 10-15 yards on each club, so i definitely subscribe to the notion that being in shape equates to more distance.

the last hole at my home course is a short but difficult par 5. the fairway is only about 20 yards wide with a large bunker (about 50 yards long) on the right and a lake running the entire length of the hole on the left. if you place your drive correctly, you've only got a 160-170 yard shot over the lake to the green, which is very heavily guarded by bunkers. i hit a 7-iron from 165 and stuck the ball 4 feet from the pin, which i proceeded to roll in for my first eagle on that hole. so i guess this was more the "best hole of the week" for me since all three shots were basically perfect, though if i had to pick one, it'd be that 7-iron to the green.

played 36 holes today, 78 and 77, from the middle tees. par 72, 6300+ yards. the 8th hole (which is one of the toughest on the course anyway) really had my number as i took double bogey on it both rounds. the other side of the coin is the 18th, which is a pretty easy par 5, where i went birdie-eagle.

there's a guy i work with who is scratch, maybe even slightly better than scratch. i'm a 5-handicap, so i don't really expect to beat him, but he's my target. if i can beat him, i know i've accomplished something. i hoping by this time next year, i ought to at least be able to give him a run for his money.

favorites: dustin johnson - i can't really pin down why i like DJ so much, but he's always the guy i'm rooting for in the majors fred couples - love love love his swing. ken duke - a fellow arkansan. a couple of guys i know have met him and say he's a pretty nice guy. dislikes: steve elkington - always seems to come across as a condescending snot rory sabbatini - just an all around irritating fellow adam scott - this one is a bit misdirected; it's actually steve williams i can't stand. but adam hired the guy, and kept the guy, so he kind of vaguely falls into the "dislike" category

78 today on the same par 70 course i played yesterday, so a 1-stroke improvement. had a pretty rough front nine and made the turn at +7, but then played the next 7 holes at 2-under par. got to the 17th, blocked a drive straight into a water hazard and had a series of mishaps from there to earn a triple, then a routine par on the 18th for the 78.

i absolutely crushed a driver on a short (325 yards) slightly downhill dogleg left and found myself pin high just off the left side of the green, exactly 325 yards per my sky caddie. it's the longest drive i've ever hit that i had a sky caddie to measure. my dad was with me and just shook his head when we got to my ball and said "i've been playing this course for close to 40 years now, and i have never, ever seen anyone drive the green."

as far as a really thorough "getting all of the dirt out of the grooves" level cleaning...almost never, honestly. maybe once every six months i'll give them a real good, deep down cleaning. the rest of the time it's a light rub with the towel or fingers just to get the biggest bits of grass or dirt off the face.