Leaderboard

Yesterday my brother and I went out and played a course that we haven’t played since March. It’s a slightly easier course than my home course, so I was going into the round thinking I would easily shoot in the 80s. I didn’t, but I wasn’t that far off. I didn’t hit the ball great on the front, but was able to hang in there and shoot 46. Two highlights: •I chunked my tee shot on the par-5 fifth and didn’t even reach the dogleg, but I was still on the green in four. I rolled in my difficult six-footer for par. That was a confidence-builder, since I almost never play that hole well. •I had about 145 in on the ninth hole, off a slight downhill lie. 8I again to four feet. This may have been the best shot of the day (my approaches on 17 and 18 are also solid contenders), but I unfortunately missed the birdie putt. The back nine was better, and I actually walked to the seventeenth tee needing to birdie one of the last two holes to keep it under 90. Both were good opportunities, the 17th being a reachable par 5 (453 whites), the 18th a short par 4 (354 whites), but the seventeenth is the better chance. My drive wasn’t quite long enough to have a good shot at the green, so I laid up with a 3/4 9I (there’s a small pond about 100 yards short of the green), which left me about 135 yards into the wind. I decided to hit a knockdown 8I, and it came off perfectly and settled eight feet out, exactly pin-high. Grazed the edge with my birdie putt, which left me with a tap-in par. Although I wanted the birdie, I was satisfied, because I hit three good shots to give myself a legit birdie chance, and I hit a good putt. I wanted a three on the eighteenth hole, which would give me 89. My last drive found the last fairway, and I had about 140 to the pin. I went with the 8I again, full swing this time. As soon as I let it fly, I knew it was gonna be good. Twelve feet out. I knew I had another chance. However, I seemed to forget that putts from above the hole on this particular green tend to slide quite a bit if you missed it long. I had the line perfectly, but I gave it too much gas, and it rolled past and just kept on rolling until I had a longish par putt. I lined up my eight-foot par putt and missed it, so I tapped in for an ugly three-putt bogey to finish at 91. With the exception of that three-putt, I played the last two holes very well. For some reason during this round, and it’s not because of my fade, I had a tendency to lose my iron shots to the right, which was frustrating because that isn’t normal for me. I didn’t hit them poorly at all, I just pushed them a bit.  My brother played his first full eighteen in about three months, and he was doing pretty well until he pulled a muscle in his leg on the 14th tee. I still don’t know how that happened. I thought he was gonna quit right there, but he didn’t. He battled on, and managed to hang in there until the 17th. After he putted out, he told me he was done. So he sat out the last hole and watched me play it.  Im probably only gonna play one more time before Saturday, which is when I’m playing my “birthday round”. I mentioned on this forum about this time last week that I was playing Lonnie Poole, but my dad went on the website last Friday, and the earliest tee time we could’ve gotten was around 2:30, meaning, because it’s typically a busy course, we probably weren’t going to get all 18 holes in.  So I looked on the list of courses I made just in case we couldn’t play Lonnie Poole, and the course that stuck out to me the most was UNC Finley. I remember when I was in middle school, I had a friend who played there a lot, and he said it was a great course. We were able to get a tee time there, for 11:24. I’m looking forward to it!

You are overthinking it. You are basically going to have such similar shafts by hard stepping the 6.5 or softing the 7.0 (both in flex and more importantly in weight), that if you can hit one, you can hit the other or vise versa. You will get much more definitive results from bending the lofts to adjust trajectory.  You would really need to move into a different weight class before I would say you would see any noticeable difference over the long haul between shafts.

Coincidentally, this article came out and lists a lot of what we say in LSW and so on. Scoring lower again involves: Not taking penalty shots. Not taking doubles or, when you get better, not making a bad bogey. (You're still going to make some bogeys.) Playing for pars and letting the birdies happen is tough for people to get. Understanding where to miss the ball and fitting the "better side" into your shot pattern/Shot Zone. The last part answers your question of sorts: If you can develop a ball that only curves or misses one direction, that's a pattern. You can play a patterned Shot Zone much more easily than you can play a "fern" Shot Zone (where the shots have a root and then spread out in all directions from there, two dimensionally, like a fern). I'm not sure what "fighting" a one-way miss means - if the vast majority of your shots are, for example, missing left, either open the face to take off some of that left miss/curve or just aim right and play it. If there's trouble left, aim WAY right. The smart-player's guide to dropping 10 shots — guaranteed Improving at golf doesn't require hours of range time. Recreational players just need to take advantage of the stat-based scoring opportunities out there.    

Things like this are why I initially brought the question up. I have nowhere to try these on. I spoke with FootJoy and they stated that you buy according to your normal waist size but that those sizes are made with the assumption that they are going over the top of your golf clothing and are sized a bit bigger

Everything. I didn’t post the swings before I started working on stuff. Long, across the line, lots of moving parts.