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I thought Russel was having a bit of fun with the comments. Now the popped collar on the other hand...... As far as Robert - Quote: He practiced religiously and was on top of his game in November, with filming two months away. But on Dec. 9, his mother, Maria, was diagnosed with bladder cancer. "I put golf on the back burner," Floyd said. "I really didn't touch a club." http://www.palmbeachpost.com/sports/golf/robert-floyd-knocked-off-big-break-show-but-1504778.html?printArticle=y Still find it hard to believe his game went south so fast but I could imagine that might make playing hard. He probably should have resigned his spot..... Quote: Originally Posted by saltman A little surprised by all the positive comments about Russell. I get that he posts here and is a decorated soldier, but his false bravado was getting on my nerves last night. Even my wife commented on it. Robert has chops on the golf course, the guy made the cut and finished T-48 at the 2008 AT&T;, that's not a fluke and is more than Russell has ever done. A lot of these guys sitting back making comments on poor shots need to learn how to shut their mouths. Justin, Kent and yes our dear friend Russell are the biggest culprits. The little bit about who could or couldn't be a Marine was ridiculous, although I suspect it wasn't his idea. Russell, are you trying to tell everyone else how tough you are or yourself?? Petey watched the same shots Robert hit and acted with a lot of class by keeping his thoughts to himself. Its apparent to anyone who has ever played high level competitive golf that Robert has lost his confidence entirely. It was difficult for me to watch as I have battled the same issue. Until you have been there you don't know what it feels like. I battled driver yips that ultimately took the joy completely out of the game. Robert standing over the ball with something on the line is probably the last place he wanted to be right there. Other notes, Petey is a player. No doubt about it. That said, Will's reaction to the comeback challenge was perplexing.

It is a sign that Will isn't going to have the mental toughness to win this (or be a professional golfer at this point of this life). Everyone there has to be a little upset that they have to beat one more person to win. The mentally tough ones say, big deal 7 or 8 it doesn't matter. It seems to me if Will has to face an elimination challenge against Pete (I am guessing though it is going to take some great golf to get back on the show), is he going to be thinking about beating Pete or about how unfair it is? It is easy to play well when things are going your way. To make it to the top, you need to be able to grind out when things are going bad.

Of course it doesn't sound like the OP knows if he went triple-triple-triple (he doesn't say he what he did, he assumes off of the score). Without knowing the exact holes and if that 90 had ESC applied, it could very well be that the guy suffers from the high handicaper problem of blow up holes. He could also be a sandbagger but you need a lot more evidence than one round of golf. I am convinced that most peoples complaints about handicaps is that is allows the worse golfer to win which doesn't seem right. It feels like the good golfers should be winning but that pretty much defeats the purpose of handicaps. If your playing a 50 person tournament with accurate handicaps, you need to have the round of your year to win since one of your competitors will be having the round of their year.

I would be a bit worried that people would birding all the short par 3/4s and get stuck playing the par 5s from the long distance. For beginners I feel it is a lot easier to par/birdie the short holes as they have occasional good swings just not 3 in a row. Heck you would might be better to bogey the par3 to take a 50 yards off the following par 5.

They are pretty different skills. It is easy for an athletic guy to get the ability to hit the ball 290+ yards. It is a lot harder to get those 290 yards to be straight. Or to get the feel to chip the put well. Distances also tend to a bit bogus and people talk about their best distance ever. I drove a 325 green once. It was downhill (probably about 40-50 feet), with a tailwind, with rock hard fairways. Move that shot with those conditions up to 7000ft and I am guess 350 would have been possible. It sounds good to say I can drive it 325 while most pros are more like 290. But that 290 is a totally different number than my 325. Quote:

You have to remember with your stats is that most members of the club are not trying to be scratch golfers. They are more interested in playing golf than getting better. Tell them that lifting wieghts and yoga for 4 hours a week for a year will add 15 yards to their shots, most of them will say I would rather play another 50 rounds of golf. You might be able to get them out the range a couple times a week but things like putting and chipping practice is rarely done on any of the courses I have ever been on. I have seen people get down to 7 and 8 handicaps with a lot of play but to get much lower requires a lot of practice since you need to eliminate those 2 or 3 bad shots in a round. Now there are some scratch guys who don't practice and only play a couple times a week. All the ones that I know of did the practice years ago (college and HS golf) and are not sort of coasting off that training.

The OP was not "Can I become a scratch golfer". It was "if I play 3 times a week and don't go to a range or have a teacher will I go from an 18 (roughly) to scratch". The answer to the second question is pretty clearly no. Everyone has a dozen guys in their golf league that pretty much do that and year to year their handicaps stay about the same. The first question is much harder to answer. It is hard to predict the results of training.

It is unlikely you will get significantly better doing the same thing you have done for the last 3 years. Could you become scratch if you tried? Who knows. Very few people come close to maximizing their golf potential. Very few should even try. Most people should not spend 25+ hours/week in their 20s/30s practicing, working out, and actually playing because the difference in their life between being the 5 handicap and scratch is pretty much zero for them.

You shouldn't expect much of a drop off until the 40s. For all the players who have lost distance with age, how many of you doing things like regular weight lifting and stretching to try and maintain your physical ability? There have been a lot of studies suggesting that you can slow down aging loss of strength and power significantly with training. However most of the studies deal with people that are pretty unfit to start with.

For the same player A will be faster. But B could much much faster than C. Golfer playing the white tees reaches the green in 2, 3. or 4 shots. since C switches clubs 3 times, lasers everything and then GPS's all distances just to be sure, looks at all puts from all 4 directions, takes 4 pracitices swings and takes a min to tee the ball up after his partner hit and so on. With most high handicappers it isn't the number of stokes that slow down play. Most grip and rip after a couple practice strokes. None of them take mins thinking about where to hit the ball and what type of shot is needed. They do spend a lot of time looking for lost balls though....

This is a slightly different question in my mind. The initial thought is accuracy is #1 by far (i.e. if I could hit every shot 150 yards exactly where I needed it, I would be the number one player in the world since I would never hit worse than par and would birdie 4+ holes a round). The question should probably be rephrased along the lines of would you rather hit 300 yards+=15 yards (5%) in any direction or 250 yards+-6.25yards (2.5%). The second guy is twice as accurate but the first guy might score better. The key isn't too be super accurate on the first shot. It is to be on the shot to the green. Hitting a PW when your opponent is hitting a 6 iron is a huge advantage as accuracy improves significantly as the club length shrinks. Maybe the 300 yard is accurate to 2% with his 100 yard wedge while the 250 guy is accurate to 2% with 150 yard 6 iron so now even though the first player is less accurate, he is getting the ball closer to the hole since he is hitting a more accurate club a shorter distance. Obviously all these numbers are made up but you get the idea. Figuring out where the balance lies is debatable and depends a bit on the course.

I have to really question that handicap unless he was making outrageous shots (i.e. chipping in from off the green, holing 30 footers,...) where you can tell he is having a career day. The odds of a 50 shooting a 38 is one of those 1 in 10000+ occurences that seem to happen every week in handicapped games when money is at stake.

There are mathematical ways of calculating what is the best play but you would need to be able to estimate the odds of the various outcomes. The questions is how often will your opponent beat you by exactly 1 stroke. If you assume that the challenges are about the same as 2 holes of golf (most of them are less than that) and the contests are equal in skill, I am guessing something like 20% of the time that extra half point will get you in the playoff and you should win half of them. Thats a lot of value. The unknown is what the future value of the money is. Right now the only value we can see is in picking teams (not super valuable), opponents (well if you know the challenge this does have value. Don't challenge Shank to a driving contest) and a half point in the elimination challenge (this is big). There could be more uses for money later in the show which might really disadvantage the low guys. Time will tell. Quote:

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That is a real big only. There is a huge luck component involved here (something like 6 shots). Even if your significantly better than your opponent at this level (lets call it scratch golf) there is a good chance of the better playing losing. Yeah you will be in a bad spot if your in the next elimination challenge. But hopefully you start playing good golf and don't go back there for a while and that there will be challenges where you can gain ground back on your competitors.

Covering would change the game to the guy the performs the best across all the challenges rather than the one the performs the best on one elimination challenge.. There would be a lot more strategy though and a lot bigger reward for playing well in all the challenges. I have no idea if it would be better TV. But Big Break:Skins better be an all woman show though

It would be fair to the first guy if the second knew the score. This wasn't a guessing game. It was a skill game of how good someone's short game was. You could have done alternating shots or something. As far as if going for it was a good idea, the odds are way different than in a casino. I have no idea what the right move was (i.e. if Russel had 100 shots, how many would hit a A,2,3) but it might not be as clear cut as it would be in vegas. Given the added info that Shank hit 2 kings in a row during the warm up shots, going for it might not be as crazy as it seemed. Most of the challenges are a bit gimmicky (i.e. breaking glass). Its part of the show. I am sure if all the contestants played 72 holes, the outcome would likely be different than what happens on the show. As far as buying the half point, as far as we know you have to do it. If you are eliminated, the money in your account does you no good. Personally I think it would be interesting if during the elimination round, it was more like a poker tournament where the players go all in and if you have your opponent covered, you are still alive even if you lose. The winner of the elimination challenge gets the pot so going to elimination and winning would be a big boost to a player. It would probably be a nightmare to produce (you could lose any number of players in a week given you would start having players bust out during the earlier challenges)

What if when playing your 9 holes you find you swing isn't right? Confidence is shot the same way. Maybe you would be hitting the driver awesome if you didn't go to the range. Seems to me that is more likely that you would be hitting the same as you hit on the range. Some people like practice. Others don't.

How can you be happy with a 5 handicap? After all scratch is so easy if you can hit the ball 200 yards straight. Just a couple of shots to the green and 2 put. And on the ones where it takes 3 shots, you will be chipping it so close the whole anything less than a 1 put is unthinkable. The 110+ guy doesn't have any dependable clubs. They could play the whole round with a 9 iron and you would still see 10 yard hits, shots with 30 yards of slice, and so on. There will also be 1 or 2 water holes on most course that are really tricky when your best club only goes 120 yards. And the chips that go over the green or come up short. The sand traps that take 3 shots to ge out of. Not to mention 45 puts is probably a good round for most of them. If your shooting 120+, focusing on the score isn't really important. Having fun (so you come back) and getting better is.

You can ask but it seems to me that you swung the club and are responsible for putting the scuff mark on the club. If you didn't have enough room to swing your club, you shouldn't have swung it.

You played 108 holes and won 2. That seems pretty reasonable to me. With 10 people playing, I would guess about 3/4s of the holes are split(feel free to correct me with the exact number) which means that only about 27 skins awarded and if the handicaps are right, everyone should have 2-3 of them. Skins games favor players with a lots of varience in their game. A guy who can shoot a round of 9 birdies and 9 double bogies will tend to be a better skins player than one that can shoot 18 pars in a skin game. That description fits a lot of mid handicappers who can execute excellent shots but don't have the consistancy to execute 18 holes worth and have a couple of blow up holes per round.