unabowler

Every year there's a point where I feel like I'm on the verge of a breakthru. In the spring I start over playing like I've never played before, and it takes a couple of months to get back to it. After a couple of months of nothing the leap to playing better is sudden. To put the breakthru in context though, I only go from barely being able to play (shooting over 120) to under 110 in a short time. Then winter comes and it goes out the window.

I'm a statistician and I've done some probability simulations, so to me this sounds like an interesting question. Once a student of mine simulated an estimate to the number of foursomes that could be pushed through a course in a day. I can't guess what the answer to this question would be. The one hunch I have off the bat is that your ball is in flight only a small fraction of the time you are on the course. Next, it may be possible to identify a time of day and year where the places on the globe where courses are concentrated are not condusive to it. You'd need a lot of data to set up a sim that would give you an accurate answer.

Sometimes you'd win the US Open.

I think that Prairie Parson is an enabler. When you say that a pro plays terribly it's taken in context. Much the same way as if you say you play well, it means relative to your ability and expectations.

Here in Dayton, OH one of the city's municipal courses has a nice 18 hole par 3. This course is on a site with two additional full-length 18 hole courses. The par 3 course is nice because #9 and #18 are par 4s, around 330 and 400 yards, respectively. Of the par 3s, eight of the 16 remaining holes are over 200 yards. So it plays like a little executive course rather than a true par 3 course. The total yardage for 18 holes is about 3800, sometimes it plays shorter. A sign in the pro shop says the course record is 54. What struck me as curious is that the course record on the 6700 Eagle course on the same site is 63.

Not to get too far onto a tangent, but only the LLWS is televised. If little league baseball were otherwise broadcast I don't think interest would be very large. More to the point I think you nailed the reason women's golf isn't more popular. Any kind of golf on television has limited appeal to nongolfers and given the choice, most golfers watch the men instead of the women. About three years ago the women's game was better than it is now. Annika and Karrie Webb were still to be reckoned with, Ochoa was an emerging talent, Se Ri Pak still popped her head up as a top player sometimes, and Wie hadn't become annoying yet. Now on the top of the women's game Ochoa is invisible this year and most of the rest of the top 10 are young, young players who aren't at the peak of their skills yet.

I played a couple of these two years ago. I was getting back into golf with one of my coworkers, and we had been playing once in a while, shooting over 110 most of the time. But we were the only people in our department who even owned golf clubs, so the other two guys were worse than us. In the first one we got dead last. We were over par, but not by much. A few months later we got in another one and were saved from a last place finish by a group of women. I think we had a 74 the second time. They did some fun things like a hole where you tee off with a flack jacket on, a par 5 where you could only use a 7 iron, a hole where you tee off with the ball covered by a paper cup. In a way it was fun, we could relax and try to make a shot. And everyone in our foursome conributed, it was really fun to hit a decent shot. The big drawback was that it took over 6 hours to play. You better like your teammates and want to spend a long time with them.

As a bad, bad golfer I like this idea a lot. My five iron is a club I'm pretty consistent with, and I hit it 150. Multiply by 36 and it 5400 yards which sounds like a distance which would be comfortable for me. I'm playing a course tomorrow and as it turns out the gold tees there come in a little over 5400 so I will play from there. My buddy will laugh at me, but he already laughs at how I play. It turns the typical par 4s there from 350-380 range down to 300 to 340. One or two par 4s are even under 300 from the gold tees. There are a couple of par 5s over 540 and they are reduced to 460-480. I believe my frustration level will go down a lot.

To speed up play??? I'm well into middle age, shoot 110-120, take all my putts and I can play 18 walking under 3 hours easily. Those putts aren't slowing down play.

The state of the game isn't very good right now as a spectator sport. If Woods is playing the story is "Will He or Won't He" (win), when he's not playing it's "Where Is He?? I'm not watching these other guys." Without Woods it would be even worse, though, it would be like it was in the late 80s and early 90s: "Who are these guys anyway?"

The golf I've played has been on munis, military courses, and public courses where the dress code is just shirt and shoes. Actually I've seen people play with no shirts at Hara Greens on the west side of Dayton. However, for the most part people observe a dress code even thought it's not formally required. The majority of people wear walking shorts and a shirt with a collar. I very seldom see anyone in jeans or t shirts or other casual clothing. The thing that I draw from the fact that people are self-imposing a dress code is that the dress codes are good. People that play the game adopt disciplined modes of dress and disciplined modes of behavior.

Is the situation in golf different than other sports? In a lot of sports the top high schoolers in the country would beat any woman in the world. Lebron James in high school would dominate anyone in the WNBA, as would a number of guys who are one-and-done in college and then on to the pros.

When I play by myself I play pretty strictly. It really helps me focus if I'm not taking a mulligan after that crummy drive or if I have to live with missing the 2 foot putt. It helps me improve. When I play with people, I go with the flow. If they take a mulligan on each 9, I don't mind. I like to putt out every hole but in these situations I'm not anal about it. One thing that happens is that I don't take stroke and distance if I lose a ball. If it's questionable I don't always hit a provisional ball (no sense hitting another ball into the same trouble, I figure). If I don't find it, it may not be feasible to walk back and hit another. I drop where I think the ball is and take 1.

At the Evian Masters that the women played last week the course was 63 hundred and some yards. I'm familiar with courses of that length (although it takes me plenty of shots to play them). On a course of that length you'll have several par 4s which are under 400 yards and likely a par 5 which is under 500. The longest hitters on the LPGA tour hit 270 off the tee but the average is about 250 and some are viable with 230s (Mi Hyun Kim). A male scratch golfer would devour a course like that, I think he'd finish above average in most women's fields.

When I started playing again a few years ago, my buddy and I would take pretty many liberties for a while. When I could shoot 60 for 9 holes, I started playing strictly. If you get 2 bogies, two doubles, two triples, and 2 quadruple bogies in nine holes (plus one more hole) you're somewhere in the upper 50s. That's not good but it still took me a while to get to that level, and I think that was the point where it was worth tracking carefully and being a little more strict.

I'm curious when it was that Nicklaus said that. I remember trying to hit my Dad's persimmon drivers when I was a kid, and I would definitely agree that it was best then to work your way up to a driver. I'm definitely a high, high handicapper but with the drivers I've had recently and how easy they are to hit, they are usually the least of my problems.

I'm 43, I've been playing for 3 years.

This is probably my favorite: http://www.daytonrecreationandyou.com/GolfMadden.cfm

I'm a statistician.