This was another beautifully maintained course. Here’s the putting green.

The course winds all over the place. Holes are connected by concrete cart paths.

It’s a challenging course. There are a few forced carries, even on the forward tees. Like this one. If I recall correctly, this shot is a view of the 12th hole from the white tees.

The sky was partly clear by then, but it was pretty chilly. I was dressed in multiple layers, plus a knit cap. Comfortable for most of the afternoon. And hey, it wasn’t snowing!

Here’s one of the course’s signature holes, number 2. Don’t hit your approach shot thin & end up underneath that big boulder on the left of the frame, behind the flag, like I did. It will be *coff* unplayable and cost you a stroke.

The jackrabbits were out in full force that day. We had to shoo them off the teeboxes on just about every hole.

I’m going to close with this shot, even though I didn’t take it the day we played. This was one morning as we walked from our casita to the lodge. We took a little detour to stand on the blue teebox for the sixth hole. The shot’s a little dark, but hopefully you can still see how beautiful it was. It’s quite a hole, too! Look at the carry from that tee: waste, road, water! Take your pick!

As for my score — I didn’t play as well the last day as I had the day before, but I did manage a 44 on the back nine, topped off by a nice aggressive shot to the green on number 18 — a green that is closely guarded by water on the right. I figured, why not go for it — I won’t be playing again until spring, who cares if I lose my ball? I’d started the hole badly, so my two putt left me with a double bogey only, but it still felt great.

There! That’ll be the last of my golf trip posts. I had a great time, and would love to play in Arizona again someday . . .

It was a breathtakingly beautiful course. Here’s what it looks like when you pull into the parking lot near the clubhouse. Paradise!

One of the reasons the course is so beautiful is that it has a lot of elevation changes.

Here’s a view from the fairway of the number one handicap hole, number four. It’s a par four dogleg right. I’m standing from about where my drive landed. I parred the hole

This was the first time I noticed the way golf balls can embed in Saguaro cactuses. Don’t just bounce off like if you hit a tree here in the northeast.

You have to place your drive carefully to score on the par threes. Here’s a view from the tee box of number 5. I took this shot more to capture the landscape, but if you look closely, the fairway is that teeny tiny strip of green along the left side. I parred this one too

I didn’t do so well on number seven, another par three. Bogey. The yellowish trees in the middle of the frame are poplars — there’s a wash running through down there, behind the green. The tee boxes in the foreground are surrounded by rosemary, which was blooming and buzzing with honey bees.

It started to get chilly later on in the round as a cold front came in. Here’s a view from the white tees on number 13.

The wind started to blow. And the lighting got dramatic! Too bad my camera choked a little bit on the contrast.

As I got cold, my game started to fall apart a little bit — I didn’t score as well on the back nine as I did the front. Got my first triple bogey (on the highest handicap hole on the back, but still). All the same, I finished with a 92, which is a good 10 strokes lower than I should have given my handicap. Not bad, considering my goal most of the year was to break 100 — and here I was, three strokes from breaking 90.

That’s the 18th green. Squeezed in right before dark. Boy was it nice to sit down at the course resturant, the Tonto Bar and Grill. The food was excellent, and we sat on their patio, which was enclosed and warmed by heaters in the ceiling. A perfect ending to a wonderful day of golf.

A very open, rolling course. Lots of small aircraft to watch between shots — it’s right next to the Falcon Field Airport. The club member who was paired with us for our round says it’s one of the busiest small craft airports in the country.

One of the nicest sights from the course is this one, of Red Rock Mountain.

We also spotted a Snowy Egret. I believe this is looking from the fairway of number 13, across the water hazard that runs between it and 15.

And these Mourning Doves, perched on this spiky plant which name escapes me right now.

My partner got a whole lot more pars than I did this round. But I played below my handicap — again. Little did I know that I was about to blow that handicap out of the water . . .

First up: Dove Valley Ranch in Cave Creek, a Robert Trent Jones II-designed course. We played this the day we flew in — drove from the airport, quick pit stop at The Boulders to check in, then straight to the course. Changed from our New York State duds into warm weather clothes right in the course parking lot — no time to waste, we wanted to squeeze in our first 18 holes before dark!

It was the warmest day of our trip, mid 70s — what a change from home. The sun felt fantastic, and I loved the desert views.

Here’s another hole a little later in the round (sorry, didn’t keep track of which hole is which!):

The back nine of the course is the most interesting. It winds along Willow Wash, so you’re crossing through a lot of Arizona-style waste areas. Balls don’t get lost as easily as in the east, because a lot of the ground is bare — but beware the flora, it’s got thorns galore!

Saw our first jackrabbit — this will give you an idea of what the waste areas are like:

I’d have to say, the sunshine was probably the highlight of this round — that, and just being out on a course again. Of course, there was also this sweet tap-in birdie on number 12. My partner had a great up and down on that hole too too! We both shot very respectable rounds, in fact

Next up: Longbow Golf Club . . .

The mental side of the game is one of the main appeals for me. I’ve learned so much about composure and self-control over the years. Taking up golf a couple of years ago meant that I could apply what I’d learned to a physical sport.

The problem is that you do need to do a decent job with the mechanics — and that’s been frustrating at times. I was ready to give it up entirely this spring (or anyway, I said as much to myself a couple of times).

But looking back, I have improved. My bad holes are now sixes and sevens instead of nines and tens.

I cured the slice that was plaguing me.

I have a ways to go, yet. Most important: I’d still like to reduce the variables of my swing.

What’s fun, however, is that I’ve gotten good enough that I can turn more attention to the mental game. So Rotella’s book is a welcome way to spend a few minutes here & there, now that we’ve got snow on the ground. I find myself remembering what it was like to be a kid, when putting was something that I thought was pretty easy.

I’m going to work on my game this winter. Not quite sure how, yet. Indoor driving range — possibly. Maybe just swing a club in the back yard. Strikes me as a way to work on that reproducibility.

It’s funny how optimistic I feel. It’s like I have this Ideal Round in my head, and it seems so real to me.

And since I can’t actually go out and play, that Ideal Round just sits there, all pretty and uncorruptable . . .

Isn’t it adorable? Look at the wee little bunkers and the bucket of balls!

Too funny!

Rochester region EWGA chapter tournament, played at Ravenwood yesterday. I shot a 101 and took low gross for my flight.

I’m a happy camper

Cross-posted at my other blog.

I am now projecting all my romantic fantasies onto THIS MAN. Call me, Rocco, I promise to pick up!

Last fall, around the time it got too cold to golf anymore, I was feeling pretty discouraged about the game.

It seemed to me that after a year & a half of playing I should have been getting better. Ha. I was as close to breaking 100 at the end of 2006 as I was last fall. What’s worse, my swing was still a mystery to me. I couldn’t really understand what made it work or not work.

I’m slowly beginning to understand the mechanics. Slowly because there’s so much to it. This is nothing other golfers don’t already know, but for a golf swing to work, it has to be incredibly precise. A teensy spot on the face of the club has to hit a teensy spot on that little golf ball at precisely the right angle and velocity. And for that to happen, muscles throughout the body, from the pads of the feet through the core to the fingertips have to coordinate their movements within miniscule tolerances. It’s hard.

Or is it? What’s been maddening me is that I’ve always been able to hit the ball well sometimes. Incredibly long straight drives or perfectly gorgeous iron shots — pitches that arc up, drop near the hole and stick. Maddening, because if I could do it once, you’d think I could do it over and over.

Anyway, I finally returned to an old “friend,” Timothy Gallwey. I’d read his book The Inner Game of Tennis when I was in high school — I wasn’t a tennis player but somebody (was it you, Dad?) recommended it — I applied it (as best a self-conscious teenager could) to my basketball game.

This time, natch, I’m reading The Inner Game of Golf.

Here’s an Amazon affiliate link, so if you want to buy a copy I’ll get, um, 15 cents or something.

My copy is the 1981 hardcover edition btw, which means I got this “screamin’ 70s” pic of Gallwey on the back cover.

I don’t want to write too much about this yet, because doing so might make it harder to apply what I’m learning. But. The basic idea is that for a golf swing to really work there has to be an element of surrender. The “I” self that lives here, on the surface of things, has to take a back seat and allow That Something Else to swing the club.

I managed to do it fairly well on Monday — I played with my folks at Victor Hills East. What happened was almost spooky, in fact. I set my goal as “no more than 6 strokes per hole.” For the first three holes I got exactly 6 strokes on each hole (double bogeys on each). I was laughing at myself for meeting my goal so literally.

The next two holes are both par 3s; I shot a 5 and a 4 on them.

It was around the 6th hole that my concentration started to wobble a bit; I began to pay the wrong kind of attention to my game (”oh wow, I’m in the running to break 50″ kind of thinking) — shot an eight on 6 and a seven on 7.

And I realized: I just offset holes 4 & 5 so that my average is: 6 strokes a hole!

I bogeyed the next two holes, par 4s, to finish the front with 52 — not great, but a good 10 strokes lower than what I would have shot a week ago.

It didn’t last. I lost my focus through most of the back 9, regaining it only on 17 (parred with 3 strokes) and 18 (par 5–bogeyed it). So my overall score was still higher than I would have liked. But I don’t really mind. When I took up this game again 23 months ago I did it in part because I wanted a competitive physical activity that I could pursue until I drop dead. But there was another reason: I wanted to apply what I’ve learned about Mind — learned since I was that self-conscious teen — to an activity that would feed it back to me in near real time. It could have been martial arts or something, but it’s golf. Now to see how far I can take it . . .

My dad and I have been talking about it because one of the courses he plays once in awhile — the Conklin outside of Binghamton, NY — used to have long lines to tee off, but now is often considerably more quiet.

It opened in 1991.

Its weekend rate is $54 plus $10 if you want a cart.

So I spent a bit of time on Google and came across this post in a Golf Digest blog. The main point of the post is that slow play is a deterrent to would-be golfers — people have too many claims on their time to give up 5 hours of discretionary time for golf.

Could be. On the other hand, the alternative sport/pasttimes people cite, like kayaking or whatever, can be pretty time-consuming too.

A couple other takeaways — the data available on number of golfers doesn’t necessarily pass the sniff test. Click the link to see what I mean, but as an example, there have been changes in methodology in the National Golf Foundation studies the post cites, including what age groups they’re including in their samples. That creates an apples-to-oranges situation that makes it hard to know if anything they’re finding today can be used to suggest a “trend.”

But if you accept that the distortions, if there are distortions, are at least internally consistent, then this is kind of interesting: the NGF says the number of “core golfers” — people who play more than 8 rounds a year — is up from 12.5 million a year ago to 15 million now. The drop, then, is in golfers who don’t play very much.

Good information or bad?

Who knows.

But if it’s even an approximation of the truth, then courses need to make it easier for beginning golfers to fall in love with the game — to the point where a commitment to improve (which takes practice, and therefore requires more than eight rounds a year) becomes the golfer’s idea of fun.

Which is why this is even more silly: more courses now require golfers to rent carts, claiming it’s to speed up the pace of play (via Golfgal, who linked to a news article about this trend a few days ago).

As Golfgal says in the post comments — carts don’t necessarily speed play. But being ready to hit the ball when it’s your turn sure does. Also not spending a lot of time hunting for lost balls. Etc.

So rather than make golf more expensive and simultaneously removing a possible incentive to play (i.e. the exercise of walking) maybe courses should help educate golfers on etiquette — something beyond the scolding little lists printed on their scorecards.

Educate the core players on how to play more quickly and you’ll not only make it easier for other core players to play, you’ll make it more likely that occasional players come back — because they’ll see a round doesn’t have to eat up five hours every time.