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.

One of the interesting things about the course is that several of the holes are replicas of holes at famous courses. I took my camera along so I could get pics.

Here’s number two, which is supposed to be a replica of the 12th hole at Augusta.

The men’s tee is actually further back than this.

We won’t talk about how many strokes this hole cost me. Remember, I just took a lesson

Although in retrospect it was a nicer par three than one coming up later.

Here’s #4. This is a replica of the 13th hole at Pine Valley. It’s a 234-yard par four dogleg to the left that slopes down sharply to the right, so if you slice you make a lot more work for yourself. That’s the 150 yard marker there a little to the right of the center of the pic. You’d do okay to aim for that, or if you’re up to it, shoot over the waste bunker and give yourself a chip onto the green.

I bogeyed that hole. I was hitting my five iron off the tees and my short game was going really really well — in fact, I birdied number 7 (a par 3) and parred number 8 (a par four). I was on my way to cracking 50. Then came this hole, number 9.

This hole is, they say, a replica of the 7th hole at Pebble Beach, and it’s where my game took a sharp turn for the worse. I can’t blame my lesson, either — it’s only 89 yard downhill from the woman’s tee to the green. But unfortunately I hit the sand, and stupidly I tried to play it as if it were dry sand. It wasn’t — it was wet and packed down. So it took me several strokes to get out, and when I did . . . I skittered across the green and into ANOTHER trap behind it.

Oh well.

This picture I took just because it was so pretty. I’m pretty sure this is the 12th or 13th green, can’t remember exactly but the view was gorgeous. Notice too that the weather has changed — from dense clouds and occasional sprinkles we’ve gone to partly sunny. The greens got faster and I did a bad job of adjusting, found myself three-putting, which is one reason I began racking up some eights . . .

Number 14 here — which the course description calls “replica of Donald Ross 17th hold at Pinehurst #2.” It’s a par 3, 167 yards from the woman’s tees, 187 from the men’s.

Like a lot of the fairways on this course, it was narrow and unforgiving if you don’t manage to keep to the middle. Considering how badly I was playing by then, I was plenty happy to get out with a double bogey

Altogether a fun course, challenging to play, would definitely like to do it again sometime.

Yesterday she took me on the next step — my backswing.

Turns out I wasn’t rotating my shoulders at the top of my swing — they were too flat. This caused my club head to be in the wrong position, which meant I had to compensate during my swing to square my club again at impact.

I could do it, most of the time, but it costs me distance and control.

Which is all very fine — and I can tell by how it feels that when I rotate my shoulders to lift my club my swing “looks right.”

But there’s a problem. My poor body is now completely confused. “You want me to do WHAT? Twist like this and then . . . hit the BALL?”

And do I leave it in peace? No, of course not. I went out after my lesson to hit some balls. Against Darlene’s advice I should add, she has more sense than I.

A small bucket of balls and then nine holes at the GVP muni course.

Quelle horreur!

I can connect once in awhile with my irons — and when I do, the ball sails — but my driver. I’m hitting the GROUND on nearly every shot.

I’m playing 18 today with my EWGA travel league. I may just have to hit my five iron or my rescue club from the tee . . . either that or play with a bag over my head.

Unfortunately, he takes a rather unkind tone — he describes women’s short games with words like “inadequate” and “inferior” — hello, somebody else needs to be expressing a bit of “innate touch and feel,” Huggan!

That aside, I have to admit — I’ve only been back to golf, as an adult, for about a year, and in that time I have been concentrating on my long game.

I don’t think that’s entirely unreasonable. As one example. An awful lot of red tee par fours are just about impossible to par if you can’t drive a fair distance. Take number five on Genesee Valley Park’s north course. It’s a 384 yard par four from the women’s tees. You need a 200 yard drive to even think about getting on the green in two. And if you don’t have a decent long game, your third shot isn’t going to need your short game anyway — you’re going to be more than 100 yards out still.

My score has gone down a good 10-12 strokes since my lessons began to take hold and I started hitting longer & straighter with my woods & driver.

But I can also see how important the short game is — particularly when you don’t have enough power to get to the green in two. (It helps that my dad keeps bugging me “how’d you do on your short game? how’d you do on your short game?” ;-))

So yeah, I’m going to work on it — you bet I am. I’ve seen too many “could be a par” opportunities slip away because I muff a chip. If that’s not incentive, I don’t know what is!

I played a couple times there this week now, too. Sunday I played my best round this summer, score-wise: on the back nine I kept every hole to six strokes or under, something I’ve never done before.

Yesterday my play was more uneven. But the round cost only $13.75 (including pull cart) and I was done in three hours (the only time I got held up was a foursome of senior citizens who let me play through after I caught up with them — thanks, gents!)

Works for me

So here to set things right are a couple pictures I took yesterday while golfing with my EWGA travel league at the Livingston Country Club in Geneseo, New York.

This is the famous . . . well, famous in Geneseo, anyway . . . rock in the middle of the fairway on number 14.

Here’s from the club website — contributed by one of their members:

When the new nine was being built, the contractor dug up thousands of rocks. On Hole #14, he came across one he could not move with his dozer. It was a problem because it was right in the middle of the #14 fairway. Scott Hicks called me up and asked me to check it out and see what could be done to remove it. I told him, “No problem! I would bring a few sticks of dynamite up and split the rock in two or three pieces and they could remove it.” Scott says, “Hold up on it, I want to talk to the Board first.” The Board then decided to leave the rock there; it would add a little class to the course, and lots of excitement. Boy were they right! In 1999 the club honored me with a party and the plaque you see on the rock. I have been cursed hundreds of times since.

Here’s another pic. I believe this is the 16th fairway. (One of the problems with taking pics on an unfamiliar course is remembering which hole is which afterward.)

This was about 4:30 in the afternoon; the sun was filtered and the light was just gorgeous.

Nice semi-private course, reasonable greens fees. Definitely worth playing if you’re in the area.

IMO, breaking the grass ceiling means we women have to do grass roots work to pass along what we’ve learned — particularly as pertains to the first couple of years of play, when so much is new and we (inevitably) feel so much uncertainty about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, what’s expected of us on the course, etc.. I’m lucky in that my parents know the game; they helped me get me re-oriented when I took it up again last summer (after a long hiatus — I’d last played when I was a young teen). And now that I’ve joined EWGA I’m meeting other women who are tremendously supportive and are helping me learn my way around the game even more.

Golf is such a wonderful participation sport on so many levels — as a physical outlet, as a way to stay active, a way to get yourself outdoors, a way to meet people — and that’s just scratching the surface, because there’s also all that stuff going on relating to one’s sense of personal limitations (and breaking through them), mental discipline and poise, the relation of mind to body — tons & tons of fascinating stuff. But getting started can be intimidating, precisely because there are so many dimensions to the game, social, cultural, physical, mental, emotional. We really need more information like the material golfgal put together — proshops ought to have little sheets they make available to golfers etc. — something that goes a bit beyond “replace all divots” lol

I think what happens is that more experienced players forget what it’s like to be a total newbie. And yet it’s the newbies who are going to keep the game growing — and I’ve read somewhere that the rate of people who quit shortly after starting is pretty high . . .