Recently on my journey back into the game I came across a tip that has proven potential to lower my scores. I really want to share this with those that read this blog. Who knows, it might help them.
Unlike someone that has just taken up the game of golf, I played years and years ago. I was a single digit handicapper when my golfing days were curtailed. The comeback from the long hiatus, ( winter of 1985 to summer fall of 2019), has been extremely frustrating for me for several reasons. Here is what I believe is happening. My mind still remembers those days of shooting in the mid to high 70’s-low 80’s on a consistent basis. Combine that with this now, 69 year old golf body, that still thinks that it can make the body do what it did when it was 34 years old. How do you think that is working out? Well I can tell you, up until recently, the end result is that getting back to consistently making the shot is not as easy as it sounds. Many of my scores on this comeback into the game of golf dramatically show that to be true. Golf, at times can be a struggle, but there’s no reason I need to make it any worse, right? As much as I wanted to see my scores come down, there was just something very critical missing in the equation. I knew my approach to this comeback was just not right, but I really did not know why. I gradually was making better contact and for what I was feeling, a better swing, but the results were not showing that. Well that was ….. until about three weeks ago.
As I was driving to my regular Monday round of golf, I play with some very good friends from high school and have a great time, I was listening to the PGA Radio on Sirus XM during my trek to the course. I’m not really sure who it was that mention this, but I heard the words, “Par is just a number. Don’t think about what you need to do to make par, think about what you need to do to execute your next shot, and only your next shot, to the best of your abilities.” The light bulb finally lit up after hearing that! There were other words mentioned about making or executing your shot and the score will work itself out at the end of the round when you add it all up …. Or something like that. Believe me, this small little piece of advice is making a big difference in my last 5 rounds of golf. No, I am not shooting in the lower handicap range, not yet anyway. But what I am doing, or at least feel like I am doing is making better decisions and better shot execution. I’m not thinking about scoring or what I need to do to recover from a bad shot to make a better score. I am just trying to “make the next shot” and only the next shot.
Let me give you an example. On Mondays, I play short track of slightly over 5,900 yards. Its rating is 68.6, yet each hole on this course has something that can make or break you. More often than not, it has been the latter for me. It’s not often can you say that you’ve had your best shot of the day on a hole where you lose a ball then hit your provisional in the tree line and not on the fairway. Yet, this is what happened to me on the 17th hole. In the past I would have started to think, “How am I going to salvage this disaster?” After a search for the first ball turned out to be unsuccessful, I went over to the other side of the fairway and into the tree line. There it was; a side hill lie, tree branches not only obscuring a normal shot trajectory but those branches slightly obscuring the line to the flag stick. Yet, I said to myself, “It wasn’t all that bad if I make a good execution of this shot.” I wasn’t thinking about score or saying, “I just have to make this shot, or else.” I was only thinking about a little less lofted iron, easy crisp punch out to carry the distance, and just a slightly open stance to put a little fade into the shot. It was a 157 shot with the pin near the front right side. I hit the ball crisp, (we all know that feeling), with an easy swing and the ball came up just a slightly to the left of target, maybe a yard off the green. I chipped it close for a one putt and I took a double bogey. Yep, you heard me right. My best shot of the day resulted in a double for that hole, but I felt so good about that shot execution. Not the score. The next hole was the 18th and made a routine par. Not that I was counting par for that hole or any others that day!
