Play in Jersey tomorrow with my friend and some of his co-workers. I should be able to put some number up on the course since I have played it once before. It is a resort course with tight fairways and beautiful atmosphere but I am not looking forward to it. I like woods course so much more that it makes it hard to get excited about this style of course. Either way I’ll get to see if I can make things even in the dollar a stroke match that we have been having this year. I am currently down eleven dollars.

In equipment news I have been swinging a new driver as well as using a testing a new GPS option. The driver is a Taylor Made SuperQuad with an orange accra XT 60 shaft. It has helped me tremendously with distance and accuracy. The weights in the head help me turn the club over and get a nice draw on the ball and the shaft increases my ball speed and my distance by about 20 yards. There is no comparison to my Nike, I don’t think I ever loaded that shaft enough to get any performance benefits. The GPS is GolfShot for my iPhone. I have been using it for scoring ever since my last option went down before a round and with a dead battery in my uPro I decided to try it on a friends recommendation. I am still not 100% sold but with it’s $30 price tag comes a full list of features including point to point measuring, shot measuring, distance to all hazards, a fly over view and lay up distances. I believe that it offers even more than my $400 uPro does. The only real downside so far is the time it takes for the distance on the screen to update. I am going to try it out more in the coming rounds for comparison and I will keep you posted.

It was a links course surrounded by houses that made acurate tee shots very important. I could not stay in form from my previous round and hit the fairways. I only had 3 acceptable shots with my driver with 1 hitting the fairway. Overall since I was playing by myself I rushed as usual and couldn’t take my time and play multiple balls or take pictures due to the oppressive sun.

I am playing Silverstone Golf Club at 7:30am tomorrow so I should be able to play without a problem. I am going to get there early to take advantage of the unlimited range balls that come with the green fees. I’ll update you again tomorrow.

I attended practice rounds 2 and 3 as well as the Saturday part of the championship. I took some great photos from the U.S. Open practice rounds that can be seen in the 2009 Photo Gallery. I can say the if anyone out there is thinking of going to any PGA events, the practice rounds are they way to go. They are really cheap, I got two tickets for $40 on StubHub.com, and you are not able to take photos on any of the other days. I had a blast watching the practice range and greens and loved how the players interact with the gallery while they are practicing. Another piece of advice, don’t worry about where Tiger is! They will never tell you what his scheduled practice time is and when possible they almost always send him out on the tenth tee to keep the crowds to a minimum. He always has a crowd that is 10 deep following him making it impossible to get a glimpse. If you must see him pick a hole way in front of where he is and just plant yourself there until he comes through and make the most of the one or maybe two shots you get to see. I chose to follow some other really good groups and was able to see all of their shots very comfortably. My favorite was Ogilvy, Furyk and Casey on Saturday. I watched them from the first tee to the eighteenth green and loved every minute of it. Wish I could have taken photos then.

As for my upcoming trip that I wrote about in my first travel post I have finalized the two places that I will be playing while in Vegas, Silverstone Golf Club and Black Mountain Country Club. Silverstone has an amazing deal where they will repay you up to $30 towards your travel expenses to the course. That means your cab or even your daily rental car fee! This brings the green fee, which includes unlimited range balls and cart with GPS, down from $85 to $55. The course looks great and should be a challenge. Black Mountain will be played in the afternoon so it is very cheap at $35. I don’t think that includes the cart but it doesn’t matter since it will be over 100 degrees outside when I tee off. The cart could cost another $150 and I think that I would go for it.

I’ll keep you posted and try my best to take pictures. Check back during the week and I’ll be posting some updates!

Click to see full scorecard.

Well, I finally did it, I broke 100 this past Saturday at West Sayville golf course. I shot 97 by playing a respectable front 9 and a really good back nine. Fresh off of my lesson this past Thursday to help my horrible driving I was able to hit 5 fairways and 4 greens enroute to a 97! I even birdied the par 4 eighteenth by hit a drive into the middle of the fairway, cutting the corner of a dog leg, and putting a nine iron on the green. All I wanted to do was get the putt close so I could make par and,  as I thought at the time, shoot 99. I hit the ball and reallized that I pushed it inside of my intended line only to watch it drop in the cup for a round ending birdie. It wasn’t until I got home later and entered the score into digitaldivot.com that I realized I had miscounted and had really shot 97.

I only had 2 penalty strokes. My horrific first drive and a ball that barely missed going over the water on 16. I hit some really good shot from the tee esspecially on the par 3s. I hit 3 of the 4 in regulation and pared those that I did. My bad shots with my driver were also still very playable. Still tons of room for improvement but I feel super confident in most aspects of my game which can only mean good things!

MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Since my last contact I have both shot 101 again and 110 the next day! Both rounds had one thing in common, penalty shots. My Driver has been as inconsistent as the day I started. Every round is the same, I will hit one nice driver 250 yards down the fairway and the rest will be an even amount of dead pulls left and amazing banana slices. Neither of the latter make finding a ball to hit your second shot very easy. Especially when you are playing along the water on the back side of Timberpoint and every hole you dead yank it into the ocean making up the lateral hazard.

The rest of my game has really been coming along nicely. My putting is really starting to get together and even better my chipping and pitching are way better than I thought they would be at this stage. My appraoch shots haven’t been as good but aren’t terrible. The only things that made playing no fun was knowing that I was playing three from the tee and most holes.

That problem was hopefully resolved after my lesson yesterday when I began hitting a nice draw down the middle for the first time. I can’t wait to see how it looks on the course. In theory I have been shooting 101 with like 4 penalty strokes per round, sometimes more. So I should be well into the 90’s If I can eliminate those driver errors. I’ll report back after the weekend, hopefully with some good news.

I’m playing next week in New Jersey for Memorial Day weekend so hopefully I can celebrate 2 things that weekend!