One More Mulligan

Well, first off, I appologize for the delay in posts. I have been trying to get all my lose ends with work and other stuff tied up before I leave this Saturday. As far as golf goes I have followed up my sub 100 round with some rounds of 100 to 106 and I attended the 2009 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. I have played both Blue and Red at bethpage but have yet to try and tackle the Black course with it’s famous sign letting the high handicappers like myself know they have a little to learn before teeing off.

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!

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I have been playing golf for the past year and can say that I love the 3 main local courses that I play. That being said I really have enjoyed playing some new courses in New Jersey with my college buddy Chuck. They have offered a new look at my game by offering different challenges and allowing me to see how I react to new situations on the course. When I play my “Fav 3″ I find that I use the same clubs on each hole, I know where the dangers are and have played just about every shot that each hole provides. Seeing how your game and scoring pace reacts to unknown challenges seems to be the best way to gauge how well you are playing.

That got me to thinking about taking a little trip to play golf in a different area of the country. I have an upcoming non-golf related trip to Las Vegas but why not bring my clubs and see if I can get one or two rounds in. The Las Vegas golf scene offers some amazing courses and from the research I have done most courses offer two levels of twilight rates with the first one beginning around 11 a.m. This is probably because no one wants to be caught dead playing in the middle of the afternoon during a Las Vegas summer. I think that I will be playing early in the morning even if it costs a ton.

The first course that I’ve been looking at is the Royal Links Golf Club. It is modeled after the courses in Ireland complete with deep pot bunkers and large greens. It looks like a challenging course with the middle tees being rated 71.2/131. A morning tee time is about $100 dollars which I think is pretty reasonable given the how the course looks on the site.

Las Vegas National, due to it’s proximity to the strip, looks to be my second choice. It looks pretty challenging at 69.7/126 but won’t be impossible. I think that I might make a 3 p.m. tee time and take advantage of the $30 twilight rate. Not sure, I’ll have to check the average temperatures before I make my final bookings.

I’ll keep you all posted on my final plans and do my best to take some photos of whatever courses I end up choosing.

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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!

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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.

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