One More Mulligan

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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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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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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Over the weekend I spent some time with my college buddy Chuck on an amazing course called Great Gorge in McAfee.  It was both beautiful and deadly, from a golf standpoint. There are three course: Quarry, Rail and Lake. We played the Quarry to Rail path and from the start were surrounded by a huge rock out cropping with tight fairways. Accuracy was very important from the tee and I certainly didn’t have much of it. The evidence is in the 4 penalty strokes on my card. I haven’t had to take that many strokes in an entire round all year let alone in nine.

The back nine, the Rail course, as the name would have you believe snakes around the rail road tracks. It was much more open which meant that I could find my errant drives and since I was hitting my irons well I could get myself back on track. My putting woes continued and no matter how close I got with my short game I would blow the putt by the hole or end up woefully short.

My iron and short game were really on, it was at the far ends of the course that I was sorely lacking. I couldn’t stop slicing my drives deep into the woods or missing lag putts by ten feet to save my life. It wasn’t until the 14th hole that I really got my driver back in plane and hit some really good tee shots. My putting never turned around which was disappointing since my last few rounds putting was my strong point. Considering how bad my driving and putting was a 54/52 – 106 isn’t really that bad. The couse had a slope of 129 which is way above the average course that I play. I am going to try and play Timberpoint tomorrow morning the lower slope rating should be better for my ego.

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