A Comedy of (Golfing) Errors

With appropriate apologies to the Bard, my round of golf at Millbrook GC on Monday afternoon, with my brother-in-law Greg, didn't exactly light the high-quality fires or threaten the upper reaches of the OWGR.

 
There were a number of early signs that the day wasn't going to go exactly to plan. 

One of my pet hates is not having sufficient time to get ready prior to teeing off. To be honest, this doesn't happen very often as I normally plan plenty of time to get to a course, get paid up, organise the scorecard, sort out a half-decent ball and some tees and have a practice putt or three. For various reasons (the details of which I won't digress into) we were late arriving which meant a bit of a step-on to start on time, although the course wasn't exactly rammed.

As you can see from my course-ography, I like to play new courses which means I usually invest in a yardage book. This helps me enormously to plan my way around a course and establish suitable shots to take on and when to play safe. Due to some changes to the course, there were no yardage books available to purchase. Whilst there were (relatively) useful marker plates in the fairway at 150 and 100 yards out, this provides little clue when the hole has a sharp dogleg or an out-of-bounds in front of you. It also led to some alarming misjudgements of distance, which manifested itself as early as my second shot on #1 - my attempted lay-up with a 5-iron sailing powerfully short-left of the green (where two of the group in front were chipping) and ending up almost pin-high (sorry chaps).

Given it had only been three weeks since I last played, I was erroneously confident about some of the more elementary aspects of playing golf - address, stance, ball position, grip, swing plane, etc, etc. If I can play good golf after five or six weeks without touching a club, how hard can it be? I seemed to struggle right from the get-go with these facets. Whether it was tiredness (the joys of having a toddler whose sleep patterns can be a bit haphazard) or just lack of attention & concentration, I'm not certain but things felt alien to me and I couldn't get comfortable over my shots.

As the game proceeded, I found myself playing a ropey shot followed by a half-decent one, but even the better shots didn't feel right. Whether it was a slightly duff ball flight or shot shape, or being off-balance after impact, there were things which weren't quite working right, even if the ball seemed to end up safe.

A comedy high point came on the 414yd par-4 3rd hole. 

I had cobbled together a couple of ugly pars to find myself 2-up against Greg. Could I take inspiration from the weekend's golfing climaxes produced by Messrs Garcia and Donald? Could I produce a beautifully faded drive, followed by  a solid iron approach to the two-tiered green? Could I roll a dead-weight putt into the middle of the cup for a confidence-boosting birdie? Er, no. 

A drive that started too far left found the small copse of trees about 150yds from the green. I then contrived to hit a tree trying to play a chip and run (hit the tree square on, mind), hit a tree again, pull my approach so that it ran off the steep slope and finish behind the bunkers, take two to get up on to the green followed by three putts. A quintuple-bogey 9. Thankfully, Greg produced an even more ridiculous performance, finding the sand with his third shot and proceeding to take six to get out, followed by two putts. Probably one of the worst matchplay holes completed in the history of golf.

For the next eleven holes, I would mix reasonable with pony; satisfying with filthy; pleasing with appalling and I would find myself 2-down with four to play. As much a result of Greg's generosity as an increase in the quality of my own golf, I managed to claw this back to record a 2-up victory, playing level par golf for the final five holes. The comedy aspect did, however, return, this time to haunt my opponent who managed to:

1. Pull his approach to #15 into a water hazard from the centre of the fairway
2. Allow the wind to push his tee shot on #16 OOB
3. Hit a tree with his second to #17
4. Hit a tree with his tee shot on #18

Whilst schadenfreude is not something of which I usually partake, we both had to smile about the standard of golf that we had produced over the preceding four hours and the enjoyment of a close match.

And I think therein lies what I am aiming to take away from Monday - smiling about the fact that I am playing golf and not sat at a desk in an office.


I am The Part-Time Golfer