Nobody needs to see that

It's been a while since I posted anything on here but, having played twice in the space of ten days at the end of July (pushing me nicely over the line to complete a 2012 goal of playing ten rounds) I've got a fair bit of food for thought. I also wanted to go through the cathartic exercise of writing down my thoughts about a particularly unpleasant bout of dummy spitting which marred my round at Chesfield Downs GC this week.
 
Getting to play a midweek round of golf is a rareity for me. Annual leave entitlement isn't limitless and, with a young family, it's not always appropriate to sacrifice time off to hit the golf course. That said, the visit of my brother-in-law Greg presented an opportunity to get involved which I duly took.

It was a very odd round of golf. I never really got into gear - my timing was off-kilter and I couldn't find anything approaching a rhythm, yet my scoring for the front nine (and, eventually, the whole 18) was actually pretty respectable at +4. This included back-to-back doubles at #5 & #6, swiftly followed by birdies at #7 and #9, the first of which followed a wild tee shot some 60 yards right of the target (a common theme all day).

I found it increasingly difficult to judge yardages correctly, putting myself in trickier and trickier positions instead of consolidating the half-decent tee shots I did manage to produce - only hitting 14% of fairways and 39% of greens in regulation is always going to make things tricky.

Patchy golf aside, the main issue was my own mental approach to the game. I have written before about recognising that I need to enjoy my golf more than I have done in the past and, frankly, I forgot that mantra during this round.

I let myself get more and more frustrated with bad bounces, poor & sometimes unplayable lies and misjudgements of distances, as if I had some divine right to play the course perfectly and sweep records aside with ease. I conveniently forgot that I had touched my clubs twice since the beginning of June, which is not ideal preparation for producing decent golf.

I have already apologised to my playing partners for the unedifying sights of me banging the ground in annoyance, letting clubs drop out of my hand on the tee and smashing an uncooperative Titleist into the undergrowth after a poor putt, the last of which produced the mildly amusing result of the ball hitting a tree & richocheting back out again.

Etiquette is an important facet of the game of golf and I didn't adhere to the ethos and appropriate attitude, so this is some semblance of a public apology to anyone reading this (a bold assumption) who might have witnessed my antics.

This is also my declaration of an end to the dummy-spitting and toy-throwing, especially when I have rounds lined up at such bastions of golfing excellence as Royal Birkdale and Dundonald Links over the next month.


Don't for one second think that this will dull my competitive edge or take away from the desire to produce good golf - I still have the goal of breaking 70 this year (and being able to update my Twitter avi to everyone's favourite number) and I am certainly not going to let Rikki Black walk away with the Tweet Golf Cup, despite his team's installation as favourites (how exactly?!) leading up to this event.


All I want to do is remove the childish and petulant strops that blighted the round of golf this week - nobody needs to see that.




I am the Part-Time Golfer