Granite Ridge Mashup

The weather guys had it wrong - again! They were calling for a wet weekend and we had the exact opposite. Realizing that the weather was going to be fine, I called a bunch of courses to find out where I might be able to walk on. It seemed as though most courses were full. No wonder golf in the GTA is so costly - courses can seemingly charge whatever they want and people continue to line up eagerly. And you thought people were dependant on gasoline!

Anyway, I ended up finding an afternoon tee time at Granite Ridge Golf Club, in Milton. Last time I walked on at Granite Ridge, it was a six hour round, but I really had no other alternative. Sure enough, the round started out really slow. It took three hours to play the front nine on the Ruby course - there were simply too many people. Fortunately, the marshall had us play the back nine of the Cobalt course, which had finished hosting a tournament by then. We managed to play the Cobalt back nine in two hours, so the whole round amounted to a five hour investment.

There were some bright spots in this round, most notably putting. I finished with a respectable 35 putts, but the key is that this included only one 3-putt. Two lengthy putts dropped in the cup - one for birdie, and another to save par. Some more lengthy ones could have dropped, but they just missed either left or right. My distance was very good all day long. I only left a couple of putts short. All others challenged the hole. If they missed, I had an easy tap-in to follow.

The other bright spot was chipping. Though I didn't leave any chip shots very close to the hole, I always put them safely on the green, within a reasonable distance. Considering that some of these were from tricky lies or over bunkers, I was pretty satisfied.

The part of the game that concerned me most was actually my iron play. This has been a strong point for me over my last few rounds, but I made some truly unforced errors this time. On a couple of occasions, I duffed shots from the fairway with either a sand wedge, pitching wedge, or 9-iron. Usually, I caught the ground with the club head before striking ball. The follow-up shots were fine, but I wasted a few strokes this way.

Had it not been for those miscues, I think this could have been the sub-90 round I have been anxiously waiting for.

Score: 94
Par: 71
Putts: 35
Fairways: 3
Greens: 3