Here we go again. My 2011 golf season got under way with a round at Woodington Lake Golf Club on Saturday during the Masters. Considering it was early April, the weather was remarkably good, as was the condition of the Legend course. After a winter of simulator golf, I was ready for the real thing. There were both positives and negatives concerning my play, so let's break it down, starting with the negatives.
Driving. My golf swing has always been less than ideal. I have a tendency to take the club up very steeply during my backswing. This takes the club off plane, forcing me to come back to plane during the downstroke if I am to hit the ball squarely. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Since the driver is the longest club in the bag, it is the hardest to control in this fashion. I shortened my backstroke in an effort to stay on plane, but this being somewhat foreign to me, I mis-hit many shots off the tee. Usually, I caught the ball on the heel of the club, sending it dribbling a few yards forward and to the left.
Par 3 holes. Apart from four triple-bogeys, my scorecard actually looked quite good. Of course, one can always say that. In golf, we simply don't have the luxury of dropping three or four of our worst holes. The thing is, three of those four triples came on par-3 holes. In each case, I pulled my tee shot well left of target. I have experienced this before and believe the problem is psychological. There is something about par-3 holes that feels so tantalizing. The green is right there in front of you and you can tee the ball up from level ground. In that situation, it's easy to get overly pumped up about the upcoming shot. Next time, I will try to think of those shots as no different than a par-4 approach from the fairway. We'll see if that helps.
Putting. My putting was more of a mixed bag than it was a negative. The fact is that I had four 3-putts over the course of the round. This was offset by five 1-putts, but that is little consolation. One cannot have any 3-putts in a round if one is to score well. Sometimes you find yourself in legitimate 3-putt territory, but that wasn't the case this time around. I need to buckle down and hit every lag putt close.
And now for the positives.
Fairway woods. What? Can it truly be possible? Last year, I could not hit a fairway wood well enough to save my life! In prior years, I had much confidence with the woods, whether off the tee or off the deck. For some reason, this disappeared entirely in 2010. The upside is that my long irons got better, but I became much less versatile. Thankfully, the woods were working well in this year's debut. Whenever I messed up a drive, my fairway woods came to the rescue on the very next shot. It was a great feeling.
Irons. Apart from the tee shots on par-3 holes, my irons were feeling very good. On hole #1, a tough opener, I hit a solid 6-iron from the fairway that trickled off the back of the green. On hole #5, I hit a wonderful 7-iron from the rough that found the centre of the green. The same club helped me find green #9, while the 3-iron helped me recover after a weak drive on hole #10. Overall, I just felt good about my irons.
Mental composure. Perhaps because I wasn't expecting much out of the season opener, I remained composed even when things were going poorly. The greatest example came on the last hole of the round. A triple-bogey and double-bogey respectively on holes #16 and #17 left me with a score of 93 going into the finishing hole, a par-4 that has ruined many a round for players at Woodington Lake. Any sort of penalty on this hole and I knew I would surpass the century mark. I began by nailing the centre of the fairway with my drive, a rare occurrence on this day. Next, I hit an easy 8-iron to a flat area 50 yards short of the green. This was critical because challenging the green meant a very long iron shot to a putting surface surrounded on three sides by water. In other words, a sure penalty stroke. Disaster struck when my pitch shot came up five yards short of the green, but I followed up with a good chip and putt for bogey. Game management was key.
Score: 98
Putts: 35
Fairways: 8
Greens: 3
Penalties: 3
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