Over the last few rounds, I felt like I gave away strokes with my short game. Chipping from very near the green, I would make shots that weren't terrible, but which didn't give me very reasonable chances to 1-putt. This was overshadowed by more obvious wasted shots, such as complete duffs or those that would find their way into hazards. At the end of the day, however, strokes are strokes – it doesn't matter whether they result from an occasional duff or from a series of mediocre chips. Realizing that I had become content to chip and 2-putt, I resolved to pay more attention to my play near the greens. My goal was to try to get up and down every time I found myself in that situation.
Playing at Twenty Valley Golf & Country Club, I'm happy to say that I definitely improved on that front. I managed to get up and down six times over the course of the round. That represented about a 50 percent success rate. Some of those were not easy, either. One was from a greenside bunker, with very little green to work with. Another was across the entire length of a large, undulating green. Yet another was a delicate downhill affair. The chipping helped my putting numbers quite a bit, as I finished with 31 putts in total. The key for me was rhythm. I have a little count that I do to improve my putting rhythm. I applied the same count to my chipping stroke and I found that everything felt more fluid and relaxed.
It's a good thing my short game improved, because my play off the tee took a big nosedive. Contact with the ball was mostly fine, but I had trouble keeping the ball straight. In fact, I didn't hit a single fairway all day. Most of my misses started on line but faded to the right. However, I also pulled a couple left of target – something that hasn't happened for a while. I actually hit a couple of straight drives, but they ran through the ends of fairways on dogleg holes. On most occasions, I was fine simply hitting out of the rough. However, there were a few times where I found myself in water or among the trees. I had a lot of trouble punching out. Incredibly, I always seemed to smack a narrow tree trunk. It often sounded like I was chopping wood out there!
Over the last half of the round, I made an adjustment that helped me straighten out my mid-to-high irons. I had been hooking those with alarming regularity. In fact, one of those hooks led to a triple-bogey on hole #7, a medium length par-3. The adjustment involved opening my stance ever so slightly, so that my feet and shoulders were pointed a degree or so left of my target. At the same time, I kept the face of the club square to the target. Relative to my body position, this means the club face was slightly more open than it had been before. I did this on a couple of occasions, with good results. Let's hope it serves me well moving forward.
I made a lot of solid bogeys during this round, but only one par. That came on hole #16, a 200-yard par-3. I hit the right edge of the green with a 3-iron, but the flag was way over on the other side. After a beautiful lag putt, I tapped in easily. I can't count it as an up-and-down, but it was very similar. It would have been very easy to 3-putt from that far away. Unfortunately, the rest of my round included the blowup holes that plague my game. I can play decent golf for about a dozen holes, but I simply can't string 18 holes together without a few disasters along the way.
By the way, the shot of the day was a lengthy, breaking downhill putt on hole #18. I drained it after a nice 9-iron approach from 140 yards. Sometimes (not often enough) the game is so sweet!
Score: 102
Putts: 31
Fairways: 0
Greens: 2
Penalties: 7
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