It has been a good few weeks with plenty of golf. My game is improving, but it’s getting clear that I need to apply some kind of strategy if I want to break 80 in a year. Some days I play quite well, but then there are days like yesterday.
I played Evje Golfpark with my friend Håvard, who is seriously hooked on golf. Evje is his home course and he was the perfect guide. When he suggested we should play for money I was more than willing as I was convinced my game would be super hot after a good warm-up on the range and practice green.
We started on the back-nine and and with a triple bogey on the first hole was I wasn’t off to the start I was hoping for. It took me a good five holes until I shot a par. The start was not the best but the worst was yet to come. On the 18th I actually managed to score 10! I don’t know if there is a name for such a score, but it was painful. I shot three balls out of bounds before hitting the fairway. Final score: 103! Merde! (Click for Scorecard).
Most people say one should practice the short game the most, but I don’t know. If you can’t make it off the tee, the short game won’t save the day. I guess I should spend my money on lessons rather than giving it away to friends. Needless to say Håvard had the most cash in his pockets by the end of the round. Read more…
All though I was planning on posting more frequently, I have spent more time on the golf course than on the internet and hence the lack of updates. Up until this week there hasn’t been much exciting to report, but when I come to think about it I’m sure it would be good entertainment. To make up for it I can show you some numbers to prove my point. Golfshot is a great tool to keep track of the progress, or lack of such and a highly reccomended purchase for the iPhone owning golfer. Take a look at this:
This is my driving accuracy for the last 5 rounds. At first glance it is nothing to be ashamed of, but at the bottom you see the graph for the different rounds. On Thursday my accuracy was 9%! Now that’s less than one in ten, and not something to be overly excited about. But on average it actually looks OK. John Daly’s driving accuracy is currently 52,51%. I’m just 10% behind JD.Cool stuff!
Today I played an informal tournament at my home club and had a final score of 85. Now that might sound like I’m getting close to my ambition of breaking 80 in a year, but my home course is a par 67. In all fairness it the goal is to break 80 on a par 72. Nevertheless my handicap is now down to 19,8, and that’s a great step in the right direction of a single digit handicap.
Finally! The snow is gone and the fairways are starting to turn green. It has been a good while since my last up-date, but in all honesty there hasn’t been all that much to report. Today, however, was the first day of golf in Norway for my part.
Last weekend I played in Sweden with my my mother. It was a great start to the season and even if my game was rusty, I had a great time. We played at Dynekilen, where I did the last round of 2009. I played better then.
It seems my short game has improved with all the indoors practise over the winter, and I am hitting the woods fairly well. Yet for some reason I cannot hit the irons straight at all any more. I either pull or slice. Every now and then I think I know how to fix it, but most of the time it ends up anywhere but where I aim.
The only sensible thing to do is to take some lessons. Today I would have a hard time breaking 100, but September is a long way away. It is just fantastic that the snow is gone:)
During the ongoing Winter Olympics, the Norwegian Curling Team have been noticed more for their apparel, than for their game. Their colorful pants must have been inspired by Loudmouth, made famous by John Daly.
I -- on the other hand -- find inspiration in watching John Daly play golf.
Since some of my friends are not that familiar with golf, I started making ”the BASE Jumpers Guide to Golf”. The idea was to draw what ever parallels there might be between the two activities and make a comprehensive guide to the fine game.
Golf, like any other activity, has a lot of terms that make no sense to the good people who do not participate in the game. For instance a ”slice” is when the flight of your ball curves to the right (if you are a right handed player) and the intention was to hit it straight. In BASE jumping this would be very similar to an ”off-heading opening”.
The project was short-lived though. First of all: to my friends that do not participate in neither golf nor BASE jumping the document would make absolutely no sense. Second, and more importantly: It was not funny, comprehensive or useful in any way.
However. What I did discover in my research for the project was that an impressive number of golf-related terms describe shots that go bad. Which gave me a new idea:
In stead of a guide, I hope you will find the new dictionary, useful. And should you wonder how my game is nowadays, I can report that I in some mysterious way have revived the slice, and every now and then I do manage to hit the odd banana-ball.
It has been a few days and that alone calls for an update. While I’m still working on the layout of my blog I’ve spent more time hacking at the indoor driving range. And yesterday: Pebble Beach Links Resort. On a simulator…
Simulator golf is not real golf and hence the score should not be compared to a real score… if you ask me. Some say the simulator is easier than the real deal; I say it is not so. However: should I be wrong I have a difficult task ahead of me. I didn’t pay that much attention to the final score but it was closer to 120 than the sub 80 score I’m working my way to.
When I returned from Spain I thought I had it all figured out and now it’s quite obvious I haven’t got a clue. These things happen. All though in a way it didn’t happen at all. It’s more like a pilot crashing his plane in the flight simulator. That doesn’t suck nearly as much as if it was for real.
That said: the new simulators at Innesvingen are really quite impressive and well worth a visit.
I just found this video of Phil Mickelson and have decided this is a shot I really need to learn. It’s probably not that useful, but who cares as long as it looks cool?
1 comment - What do you think? Posted by
admin -
February 10, 2010 at 10:05 pm
I want to do something about the lay-out golfdreams. For instance I do need a cool header. Just see what my friends at basedreams have done. I have no idea how to go about, but in my search for an answer, I went out of bounds and discovered Wordle.
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. It can also do this to the text from any website that has an Atom or RSS feed. Below you can see what it did to golfdreams.net, and while it can’t be used for a header, or any thing else for that matter, I think it’s quite cool.
This morning I had a message in my in-box on Facebook. It said: “Closet golfer. Is that you?” Mind you, this was from a person I do not know, and my first thought was that someone apart from my immediate family and nearest friends had read my blog! How about that?
However it wasn’t so. It turned out I have written a short piece in the Norwegian skydiving Magazine: Fritt Fall. In the article I am looking for “closet golfers”, who also skydive, or used to skydive, for a tournament. It’s cool to see people have taken notice, and it’s good to see I am not the only skydiver who have gone over to “the other side”.
For marketing purposes I believe it would be wise to use other media than golfdreams.net to promote the event. For now…
3 comments - What do you think? Posted by
admin -
February 6, 2010 at 7:26 pm
