Glimpses of Greatness

Spring is definitely here and Easter is on! Great weather, great golf and promising results. Today I played at Soon Golf with my neighbour Niklas and two of his buddies. The front nine was a disaster. Luckily the the rough was cut all the way down, so I lost no more than one ball. That’s a small victory in itself, but the game as such was pretty stinky.

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A new dawn!

Readers have commented on the lack of updates. (OK in all honesty it was one guy who mentioned it briefly, but still…) The golfdreams blog is updated and I am ready for the 2011 season!

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Breaking 80 in a year? Not in the first year

First and foremost I started the blog as a joke after being ditched from Team basedreams. I found my first subtitle “Golf hard and live the dream” quite amusing, but thankfully it didn’t take that long to understand that I wasn’t creative of funny enough to pull it off full scale.The idea was to make golf look cooler than BASE jumping, and as it turns out I am probably one of the few people on the planet who have done both and prefer to hit a ball with sticks.

Then I thought it would be a cool challenge to break 80 in a year from when I picked up the clubs again. I believed very strongly that I would be able to acquire a single digit handicap within a year. It took longer to understand I wouldn’t make it than it took to see that my limitations in making a funny website.

The statistics show that not too many folks are following this blog closesly, but to the few of you who check by every now and then have noticed the lack of updates. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on my game. I truly have, but I didn’t make it. For a while it did look as if I would though.

By the end of July I posted my best score of the year. An 84 on a par 71. I had three birdies on that round and thought I was headed for greatness. While on holiday in Portugal just after that, I played some of the finest courses on the planet; and I was reading a lot of books on golf.

I realised that if I were going to become a decent golfer I needed instruction, and to work diligently at creating a solid reproducible swing. So when I returned to Norway early August I started taking lessons, and working on the fundamentals.

This has proved a lot harder than what I first imagined. I though my game would improve heaps, but the oposite has happened so far and my handicap has gone up to 15,1. My game is more like a 36 handicapper, but I’ve decided not to let it worry me too much. If I keep at it I surely will improve over time and hopefully it will enable me to score way better than I would if I kept on traveling down the road I was headed: looking at my score rather than my game.

So now the blog has changed. It’s now dubbed breaking 80, and I will post anything I find helpful in the process to build a solid game. And not only that. I will post anything golf that I find remotely interesting… on a more frequent basis that before.

Breaking 100 would be a good start;)

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 18^th 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…

PGA TOUR Widgets

I finally managed to have a couple of cool PGA TOUR widgets installed at the top of the right sidebar menu. Great success!

Hit the fairway…

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.

The Season Begins

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:)

John Daly – Inspirational

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.

Banana-balls and The Dictionary

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.

Not the real deal

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.