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.

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.

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:)

I -- on the other hand -- find inspiration in watching John Daly play golf.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rtT2z5fDlg

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.

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUYFbD1rNv0

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.

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…