As Chuck put it in his blog post, yesterday was my Assessment day of the past month of work. We had the 18 hole chipping contest first. I’ve been somewhat uncomfortable over my chips lately. I am putting almost zero spin on the ball so it’s tough sometimes to control how far they roll out, even with my 59* wedge they were rolling quite a bit. I was fortunate that the greens were so slow yesterday or I would of had to hit flop shots to every hole to stop the ball. My short chips were actually pretty decent, but the longer ones tended to fly to high and there was one unfortunate blade across the green. I think I am flipping the club through impact a little, but I will leave that for Chuck to determine. Chuck won the match, and he has never lost a chipping match to anyone at the Windermere green, but that will change in the near future!
Next was the putting. I am actually very comfortable over my putting at the moment, which is something new. I had a few putts that hopped a lot on me in our contest, but I am not sure that was due to my stroke or the greens having sand and fertilizer on them. I hit some bad pushes, but those were few and far between, and I don’t believe I had any three putts. I won the putting match by one hole, and that just shows me that I have more confidence in my putting.
The 9-holes we played yesterday in my mind were very disappointing. I told Chuck on the course that my swing felt like a lot of work. It wasn’t feeling easy like it had been the past few days. I basically was just too mechanical, which I always have been, but somewhere in the past few days I stopped trusting that I could swing the right way without thinking about it, and it showed. Chuck said in his blog that I hit a few solid shots out there, and maybe it’s because I am too much of a perfectionist or that I had just come to expect myself to be able to do certain things over the past few days, but I can’t recall one solid shot. I was hitting weak drives off the heel, thin iron shots, blades out of the bunkers, and chips that were coming up way too short. I hit some solid putts, which was nice and saved some shots, but I just felt that the progress I have made over the past month just wasn’t showing. I shot 4 over par, but it felt a lot worse.
I certainly understand that I will have plenty of days like this, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hate those days. No golfer likes to hit the ball bad, I just have to figure out a way to get the ball in the hole when it’s like that. Oh well, it’s in the past, all I can do is learn from it and then forget it. I have also decided that I need to invest in a new brain, because mine isn’t working too well right now, so I will have to look into that.
