The day I retired my woods -- for now

I have started a Golfing Noob Tumblr account, where I chronicled last week's outing at Rich Maiden, a lovely 18-hole course near Fleetwood, Pa.

The biggest discovery I made was that I hit my 3-iron off the tee better than my driver or even my 3-wood. So for the entire back nine, I kept all my woods in the bag (with one exception: Once I used the 5-wood on the fairway). The result was better, but it still highlighted my woeful short game an lack of putting skills.

I ended the day with a 152 -- better than my all-time high of 156, but still a terrible score.

The round helped me clarify some of my goals for the remainder of this year:

• Shoot double-par or better on a par-70 course;
• Break 100 at Village Greens, which has a par of 56;
• Cut my three-putts in half. 

That third goal is inextricably linked to the first two. They say beginning golfers should practice putting more than driving. Oh brother is that true.

Here's a look at Thursday's game, by the numbers:

If my lob wedge were a person, I would write it out of the will

Amazing what one little piece of swing advice can do to your game.

I have been reading "Harvey Penick's Little Red Book" and "Fundamentals of Hogan" for tips on how to swing properly, something I never really studied. For years I followed the model of, watch your friends swing and try to do what they do (only left-handed). I didn't notice any improvement until today, playing at Village Greens in Sinking Spring.

My advice to beginning golfers: Par-3 courses are better than driving ranges for practicing your game. Short holes, (usually) forgiving fairways and real-life pitching and putting experience that won't cost you much more than a bucket of balls.

Anyway, last night after getting home from work I watched an instructional video from on swinging where the pro stressed the importance of keeping your left (right) arm glued to your chest on the backswing. A minor lesson, sure, but I'm certain I never did that with any consistency. So today, that was my goal: Keep that right arm close to the chest.

I've said this before but it bears repeating: My golf game is so bad that it needs a million fixes. However, that one remedy improved my score more than I expected. I hit more tee shots that went straight and far, and was consistently within reach of a bogey or double bogey on almost every hole -- the exception being hole 18, which one day I will conquer.

Oh, yeah. That's a gimme.

No hole went better than No. 2, where I hit the ball well for three shots to get it on the green. My third shot got the ball less than two inches from the cup for an easy bogey. From there things got slowly, but steadily, worse: two 5s, two 6s and a 7 before I told myself to calm down and go back to enjoying myself. I three-putted hole No. 8 for a 6, but that meant I got on the green in par. Which was good enough. Hole No. 9 was another triple bogey, thanks to some bad strikes with my lob wedge. The good news was I was able to two-putt it for a 7, giving me 50 on the front nine — six strokes better than last week's round at the same course.

I was much more consistent on the back nine, but the lob wedge continued to give me headaches. The 10th hole was just a big white circle with the pin on the fairway – the green was being repaired. All I had to do was get the ball to land in the white circle and count that. But I kept skimming the ground with the lob wedge, overshooting the target over and over. What could have been a par* resulted in a 6.

On hole 13 I had a legitimate chance at a birdie but ended up three-putting for a bogey instead. The good news is I only three-putted two other times on the back nine. In addition to keeping my right arm close on my backswing, my other goal today was keeping the putts down.

Hole 18, at 305 yards, continued to be trouble. I hit the first shot straight down the fairway but my second shot landed under some trees. I shot it out with a 9-iron but lost it, resigned to take a penalty drop. As I hit my next stroke I found the original ball, halfway up a steep hill where the green sat on top. I played my original ball and managed to get it on the green, but an agonizing three-putt gave me the only 8 of the day.

I guess it's a sign of progress when an 8 on the scorecard is an aberration rather than an expectation.

What I like about golf is that the moment before the swing, you are all concentration and living in the moment. At those times when you can keep your mind still and follow it with a well-executed stroke, the game is sublime.

One final note: I finished the game with a 101 – still unable to break 100 on even a par-3 course, but that is 18 strokes better than last week. I call that progress.

Today's scorecard:

The latest environmental danger: terrible golfers

Great day for golf.

The intent seems noble enough: create a wildlife sanctuary in a public golf course. I don't know how much the animals enjoy the constant threat of errant golf balls flying into their habitat.

In this weekend's round, I mercifully missed their homes as often as I missed the greens. No animals were harmed during my game at Colonial Acres; only my golf score.

Colonial Acres is a public, nine-hole golf course in a suburban development outside Albany, N.Y. It's also an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, meaning if you hit your ball into some of the wildlife-inhabiting hazards along the course, you're not allowed to go looking for it, lest you disturb the habitat of the fauna within. The course has wide, forgiving fairways combined with vicious greens that make the course much tougher than it appears. Thankfully, none of the protected animals actually served as hazards.

I was in town for a family reunion. It turns out that the only three people in my extended family interested in golf are my brother-in-law, my father (whose "interest" level is somewhere below the Fed's prime rate) and me. And we all live within 15 minutes of one another.

I started strong on the first hole with a bogey. The tee was less than 90 yards from the flag and I overshot it with my 7-iron. Two more shots got me on the green, and a nice, long putt – the best putt of the day, and probably of my life – gave me a 4 for the hole.

My brother-in-law got a 5; it is probably the last time I will start the next hole before him.

After that it was a series of topped shots, slices, overshot greens and general mayhem. I didn't score the dreaded 10 (or 3 in binary) but on two of the nine holes I got a 9. Only three other times did I even triple-bogey. Twice I hit my tee shot on to a different fairway.

On hole six, I ruined an otherwise good tee shot by playing the wrong ball. My first shot went straight-ish, landing in front of some trees to the left of the fairway. I looked everywhere for it, finally spotting a white ball about 50 yards or so from the tee. It took me five more shots, including one from a bunker, to get onto the green, where I (at least) was able to two-putt for a 9. But somewhere between shots four through eight I noticed a little swoosh on the side of my ball; I'd hit someone else's Nike after my tee shot.

Oh well, I thought. The Wilson Titanium ball I started with must have been lost to oblivion. Maybe one of the animals on the course appropriated it.

The next hole went in the opposite direction. I hit my tee shot wildly to the left, onto the fairway of the aforementioned hole (Why couldn't I have done that earlier?). As I approached my ball, I found Wilson , not 30 yards from the last green, just six inches off the fairway.

No wonder I couldn't find it before. I hit it too well.

A trip to the par-3 Village Greens course seems in order this week. I need to work on improving my short game and my putting as evidenced by some horrid three-putts I can't blame on Colonial Acres' cruel, cruel greens.

On a plus side, I didn't lose any balls to the wilderness or the water hazard on hole 9. And I came home with a Nike.

Here's the brutal truth about Saturday's game, also known as my scorecard:

Colonial Acres was also the first time I tried scoring with the free Golfshot app on my iPhone. I'll post those stats here periodically, too.

That one bogie looks awful small in the pie.

Nongolfers have it wrong about Mark Twain

Blogging, like brushing one's teeth, ought to be a daily activity. The main difference is, one only needs to take two minutes; the other, if you're doing it well, can take much longer.

I'll leave it to you to guess which is which.

So I created a bit of a dilemma for myself with this blog, where I'm supposed to write about taking up the sport anew after a long layoff and making progress (or not) in a quest for a below-100 score. I don't play golf every day, you see. I don't even go to the driving range more than once a week.

To be completely frank, I only went to the driving range once, two weeks ago, since digging my clubs out of the basement.

But golf is a sport that allows lots of time for contemplation. When you're not on the course, it's still easy to think about golf, whether pondering The Game or simply a game in the past. (In my head I've been reliving the par I got on the front nine of Village Greens earlier this week; my best tee shot ever.) So I'm afraid, dear reader, that on the days I don't have thrilling tales of birdies and niblicks, I will share my thoughts on golfing miscellany.

Which brings me to Mark Twain.

The common belief is that America's first great humorist once said of golf that it is "a good walk spoiled." Sportswriter John Feinstein used that phrase for the title of his book about the PGA tour and you hear it from just about anyone who disparages the game.

You can see why: It's short, pithy and mildly insulting without being offensive. There's just one problem: Mark Twain probably didn't say it.

I intended to write a post about how America's first great humorist dissed the game and analyze his reasons for poking fun at golf. I'm sure they would have been fun. But some quick research convinced me that of all the quips Mark Twain made, calling golf a good walk spoiled was not one of them.

The good folks at Quote Investigator came up with some convincing evidence that the saying originated somewhere besides Twain's pen. F. W. Payn, for instance, in "Secrets of Lawn Tennis," published in 1902, referred to a jockey who said of golf that it "merely spoilt a good walk."

As Yogi Berra could sympathize with Twain. He was once (possibly mis-)quoted saying "I never said half the things I said."

I can laugh at the saying, regardless of who coined it. But since taking up the sport this second time around, I respectfully disagree with the sentiment. For all its frustration, golf has a meditative quality I didn't appreciate the first time around.

Because even for duffers and foozlers like me, the object of the game -- hit a tiny ball into a larger hole -- doesn't warrant the stress, frustration and anger that some people (me included, sometimes) get from it.

Why, after all, would you want to spoil a perfectly good walk?

The official record from today's golf round

I almost forgot to post my scorecard from today's 18 holes at Village Greens.

The good: two pars, one bogey and a double bogey. One of the pars was on hole 7, where I hit an 8 last week. So, yay for that.

The bad: Way too many three- and four-putts, despite starting with a good putting game in the first few holes. Also, four holes with 8, two with 9 and one 10 (but it was a par-4, so I was only 6 over).

The ugly: See the smiley-faces on the pars and bogey? I put a vomiting-face on the worst holes of the day. Hopefully that'll teach me not to four-putt.

Go ahead, taunt away.

Neither rain nor wind nor lousy play will keep the hacker from his appointed round

I'm proud to say this was my first shot off the tee.
Sadly, I didn't birdie. 

When you're a beginning golfer, sometimes the well-hit shots hurt more than the bad ones.

Case in point: My first ball off the tee today at Village Greens, a par-3 course in Sinking Spring – the site of last week's adventure – struck a wooden fence to my left and bounced within a reasonable distance of the fairway. The fence was the only barrier between the course and some homes on the other side of an alley. Last week, in fact, my first ball went far enough to clear the fence so it could land, unimpeded, in someone's driveway.

Anyhoo: lousy shot, but it wasn't disastrous. Better yet, it was still playable.
A second example of a terrible shot: I sliced another ball off the tee sometime in the front nine. It went high into a pine tree, crashing near the base and two inches in front of a thick branch. Rather than take a penalty stroke, I played this bad ball, chopped down on it with my lob wedge and brought it back to a reasonable spot on the fairway.

Bad shots I can handle. Hell, bad shots I can count on. And that's part of the problem.
Because every once in a while, I'll hit the ball well, using proper form, weight distribution and everything else – then overshoot the green. Suddenly my pitching wedge will carry the ball farther than I've been able to hit all day. When I need to just push the ball a bit, my 7-iron suddenly becomes a driver and launches the ball a mile, where a hole earlier, that same club couldn't carry it more than 20 yards.

Nowhere was this more perfectly demonstrated than on hole 18, a par-4, 250-yard hole with a nice, wide fairway where the green sits atop a hill. It could have been my best hole of the day — and I had a pair of pars and a bogie already. I used my 5-wood off the tee, and the ball went a little less than halfway down the fairway. My second shot was a 4-iron, which had the distance and aim to get me within one shot of getting on the green.

I've been uneven with the wedges all day. Sometimes they gave me just what I needed, more often they landed short. I figured my 8-iron would give me the distance to get the ball up the hill and onto the green, with one stroke to spare for par.

As I'd done with my earlier two shots, I hit the 8-iron as well as I could – a beautiful, arcing shot that went high in the air, straight toward the pin and landed on the green. And kept going. When I got up the hill, the ball was 5 yards from the edge of the green, at the far end of the hole. Out came the lob wedge. Once again, I overshot, getting it too high and rolling the ball past the green onto the high-grassed fringe on the other side. One more shot to get it back onto the green, and three putts left me with an 8 for the hole.

Another tee shot, though I bogied this hole.
When you're a novice, a bogie's good enough.

Bad, but not as bad as some holes I played earlier today. Twice I scored a 9 and once a 10 (but if anyone asks, I'll tell them it's a 3 in binary).

Oh, I had a few bright spots. Twice I hit the green from the tee and was able to two-putt one for par and three-putt the other for a bogie. On the back nine, I parred another hole after actually hitting my lob wedge the way I wanted.

Striking that fine balance between hitting the ball the way you want and hitting it the way you expect is still beyond my reach. So is breaking 100, for now. Even at Village Green, I shot 119 – 63 over par.

Free advice from a golfing legend

If you want good advice about the game of golf but don't want to pay for it, you can either prowl the Interwebs for blogs that offer same, or you can wait 100 years to hear from the experts.

Note the form! The grace!
The jacket and knickers!

Harry Vardon, who won the British Open a bunch of times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wrote a book about this exasperating sport in 1905, complete with his own tales of mastery, instructions on driving, putting, etc. and illustrations to help the novice golfer pick up the game. In the United States, the copyright has expired, so the good folks at Project Gutenberg have made "The Complete Golfer" available for free online.

As a historic tome, it's a fun read. But how useful is the advice of a long-dead golfer, even one who was the best of his time? Pretty useful, if you discount Vardon's frequent use of terms like "mashie" and "niblick," the definitions of which I have yet to divine. Golf is an old sport, and some traditions of the game stand the test of time — though thankfully not its shameful heritage of exclusivity and sexism.

So here are some tips to improve your golf game, from the immortal words of Harry Vardon, followed by some advice that's, well, a bit out of date:

"Always make an effort to improve your game, and do not content yourself with the idea that you go out on the links for the exercise only. It is no more difficult or less pleasant trying to play better than it is to go on continually in the same old way."

 "Do not be tempted to invest in a sample of each new golfing invention as soon as it makes its appearance. If you do you will only complicate and spoil your game and encumber your locker with much useless rubbish. Of course some new inventions are good, but it is usually best to wait a little while to see whether any considerable section of the golfing public approves of them before rushing to a shop to order one."

"Never hurry when playing a match or a medal round, or indeed any kind of golf. Haste will affect your nerves and spoil your play. The record for playing a round in the shortest possible space of time is not worth the holding. Take time enough, but don't be unnecessarily slow."

All solid advice. As for fashion, let's just say Harry was a product of his time:

"Always use braces in preference to a belt round the waist. I never play with a belt. Braces seem to hold the shoulders together just as they ought to be. When a man plays in a belt he has an unaccustomed sense of looseness, and his shoulders are too much beyond control. It is a mistake to imagine you can swing better with a belt than with braces. For the same reason I do not advise a golfer to play without his coat, even on the warmest day, if he wants to play his best game." 

"If your eyesight is not good and you are obliged to resort to artificial aids when playing the game, wear spectacles rather than eye-glasses, and specially made sporting spectacles in preference to any others."

 "Don't play too much golf if you want to get on in the game. Three rounds a day are too much for any man, and if he makes a practice of playing them whenever he has the opportunity, his game is sure to suffer. He often says that his third round is the best of the day. But what about the first next morning? Two rounds a day are enough, and these two rounds on three days of the week are as much golf as is good for any player who does not want to become careless and stale."

Now, can someone please explain the difference between a niblick and a mashie?

Golf outing -- Village Greens Golf Club, Sinking Spring, Pa.

Today's important lesson: A 7 on a par-4 is a better score than a 7 on a par-3.

That's a rabbit in the lower left hand corner,
 and no, I didn't hit it.

I played not quite a full round at Village Greens Golf Course in Sinking Spring, a mostly par-3 course in a beautiful, tree-lined suburban setting. Luckily the day was a nice one for walking in the woods, as I spent most of my time among the trees in search of my ball. First two shots off the tee on the first hole went into a row of trees that separated the course from some nearby residential driveways. I gave myself a Mulligan and hit my second shot in about the same place, although it stayed on this side of the trees.

Thus did the rest of my game progress: Lots of 7s and the occasional dreaded 8. On a regular par-72 course, one could call this a success. I DID score 56 on the front nine, after all. But since Village Greens has a total par of 56, I can't say I improved any.

After hitting a dreaded 8 on the seventh hole, I returned to form somewhat and scored a 7 on hole eight. (According to my score card I four-putted the hole; an increasingly frequent occurrence, I found.) I got the same score on hole nine, which became an instant morale booster. That hole is a par-4, and I hit a nice, straight drive with my 5-wood off the tee. It took me six more shots to get the ball in the cup. But considering I hit an 8 on a par-3 hole — twice! — earlier, I consider a 7 a victory.

The back nine went unevenly. I was playing behind some old dudes who seemed slower than continental drift, so I skipped hole 10. After a horrible 8 on hole 11, I bypassed hole 12 and immediately improved, scoring three 6's and a bogey on the next four holes.

I returned to form on 17, scoring an 8 (with three putts). On the last hole, pressed for time, I hit the ball about 30 feet in the air and 15 feet in front of me. The hell with it, I decided. Sometimes you have to know when to quit.

Beginning golfers need to focus on the positive (I keep telling myself), so I try to forget the bad scores and focus on the string of good holes I had on the back nine. Why else would anyone take up this game?

This round taught me two lessons good for any novice:

1. It doesn't matter if your score sucks; just enjoy playing.
2. Every once in a while, your score won't suck. Not often, but once in a while.

Those are good enough reasons to keep swinging.

Still a long way from breaking 100.

An inspiring first shot

If only all beginning golfers could look so smooth:

Why golf? Why now?

I have struggled in the last few weeks to figure out why, at 41 years old and after a healthy layoff from the sport, I decided to take up golf.

My life had been going well once I put my clubs away. I'm not saying there's a connection but after I stopped golfing I found a better job in my field, met the love of my life and bought a house.

Why muck that up with golf?

P.G. Wodehouse. Smart.

Best answer I can muster comes not from me but from the great P. G. Wodehouse who, in his short story "A Mixed Threesome" summed up why anyone takes up such an insane pastime:

"In every human being the germ of golf is implanted at birth, and suppression causes it to grow and grow till—it may be at forty, fifty, sixty—it suddenly bursts its bonds and sweeps over the victim like a tidal wave."

Well spoken.

A note on equipment

My golf clubs get a bad rap.

Not by me, of course. Of the many, many faults of my golf game, I think "bad clubs" falls somewhere below "bat hallucinations" among things that should worry me.

Two weeks ago I played 18 holes for the first time in about seven years. One of my friends, "Chris" (actual name: Chris), insisted I need to buy a whole new set of clubs if I'm going to play this game. Chris may have gotten the idea from the fact that my driver and 3-wood, both steel-shafted Stan Thompson "Ginty" clubs I found on eBay about a decade ago -- are each held together with duct tape.

Apparently the miracle adhesive can fix anything but a golfer's reputation.

I admitted that I need to get the clubs repaired; it's just a matter of rewrapping the thingy around the hosel (hosel??) where the club head meets the shaft (hee!).

His response? "You don't need to fix it, you just need to replace it."

Sigh.

Here's the thing about golf clubs, though: They're expensive. A new set of even the cheapest, no-name golf clubs runs more than $150. Whereas my clubs, for which I paid between $1 and $2 at thrift stores in the late 1990s (save the Gintys), are already paid for.

Now, if I should find a roll of $20s hiding behind a bush some day or become a rich and famous blogger, I might change my mind. But blowing hundreds of dollars on new golf clubs is hardly worth it for a lousy golfer. I'm keeping my $30 set of clubs. Until they break.

I did shelve the Gintys, for now at least. During my thrift-store buying spree, I snatched every lefty club I could find. So I have three sets of woods I can throw in my bag whenever I hit the golf course.

As I pursue my goal of breaking 100, here are the accessories to my crimes against golf:

Woods

Driver: Mitsushiba

3-Wood: Walter Hagen Haig Ultra, wooden club face

5-Wood: Mitsushiba 

Irons:

Wilson 1200GE irons, with a ProTacTic 7-iron

Wedges:

Pitching Wedge: WIlson 1200 GE

Lob Wedge: I have no idea

Putter:

Ping Zing 2

What's in your bag? Comment below.

CRZAXUFSGAT8 

A quick introduction

Image courtesy pdclipart.org

You know what this world needs?

I'll tell you what it needs.

It needs another blog about golf.

Not one of those "ooh, this is how PGA champion Joey Hoffenfooter hits the green using a 4-wood that he had custom-made into the shape of a tree stump in order to sink the eagle putt on the 18th tee at St. Hoozitz in order to win the 675th CSI championship after defeating an entire field of excellent experts, which is only natural since Joey's been playing long before he left the womb." I mean a blog for us mortal golfers.

And by "mortal" I don't mean "scratch." I'm not entirely sure what that word means.

I also don't mean "hits in the low 90s, mid-80s when no one from the USGA is looking."

OK, what I really mean is those of us who are crappy golfers. The ones for whom par is as unrealistic an ideal as world peace, whose supreme goal is to break 100 before we have to shuffle off this mortal coil, and who fool ourselves into thinking that we got into this sport for the exercise, dammit.

Part of the impetus for Golfing Noob was a book by the excellent novelist and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen wrote a book a few years ago, "The Downhill Lie," about returning to golf after a 30-year layoff, and his comical misadventures as what he considers a bad golfer. In the book, he starts hitting in the 90s and dreams of dropping his score into the 80s, with only occasional success.

I don't have any sympathy for Carl Hiaasen.

I'm one of those golfers who has yet to break 70 -- on the front nine. This blog will chronicle my efforts to shave not just 10 points (do they call it points?) off my score, but 56. If you, like me, are one of those perpetual beginning foozlers who has a golf score closer to a bowling score, I hope you find something here with which you can relate.

And if you're one of those -- what do they call it? -- "good" golfers, maybe this will take you back to the days when you really sucked. Or it will give you a chance to laugh at those of us who still do.

Either way, welcome aboard. Feel free to comment.