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.

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