Underdog Golf Blog

This weekend I got to attend my first ever live PGA Tournament. Living in San Diego, CA, I am lucky enough to have an annual event hosted at Torrey Pines 10 minutes away from my house. I didn’t really know what to expect when I got there as I had heard mixed reviews about attending these tournaments live.
People had told me that I wouldn’t be able to see anything and it’s better to watch from home, yet others told me there was nothing like it. I have to say I agree with the positive reviews as I had a blast and loved every second of it. It also didn’t hurt that it came down to a 2 hole playoff between Brandt Snedeker and Kyle Stanley.

The easiest way to get better at anything in life is to examine past patterns, whether they be your own or that of history and learn from them. This is why in golf so many players keep track of specific results throughout their rounds.

I myself keep track of fairways hit in regulation (tee shot), greens hit in regulation (with at least two strokes left before par) and total putts. May golfers even go to the extent of keeping track of up and downs, sand saves, distances with each club out of every lie and so forth. I’m still have so much to learn and my swing is still evolving at such a changing rate that I only focus on the first three mentioned.

I’ve always thought of myself as having decent posture. I’m 6’4”, so it’s not the easiest thing in the world as there is a lot of me to lean one way or the other. Recently though I discovered that I carry my weight on my toes.

There is never more evident than when I swing a golf club. There are a million things that can happen and the main two that I experience is dropping my head and/or falling forward afterwards. Little bit tricky to have consistency if you’re flopping all over the place.

Tonight I’m staring at my computer screen, the cursor blinking on a blank page almost taunting me. I’ve got so many things going through my head on what I need to work on, but none of them translating to words. It’s almost hard to describe the learning curve I’m on right now.

Woosh. Woosh. Woosh. I’ve grown to love that sound so much. The sound of connecting with the ball first and launching it off the club face. Anytime you watch a PGA tournament you hear this sound with almost every shot. As an amateur, and most importantly beginner, the occurrence of this is a bit more spread out.

Patience is a virtue. I remind myself of this every day, especially those days that involve golf. This past weekend I had one of the best 9 holes of golf and one of the longest most trying rounds to date. The later round tested my patience and I feel I came out on top.

If there’s one thing I haven’t perfected yet it’s gauging distances on the golf course. I’ve definitely gotten better with time, but I’m still not where I need to be. To help out with this, I asked my wonderful girlfriend Maria for a SkyCaddie SG5 as a Christmas present. I asked, I received, I screamed like a little school girl when I opened it Christmas morning.

There’s an old saying, “Practice what you preach”, that I think has finally registered with this wonderful game of golf and myself. One of the things I did this past week was go back through and read all my previous posts and I started to notice that one key factor that I hadn’t mastered was playing one shot at a time.

I have always felt like I had pretty good balance. That is until I started seeing my golf swing in slow motion on video with a little red line drawn around my head.

It turns out I, like many other beginner golfers “wave my hair back and forth” during my full golf swing. Admittedly it has gotten much better. My head used to go down during my backswing and then back up in my downswing leaving tons of room for inconsistency. I’ve worked hard and learned to keep my balance and stay more upright in the backswing but that led to my head going down just a tad in my downswing.

Not one day after my last post Back in the Swing of Things, I got sick again; one of the lovely benefits of working with people who are sick and continue to come into the office. This put my total sick time to over 2 weeks and my practice and productivity for this golf blog at an almost stand still.

While complaining to one of my college friends that lives in VA, he not so subtly reminded me that he has to take months off at a time due to winter weather. He also told me it typically takes him 3 to 4 months into the golf season to really feel like his game is back to peak level.