Make hay while the sun shines

Golf is a game built upon confidence, in fact it's true of any sport really, but for me it's more apparent in golf than any other sport. You are out there playing all of the shots and the buck stops with you. Shank a shot or duff a chip and the finger of blame can only be pointed back towards oneself.

What I often see in my own game is little or sometimes longer hot streaks. Equally, we see the opposite, where we have a pocket of bad holes bunched together. For example, today I played the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th holes in -1 and then proceeded to play the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th in +8. What i want to explore today is how we can maximise the hot streaks and minimise the bad run of holes.

I played this morning and unfortunately, personified just that and it gave me the idea for this post. Have a look at my card below, where my front 9 was a joint best ever of 40 strokes or +4 and my back 9 was a forgettable and disappointing total of 51 shots.

Front 9

Back 9

What not to do

1. Get frustrated after bad shots.

I covered this one in a post a couple of weeks ago and it's definitely worth reminding you and reminding me, because guess what I did after a poor shot on the 10th hole today? Yes, you guessed it, I called myself "a fucking Eegit" and "a dopey bollocks" after i duffed a tricky shot where I was attempting to run a low hybrid around 40 yards under low hanging branches, through a bunker and onto the green. In difficulty terms, it was a 9, so why get upset? This led to some more poor shots and I took a 7 or no score for my stableford competition. I made a great putt from off the green on the next for a very fortunate bogey and then made 7 on the next with more bad shots. That one bad shot, which was a very tough one completely transformed my round from one of my best to average and I firmly believe temperament was a huge reason why.

Something else to consider is your playing partner/s. No one likes to hear someone cursing and getting frustrated and berrating themselves. So for the good of everybody, I am going to try extra hard to keep my temper and self deprecation in check going forward. I'm playing again on Sunday, let's see if I can improve on my 91 from today by being as Zen as I can. In my defence I only had 4 hours sleep before the round and may have been a bit tetchy, as I was working last night, which facilitated my early morning golf.

2. Concentrate too much on holes where you don't have a shot.

You know when you're going well, but maybe avoid the urge to add up all your points to see how well you are actually doing. Just play every shot that is on front of you and try to get the ball in the hole in as few shots as possible. That sounds easy, doesn't it! Another thing to be mindfull of is getting over obsessed with the holes where you have no shot. I'd nearly go as far as to say that you're better off not knowing which holes you do and don't have shots on. Just play like it's a strokes competition and try to go as low as you can on each shot and forget about the stroke index, the computer can figure that out for you at the end.

3. Get greedy

Don't get greedy like Bryson and know when and where to take your medicine. You won't win many prizes if you take on everything all of the time!
We need to learn where to take things on and when to just chip back out onto the fairway and take our medicine. That was another facet of my back 9 today, I was taking on difficult shots, where a conservative approach would have led to more points on the card.

4. Not know where to miss

This image from golf digest sums it up well. Know where to miss, if you are likely to pull it a bit right, then aim to the left in the picture and it may fade towards the hole. If it happens to go straight, then you are looking at a long putt which could lead to birdie or par.

This one was another feature today, when my tee shot found an awkward uphill sideways lie. I should have aimed right of the flag off the green knowing these shots often pull left. Instead i aimed at the flag and pulled it left as expected and was left blocked out by trees, ultimately leading to that 7 on the 10th.

The images above are free to use and were sourced on Pixabay.com, except for the Bryson picture and the where to miss one which were sourced on Golf digest website

Thanks as always for reading.

Peace Out.