I’m excited about getting back to golf.
Earlier this week I snatched up the opportunity to play 18 holes with a new friend. Wow, did it feel good! I should correct that, it felt good to my soul to play… but my body thought I was nuts.
Ditching out of work early I met Kevin over at Cottonwood. It’s a nice little muni on the south side of El Cajon. As I drove to the clubhouse I got a chance to see a number of holes and felt pretty good about the simple layouts. Not a shooting gallery and not a resort. Perfect for where my game is after 3 years off!
I had meant to go to the driving range on Sunday… but the Chargers game stole my daylight and it didn’t happen.
So there I was on the first hole feeling like a complete nimrod. Literally, the ball could go anywhere. I assured Kevin that anything could happen… this wasn’t going to be pretty.
Long ago I learned that golf is a mental game merely executed with muscles and bone. If you let pride or ambivelence get in the way you’ll always play terribly and have a miserable time. Instead, I try to play the game at least semi-intelligently. For me that meant embracing the obvious. Forget the driver. (The hardest club to play in the bag.) It also meant that I needed to find 2-3 clubs that I was comfortable with and just take my medicine with them.
That strategy worked for the most part. Predictably, when I tried to hit the 3 wood off the tee it sprayed violently. This forced me to hit crazy shots from awkward distances, around trees, over other tee boxes, etc. After a few holes I just resolved to teeing off with an iron and things improved from there.
Kevin was a lot of fun to play with. We have very different games. He has a low ball trajectory that is mostly straight. Thankfully he was infinitely patient and had a good attitude that my shots have a high trajectory and tended to spray all over. It was pretty funny because we’d go over to his ball in the fairway… then go try to find mine off in another fairway or the rough.
All-in-all it was a good day. With a couple mulligans I can somehow say that I broke 100. It wasn’t pretty unless you count hitting some crazy recovery shots and snaking in a few putts in the 15-20 foot range.
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