Graham Averill is turning 50 this year and he’s crazy. Instead of buying a motorcycle or getting a tattoo, he’s decided to try to get really, really good at golf. He is a 13 handicap trying to get to zero in a year. Welcome to his midlife crisis.
“Make good choices.”
That’s what my wife tells me every time I walk out the front door. It doesn’t matter if I’m going to the grocery store or meeting the boys for a beer. “Make good choices.” I’m 49 and she treats me like a teenager living in a After school special destined to buy drugs off a hook and drive drunk around Dead Man’s Curve not wearing my seat belt.
I can’t blame him; I have a history of making bad choices. Should I have another beer or go home? Should I buy the sensible sedan with great gas mileage or the truck that guzzles gas like a creepy guy who takes beer on tap?
I’m not proud of it, but if there’s a fork in the road, I’ll probably take the wrong path. This type of poor decision making can be problematic on the golf course. I see windows where there aren’t any, I think I keep my driver further away from me and I think about punching out an official surrender sign. In short, I’m an idiot. I play the course with my ego and it gets me into trouble.
The good news? Making bad choices is an easy habit to break on the golf course and can have an immediate impact on my score. It’s low-hanging fruit that has nothing to do with my swing or how well I hit the ball. And making better choices isn’t the only fruit I can pick to lower my scores.
Putting
I am a notoriously bad shooter. But I’ve gotten a little better in the last few weeks by doing the simplest thing possible: I started lining up my goals. It’s not magic. I’m just reading the green and directing the line over the ball to the spot I want to hit. I’ve never bothered to line up my shots before because I didn’t want to take the time to do it. If you’re going to lose, lose fast.
But you know what’s better than missing a quick free throw? Sinking a free kick. Taking the time to use the extension mark on the golf ball has helped me sink more shots, especially in the six to 10 foot range. Draining an eight-footer used to be a once-in-a-few-weeks miracle, but now it’s draining almost 20 percent of shots at that distance every round. That’s not as good as a scratch player (39 percent win rate at six to nine feet) but it’s a step in the right direction. And I’m still working on the skills. Aligning the ball takes practice and learning to trust my initial read when I stand on the ball ready to putt takes time. But I love the process of lining up my paws. It forces me to slow down and be more thoughtful about every decision.
I’m losing 1.7 strokes per round to a scratch golfer on my putts overall, so there’s still a lot of work to do. I still need help reading the greens, and when I play a new course with different green speeds, my three-putts come back into play. But I’ll take the hits where I can get them, especially easy ones like this. Every shot helps.
Ego control
Pop quiz: Your car lost its way and you got behind some trees. There is a window with a direct line to the green, but it would take a terrible shot. Do you go for it or punch out on the fairway?
Of course, you do that because you’re not a whore, right? Wrong. You punch out. It’s not the sex game. It’s not the game you tell tall tales on the grass after the round, but it’s the game that keeps your score down. The idea of ​​punching goes against my nature, which has developed over time in our culture, which tells you that heroes go for it. Always. But I’m slowly realizing that the little fist shot out of trouble can be the most effective tool in my bag.
This is a difficult claim to support with hard data. There is no way to measure the impact of punching out of trouble, compared to the field of Strokes Gained. But the most proud I’ve ever been of my golf game recently was on a long par-5 when my drive ended up right in the fairway behind a solid, full wood. I had several options. I can try to roll it to the right side of the tree with a draw and hope to land on the front side of the green. But if the draw didn’t work, I would send the ball into the woods to the right of the hole. Or if I got too aggressive with my launch line, I would send the ball into the thick of the tree in front of me. In other words, it would take a perfect shot.
Maybe it’s because my mom always told me that I can do anything I want in life, but I have no problem convincing myself that I have that perfect picture in my purse. And yet, on this particular day, I was able to assess the situation objectively and recognize that moving toward it was beyond my abilities. I picked up my 5-iron and punched the fairway to the left. It was a beautiful delivery, flowing 90 yards in the general direction of the green. I was able to keep up with a full wedge and two-putt for par. Hell yeah!
It won’t show up on any app that tracks my game, but that shot probably saved me two or more strokes on that par-5. I’ve lost track of the number of blow holes I go for and only dig myself deeper into a pit of despair.
I have not completely put aside my ego. I still think my driver can cover the distance it’s disabled, but maybe that’s my inability to do math in the game. Numbers are hard.
I know that chasing this low hanging fruit has a lot of potential. It’s not sexy, but there are shots to be saved simply by playing smart and making good choices.
the hell My wife was right this whole time.
Dig deeper into one golfer’s struggle to improve at golf in middle age and read last week’s Scratch By 50 to learn how Graham is coming to terms with his short game.
