Date: July 5th 2011
Format: Stableford
Venue: [Home course]
Score: 27pts
Handicap mark: 3.7
Themes in reply: Facts not impressions; favourite shots; machine?
Hi Colin,
Just a quick note on my round on Saturday.
The weather was good with a slight easterly wind (down the first). I played with KL in the monthly Stableford.
Things didn’t go as planned!! As you know I played really well on Friday and was looking forward to the round. We went up the practice ground first and hit a few shots and did a bit of chipping.
I hit a 4 iron off the 1st tee. It was a poor connection and went into the rough on the right. I found it lying down a bit and hacked it out onto the fairway. I then hit a fairly decent shot to the green. When I went to mark my ball on the first I noticed that it was the wrong ball – it was a Titliest 2 (red) the same as my original but had different markings – so no score there.
I hit an ok drive down the 2nd and hit a good 9 iron onto the green but 3 putted.
On the 3rd I hit a poor tee shot with my 3 wood which ended up against the fence on the left. I took a penalty drop but could only manage a 6 so no points.
I then went:
4th – par
5th – bogey
6th – bogey
7th – bogey
8th – par
9th – bogey
The round continued like this – I was just off the pace. I played a bit better on the back 9 but didn’t score on two holes.
My final score was 27 points which was disappointing to say the least – 38 points was the winning score.
I am not sure why I played so poorly – conditions were relatively easy for Porthcawl. I didn’t strike the ball anything like Friday.
Let me know what you think!!
Regards,
John
Dear John,
First things first:
- Thanks for being so enthusiastic
- Thanks for being honest and for being willing to look at yourself
- Thanks for doing all of this in the spirit of humility, fun and the pursuit of pointless perfection.
This is how I see it.
You won on Friday and you were kind enough to ring me up. You played well and people noticed. I could tell from your voice that the thrill of “timing” over and over again across your whole game had you intoxicated, and you couldn’t wait to do it again. You like being good and you are starting to believe that you can get down to scratch.
From what I saw on Thursday there is now a confidence to your game and a “zip” to your ball-striking. If all of this is right then it is inevitable that you carried a lot of expectation of yourself into Saturday’s round. A similar thing happened to you before the Club Championship and you had a similarly poor start.
The key to improvement is to look coldly at the facts and to distinguish the facts from mere “impressions”. It is always unlikely that the facts will suggest that changes need to be made.
I don’t know what the format was on Friday but if it was strokeplay, handicap and you won then that suggests that you can bring your handicap down further. Nothing that happened on Saturday has any bearing on that analysis: it is highly unlikely that you fluked a whole round on Friday.
Let’s assume that on Saturday you strode on to the first tee with the expectations and excitement mentioned earlier. For some reason you chose to hit a 4-iron off the tee like you did on Thursday. I assume that this was because of the following wind (for the sake of completeness please would you clarify the thinking behind the choice of 4-iron. Thanks). To hit the tee shot into the rough would have been a severe jolt to your hopes and would have rekindled lots of horrible undistinguishable memories from all the other occasions in your sporting life where hope had been hit hard and early.
When you found the ball you had to hack it out but you still had a chance of a four. You hit a good shot on to the green, which pays tribute to your powers of recovery and to how sticking to the method brings consistency even in the face of emotional turmoil! To then get to the ball and realise that you were having to take a two shot penalty, and that for a ball that was ostensibly the same as yours, must have been truly gutting.
You still managed a decent drive from the second tee and a good approach, and now we come to the crucial shot of the round: the first putt on the second green. Probably, this putt carried with it all the remaining hopes that you had carried on to the first tee that hadn’t been extinguished by that disastrous first hole. For the putt to be far enough away that you were left with a miss-able second would have “wobbled” you a lot given the context of the putt. This scenario made a poor tee shot off the third virtually inevitable. What to learn from this I’ll come to later. Before that I just want to finish analysing the facts of the round.
According to your e-mail you scored thus: 0, 1, 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1 for 9pts on the outward 9. That means that you scored 18 points on the inward 9. You didn’t score on two holes on the inward 9 which gives you an average of 2.57pts per hole. So for 9 of the 18 holes you were quite a good bit better than par. Given your start, I would mark that down as a good recovery.
So, where to look? After giving it a lot of thought, I think you can safely put this round behind you. Overall, given the calamities, your scoring held up well. It may not have felt as if you were striking it that good but you must have hit quite a few decent shots to score 18 points on 7 holes. Also, you must be playing well throughout your game to score like that. It is important to face the fact that you scored well because, like my Dad, you have this sneaking suspicion that you are going to turn up one day and not be able to hit a thing. You need to realise that “form” is an excuse, it doesn’t actually exist. If you allow your muscles to relax then swing, then that ball will fly; there is nothing to stop it!
I don’t want your first shot of the round to turn into an “issue”, so I hesitate to highlight it too much. And I also do not want you to stop feeling excited and expectant before a round – it’s wonderful! So, what you could try (and we could mention this in a clearing call) is to use the energy generated by your excitement and expectation to really bring alive the memory your most recent “favourite” shot – the more recent, the better.
Choose something you were particularly pleased with and then simply bring back the memory of how the swing “felt”, no more, just the feel of it. And wallow in the lovely feeling; the feeling of power, of accuracy; the feeling of easiness and simplicity. Get a real sense of the simple, easy movement of that swing. Do this while you’re waiting to tee off and just before the visualisation that starts the routine. Another place where you could have used this is on the 3rd tee after the 3-putt.
If there is a lesson from this round, it is that it is worth spotting where disappointment might be dulling your imagination, and to overcome this with a conscious evocation of a recent memory of the “feel” of a thrilling shot (of which you now have quite a few!). And then, when you can really “feel” in your imagination that swing that made that brilliant shot, smile, because the swing is still in there somewhere!
After you have read this, re-read your last but one sentence, the one that starts: “… I am not sure why …”. That is a classic example of an impression that is simply not borne out by the facts. The fact is that on some of the holes you played very well and must have hit the ball as good as you did on Friday. Your impression that you didn’t is fuelled by your disappointment following your success on Friday. You had some bad holes – that’s true. This will happen from time to time: you are not a machine.
Regards,
Colin
