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How to Enjoy your golf

I am a great believer that perfection is never achievable. Never in this life. Your job is never perfect. Your home is never perfect. Your kids are never perfect. And God forbid, your spouse is never perfect. You’d be stupid though to say that in front of her.

And in golf, forget about being perfect. The thing is, we are not pros. Neither are we those with a million hours to spend practicing around the greens and driving range . If you are anything like me, juggling between being a driver for my kids, a babysitter, running a business, spending time in my church doing stuff, participating in our home associations, going to my kids’ friends parties and generally being completely overwhelmed with activities in life without involving the game of golf – you will know the only time you are practicing golf is when you are playing it.

Trying to cram in one game a week isn’t easy. Firstly, its the work. Secondly, the family. Weekends are out obviously. Even weekdays, golf tends to eat more into my work hours than family time.

So the expectations of what we get out of golf is a lot less. And when the expectations are less, it makes the game a lot more enjoyable.

Playing golf – one of the easiest way to enjoy it is to play fast. I recently played with someone who took an eternity with his swing. An Eternity. I am a reasonably quick player, or so I think. My ‘pre-shot’ routine if there is such thing is to put the ball to the ground – 2 seconds. I step back, look up and find a spot like a tree, a crane, a bunker, a hill, a building – anything for a reference to aim at, near or far. It’s usually anything off to the right of my line of sight – because my natural shape is a draw. I would mutter to myself “Tree” or “Crane” or “bush” or “billboard” or whatever. That probably takes about 5 seconds. I take my stance, the ball slightly to my left heel, take one practice swing – 5 – 6 seconds. Step back and address the ball again – 5 seconds. I take a practice back swing to set my plane and shift my weight to my right slightly and address the ball again – 5 seconds. Then I rip it. My shot is between 20 – 25 seconds from teeing up to letting it fly. Which isn’t extremely fast but I have seen people go through the 40 second barrier and even one guy who takes a full minute. I am like, damn it, hit the bloody ball! Have you played with someone who just stands there at address on the ball as if he was frozen? Literally, a full 10 seconds go by and he is just there looking at the ball, addressing it. I am like, are you waiting for the ball to say hello?

I get very impatient very quickly; because I am a rhythm player. One of the difference between Kota Permai’s 93 and Palm’s 85 was rhythm. In Kota Permai we played behind very slow players and we were constantly disrupted. In Palm we made sure we teed off in front of a big group that registered and we played with hardly any breakage or waiting. Tee off, walk to the ball and take around 10 – 15 seconds to hit the ball, then go on. I play best when I don’t think so much. In the previous game, I had at least 4 -5 birdie opportunities – birdie putts with 10 feet or less. I missed all except one…that’s more due to the putter than anything else.

So, really, if you want to enjoy this game and have other people enjoy – play a quick pace. With our standard of hacking, it makes no difference if you address the ball for 10 seconds or just hit the ball!

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85 at Palm Garden

The up and down year continues. After posting a 93 in my first game in Kota Permai with 1 par, 1 birdie showing, I switched drivers and putters and promptly shot an 85 at Palm Garden. It had nothing to do with the drivers and putters though because I was still awful with my drives and my new (or rather very old) putter wasn’t do me any favours either with a 3 putt on the 1st, 3 putt on the 10th and 3 putt on the 18th.

However, my irons were just dialed in as I went on a birdie hunt on a few holes – and ended up with 8 pars and 1 Birdie for a somewhat respectable score. if I two putted those, I would have saved 3 strokes. If I played the somewhat easy par 5 smartly instead of smashing my driver into the water for a triple, I could have parred it maybe and shot a 79. I never broke 80 before in my life. A 79 for me would be like the pros shooting 59.

Speaking of pros, how is Tiger doing? I did manage to catch a bit of his highlights at the Farmer’s at Torrey Pines. He was -1 after 11! And he had to go screw it all up by shooting +5 over the last 7 holes. I wish I can say that he is back. I don’t think he is.

However, here is some mind boggling stats for you.

Tiger Woods is ranked 663.

Our great Malaysian Players – Danny Chia, Nicholas Fung and Gavin Green are ranked 276, 321 and 346 respectively.

Yet, when he teed up, Tiger Woods, ranked 662 ranks lower than Jason Day, brought in crowds more than 4 deep. It’s like a football game between Germany vs Bhutan and everyone is watching Bhutan. It’s like watching Andy Murray play against Alberto Brizzi and everyone is going like: Alberto! I Love you!

WTF is Alberto Brizzi? I don’t know. He is the 663rd ranked player in the ATP tour.

So yeah – say what you like about Tiger – he is the main reason why I played golf, play golf and will continue to play golf. If he’s back, great. If he’s not, it’s still going to be Tiger being watched more than any golfer on this planet.

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Gilagolf is back with Tiger Woods!

So now, 2017! I managed to get my first game into the year at Kota Permai and went on to score an amazing 93. Yes. There is sarcasm. I shot 47-46 and didn’t do any favours by struggling at my putting and chipping. I ended up with 1 birdie and 1 par amidst a whole lot of bogeys, a triple and sprinkled with some doubles. New year, same game, it seems. At least my birdie run continues for now with consecutive games with birdies. I did manage to dig up a very old Cobra LD 5 wood out from my store room to test. This is a 2007 model, mind you and by God it is terrific. I am punching this baby further than my 3 wood. In one hole, I flat out outdrove the whole flight who were using drivers. And these are not lightweight guys as well. It was the 11th hole in Kota Permai where I ended up around 70 metres away from green. We were teeing up at blue which was registered at 311 metres.  This is a 5 wood for goodness sakes. On the Par 5 hole 18, my drive around 250 still left me around 210 – 220 uphill to the green. With the wood 5, it went long. It’s ridiculous club.

It didn’t do me much good though in terms of scoring. I still suck at the game. I landed, I think in the bunker like 8 times or so throughout the game.

As for Tiger Woods – the good news is that HE IS BACK! Yes, I basically have given up watching golf for good for a year plus now. Even the majors I don’t give a crap anymore. The only guy out there worth watching is Tiger, and he’s going to be playing this weekend, so I will try to stay tuned!

Happy hacking in 2017!

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Happy New Year and We are BACK!

Happy New Year and Gilagolf is back!

I know, haven’t been writing a lot lately – my motivations have sort of slowed down in terms of playing golf. Am I still playing? Oh Yes, but its cycling through the same courses – Mines, Glenmarie, Sungai Long, Tropicana, Kota Permai, Palm Garden and then on and off back to our haunt at Rahman and also KGNS.

2017 rolls in and RHB tells us now that they are still negotiating with the golf clubs on whether they will continue on this year to provide golfing privileges. To be honest, compared to the other cards, I think RHB is a bit crappy in terms of credit card privileges. The only reason why we went with it is that the golfing privileges are reasonable. If these are taken away, a whole bunch of us will just revert back to our normal cards (Maybank, CIMB, Citi). So RHB – you better buck up!

The secondary reason why my golf has taken a sort of back seat is that other things like moving home, putting kids through school etc now takes precedence. The amount of money spent in moving to a new home and renovating it is ridiculous. And now, education as well – thinking of sending kids over to international schools? Good luck. They better be future Mark Zuckerbergs, else I don’t know how on earth will they make back their cost.

So what are we looking at for 2017 in terms of this game of golf. Well – gameplay wise, as always, I will seek to improve – play consistently in the 80s is a starter. 2016 was actually a pretty good year for my game – birdies became almost one per round for me – inclusive of my last game of the year at Glenmarie. Now, to make it more consistent. My struggles with putting needs to work on. My chipping is still shit, but at least my drives now are less wild and I am giving my chance for regulations.

For golf in general – look forward to see Tiger Woods back. Honestly since he left, I have never bothered to watch or even catch golf. I am always more of a football fan who doesn’t play football, and a golf guy who doesn’t watch golf. But with Tiger back in the hunt, why not?

So will I be updating this blog? I don’t know how often – it seems to me blogging is a bit of a yesteryear activity – now everyone is into anything else. Still, I still get to see a fair bit of hits and readers everyday on this blog and I just feel that I need to get something in here to be fair. So – like I said, I will probably be writing more of other things aside from just golf per se, and an article a week seems like a good plan, as long as you guys don’t judge me too much.

So, for 2017 first article – I just want to say: Glenmarie still have shitty service. OK, I like the course. It’s nearby, it’s accessible and it’s nice and there are 36 holes. But I always disliked the management and service there. There is just something off with it. From the time that they insisted on charging us extra for using the board for our tournament even when no one was using it; or when my playing partner got robbed by one of the caddies (the caddy admitted to stealing around RM300 from my friend’s wallet), and now recently:

Me and my buddy use stand bags for our game. Stand Bags are those bags with the built in legs so we can stand it at an angle while playing a shot, and then carry. Because we sometimes walk in KGNS or Rahman – like maybe 15 years ago. Nowadays, we can’t even walk to the car park without complaining of leg pain. But the bags still remain. Because these days we just dump everything in the cart, our stand bags are filled with full set of clubs with probably 30 – 50 balls etc making them extremely heavy. I instruct the caddies, or the ones taking the bags from our cars to not use the built in legs because the bags are generally too heavy. Additionally, if you use those legs of tiled floor, they have a tendency to slip, causing the bag to collapse.

I told this to Glenmarie and they just went like yeah, yeah.

The next thing I knew, I saw my bag sitting on the legs and almost breaking before I caught it. My friend – not so lucky. Those Glenmarie idiots put his bag on the legs and the one of the legs snapped and the entire bag crashed onto the floor. Worse, the Glenmarie idiots didn’t even bother to pick it up – they just left it. The leg is now broken and can’t be use. The argument is that, we don’t even use it, right? Well, the point is that we don’t like broken bags, Glenmarie. And to the day I die, I will keep repeating – your service suck.

Welcome – 2017.