I have recently gone on a purple patch in my golf game of late.
Playing three games previous at Tropicana, Palm and Kota Permai, yielded me birdies in each round. Anyone knowing a 16 handicaper struggles will know that getting a birdie is as rare as spotting a pink hyena doing a riverdance.
The Palm garden birdies were probably the most memorable – two in a row to end the front nine, and for Kota Permai, the very first hole Par 5. Strangely even with these birdies, I still ended up shooting 87,88 and 89 on these courses, showing that gross score improvement is still difficult to come by.
This year, with much less golfing, is turning out overall, better golf. My drives are less wild eversince I decided to shorten my grip to the point of my right hand almost gripping the shaft itself. Another change I did was instead of tackling the green, I am almost always going short of the green. The reason is because I can then approach with a shorter club, and I am not too worried about controlling and can just muscle the whole thing in. I am dropping to a 9-iron now for my 150 meter shots, and a 6-iron for 170 meters. I am not saying I am reaching these distances with these irons, but they are close – even if I drop at 140 meter with my 9-iron, the ball can still roll onto the green without taking those bunkers into consideration.
Where my game need utmost upgrade is in chipping. I am still yipping it like a monkey on opium and I lose amazing amount of strokes due to bad chips, bad punch outs from the woods and overall just horrendous management of these supposedly easy shots.
Also this year I’ve stopped taking in all the statistics on my game and just take in the score. It seems with less calculations on the course and analysis, I am playing better. I don’t care about my 3 putts anymore and I putt better. I don’t care about missing the fairway anymore and I am hitting those fairways. I don’t care about how far I drive anymore and I am booming it. It seems like the less I scrutinise myself, my immense natural talents are now shining and I am achieving my God-given destiny of playing a consistent 16 handicap. Yes. I am being sarcastic.
Also – I have had some emails (thank you) wondering if this blog is ever going to be updated. To be honest, I don’t really have a lot to update on golf. Ever since that Pussycat Woods decided to call it quits and then do a comeback and then decide to quit again, I’ve been more than disillusioned that the game of golf is actually going backwards – which it is. If you look at how Taylormade is struggling and part of it is being farmed out by Adidas, and how Nike has stopped producing golf clubs and how overall, nobody really gives a crap anymore about golf and everyone is into cycling or jogging or swimming or lawn bowling – the trajectory of golf as a popular sport is somewhat declining – even with the yawn fest of Olympic golf not doing it any favours. Of course, this is my opinion based on extensive research of looking at Google for the past 2 minutes.
I can actually see the disinterest in it. In early 2000s, a lot of my colleagues were eager to try out golf. We even set a pool fund and get people together to play golf together, and organised outings to golf clubs like that stinkhole Bandar Utama golf course. We went to the driving range. Of course, the fact that we were all single and there were girls we wanted to tackle also picking up golf had a major impact to our motivations. Especially if you are already familiar with the sport, we can do the “OK, here is how you grip it” and then taking the advantage of holding her hand without getting a slap in the face or a call for harassment. Yup, it was a great maneuver.
But nowadays, when we talk about golf to my younger employees, they just go “meh”. The fact is, we are regressing back to the point where golf is now an old man sport. Because we are, naturally becoming “old men” as we hit our 40s or so. The younger generation doesn’t pick it up. Instead they pick up this strange activity called ‘jogging’. Which is significantly cheaper. All you need are shoes and a road.
So – I suppose, I will consolidate other articles into this blog. I run a blog called Giladad where I write about my travails as a father, but that readership has around 1 person- my wife so she knows what I am complaining about (her).