I went out and hit some balls today, at flags, with a pencil and card in my pocket. The 2006 revolution has begun!!
January on these shores can be a bitter experience, so I confined my golfing to the driving range and a solid month of tweaking and blister inducing discipline. The one flaw about the range, however, is that the fairways are pretty wide, in fact there is no fairway, there's no rough either and there's no nervous chipping over bunkers and the like.
It's all very well beating balls and working on your game (I even had a lesson - I have 'floppy hands at takeaway') but you can't really assess how you're playing. Your head might be right, technique may be spot on, but the one hole the 'rebuild speculum' can't see up is the one 450 yards away round the dogleg.
Two things inspired me to get out on course. Tiger Woods and tapas.
I watched Tiger at Dubai 'playing badly' and still winning in a play off. Say what you like about the fella, and I'm not exactly running the fan club, but he knows how to win. Sat watching him (8am GMT) I thought 'Balls to it' I can do that and headed up to the course.
This is where the tapas comes in. Not exactly orthodox but hey, I was on my own. The night before I went out to a Spanish restaurant trying to educate my little sister's palate and had a huge selection of tapas. It was wonderful and I heartily recommend it to all, but something was said about how the meal was 'a series of little good things but the whole dinner was spectacular' (she's very eloquent for 15). Herein was my new golfing analogy. Golf, when you break it down is one hole of good things replicated 18 times. You could go further and say, one good swing replicated x times etc. The important thing is that you just try one little good thing at a time and keep trying little good things and then you walk off at the end thinking 'that was something spectacular'. I beat my handicap (just) with a 79.
So my advice for 2006? Think Tigers and tapas.
Web bloke Shaun
Remember Me