Saturday, October 16, 2004

Unexplained goodness - Golf @ Plateau

Tony, Paul, Rick and I headed out for a very wet round at the Plateau Club today. I haven't played with Tony for a while and since he used to be a member there, it was fun to get him back out on the evil track of lost balls we call the Plateau Club.

But today was different for me.

I started out at the range and couldn't hit anything very well. When we headed to the first tee, though, after taking advantage of a flexible "start of round" ruling, I had a nice tee shot to the left half of the fairway, followed by a three wood across the junk to the fairway and a wedge onto the green. Whoa. Two putts later, I was off and running at even par. On the second hole, I had a good tee shot to about 150 yards. Lately, I have not been getting my normal distance off of my irons, and with the rain I figured that I should take an extra club to make sure I got to the green. I nailed the 6 iron and it flew past the green and up onto the hill behind the green. Huh? I was making really good contact and getting good distance even in the yucky weather. Neat! I got out of 2 with a bogey. The rest of the front 9 was pretty consistent. If I hit a bad shot (like the crappy little dribbler on 5, I would make up for it in a later shot. Putting, in particular, was really working for me today and I turned a lot of potential double bogeys into singles on the front 9 finshing with a 45 - perfect bogey golf and right on my handicap at the Plat.

Side note: I have a nice Gortex jacket that keeps me warm and dry when we play in the rain, but I have found it is really hard for me to do a full swing when I am wearing it, so for the first 9 holes I kept taking off my jacket in the pouring rain for each full shot, then putting it back on after the shot. What a pain! At the turn I stopped by the pro shop and picked up a short sleave rain shirt and that made it much easier for the second half of the day.

On the back 9, things started to click.I had a great approach shot on 11 from about 170 yards which stopped about 9 feet from the pin and I made par there. Same thing on 13. Even when I had some really bad shots on 14 and 16, I was still able to come away with double bogey and offset it on the next hole with a par.

So I came to 18 at 15 over. Now 18 is where many good scores have gone awry and today looked like it would follow that pattern. I pulled my 3 wood into the trees and while it is possible for it to get through if it misses all of the trees, I heard a couple of "click"s as it went through. I figured I would go look and see if I was lucky enough to make it through. Sure enough, the ball made it through and was sitting in the fairway with only 150 yards to the pin. I got a bit distracted with Amsterdam stories and messed up my approach shot but my next wedge flew between a couple of branches and landed softly 10 feet from the hole. As it had happened earlier in the day, the putt rolled true and while it tried to lip out, it ended up falling backwards into the hole for back to back closing pars and a total score of 87. This is my second best score from the golds at the Plat. Despite the weather, I was feeling pretty relaxed all day long and that paid off. Having only 30 putts and one penalty helped a lot as well.

Duffergeek Stat Zone: (Oooh! New Feature!)
Score: 87 (13.012 round rating)
Putts: 30
GIRs: 4
Fairways: 8/14
Interesting stat: 75% GIRs on par 5s. Just missed the one on 9 by about 2 feet.

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