The Grand Champion

I have proven once and for all that I am the superior golfer with a solid all around performance in the final round. Strub is inconsolable.

It's over

I won, but I lost.

Damn.

Driver status

Driver doesn't appear to be on the table at this point. I've had some success hitting 3- and 4-iron off the tee.

Plan is to visit the driving range tonight (once I get my car back from the shop). I'll try hitting driver about a hundred times, see if I can get this thing straightened out.

I don't think I have a shot to win tomorrow if I can't hit the Sumo Sq2. But that's not to say I'm going to go in and hit it if it's not going to show up for me. I'd rather play even and lose the season by 8 than make an ass of myself and lose tomorrow by 20 feebly attempting to hit driver every hole.

Alex has been playing better than me lately, but he's still the same Alex. Meltdown definitely not off the table. And if his lead shrinks to about 3 by the turn, look out.

Hit the driver?

Strub refused to hit his driver again last weekend with only one exception. He almost made it to the ladies tees. I have a slight length advantage over him, and he makes the problem 100x worse by hitting 5 iron off the tee. His thinking was that he would put it in the fairway every time, and I would lose enough drives to make it worthwhile. Unfortunately, neither of those things is true. In fact, he is still losing more drives than me. He said the only way he could win this week was to be able to pull the driver out of the bag with confidence. Whether he put in the time at the range this week is yet to be seen.

This is the week

Strub hasn't beat me in golf in 3 weeks. He has to win by 8 to take home the Libous title. Not a chance.

Last week

Strub claimed to be too sick to wake up early and play golf, so we did a light day at Chenango Commons. I beat the everloving piss out of him, but it was pretty easy to see that coming after he put his first three shots into a pond literally 6 feet in front of where he was teeing off. All told, he barely broke 100 on a course which is par 60.

This week is his chance to break 100 on a real course- the one we were supposed to play last week. I still don't give him very good odds, but we'll see I guess. Stranger things have happened.

Now it is a sprint

I beat Strub by a solid 7 strokes at Traditions, and now he is in a deep hole with only one course left. He'll try to put on a brave front and say that he is confident he can make up 7 strokes in one day, but the statistics are clear that rarely does anybody win by 8 or more in a single day. He really needs a little help here.

The thing working most against him is the fact that when one of us plays bad, the other one invariably plays almost (but no quite) as bad. At Hiawatha last week, I had one of the worst outings of the year, and he managed to have an awful round of his own. If I have another bad day at Conklin, expect him to have a bad day of his own. His best chance is if I have an average day, and he comes up with the round of his life.

The final round at Conklin is at least 2 weeks away, and we have a tune-up at Genegantslet tentatively scheduled for this week. Strub is still chasing 100, despite the fact that he has shown marked improvement throughout the summer in everything except his driving game. In fact, a common refrain last week at our shockingly bad outing was that for two guys that played so much this summer, we still scored (and played) awful. Genny is forgiving, and gives some opportunities to make up strokes if you start slow.

At the end of the day, this tune-up is about being ready for Conklin, whenever we get there. Strub has experimented with taking his long clubs off the table (presumably because I guaranteed I would beat him if I took that route), with hitting driver at every opportunity, with hitting other woods off the tee, and all manner of other bold strategies. Now he has a very limited amount of time to figure out what actually works and stick with it. No matter how you slice it, the constant loser's refrain of "it's a marathon, not a sprint" is no longer true- it's a close to a sprint to the finish as you could imagine.