Re: Throwing away a summer of golf

Strub managed to blow an entire summer's worth of lead in one day. We are now tied on the season, with 2 left to play.

A nice win

Full update later, but I gained another two strokes on the season with a two-shot win (108 to 110) at Pheasant Hill this morning.

The deficit is going to be difficult to close at this point. I didn't play my best today, but I did a really great job recovering from trouble.

I like my chances.

Libous

If Libous will pose for this picture at the Deposit Lumberjack Festival Parade ...



... he's gotta find 30 seconds for us.

Saturday plan

10 a.m., Pheasant Hill in Owego.

I am feeling supremely confident.

Agreed on all counts

That course was miserable. We kept trying to give it a chance, and it just kept getting worse. I mean seriously, I thought the paint on the garbage cans at Dimmock Hill was bad until I saw this:



Behind the chicken wire with 'H G C' scratched into it is the cart path heading to the No. 8 tee, but it might as well be a sample of many of the fairways.

Today wasn't an accurate representation of our golf skills, that's for sure. Add the dry conditions to an already dreadful course and this is one round I won't fondly remember.

Quickly, though, the employees of this golf course were really great, one of the nicest staffs we've seen. The woman tending bar was extremely friendly and kind, and when we stopped for hot dogs at the turn, a gentleman was waiting with a gas can to check to make sure we'd make it all the way around the course again. Classy employees.

And as for how we played, well, a tie at this point is, in my eyes, a victory. I was up 3 heading to No. 18, and threw the individual win away with a triple-bogey 6, but I drove the ball the best I have in months, and had the first eagle putt of my life after an exceptional (and ballsy) hybrid over a water hazard.

My lead stays at 7, which I am comfortable with. I think I can outplay Alex at Traditions, because I've played there at least a dozen times. His window to make up the difference here is quickly closing.

I'm this much closer to proving, definitively, that I am the better golfer.

Hancock

Whereas some of the courses we played were cow pastures, Hancock was instead an abandoned logging project. Fairways were basically just dead grass, and you essentially were hitting off berber. Easily the crappiest course we played, but home to maybe the best moment of the year. Some guy in a stained polo shirt (later determined to be brother of the club pro) walks behind the bar, mumbles something about 5 o'clock somewhere, takes out a styrofoam cup, fills it with ice, and then fills that with just vodka, and walks out. It was almost, but not quite, noon.

Two words

Score board.

HA

Chris Strub is the only guy I know that complains when he doesn't get 11 hours of sleep. Guess what buddy: we all know you work late, but that doesn't mean we are all gonna feel sorry for you because you have to have short nights like a regular person. You can get out of work at midnight and wind down for 2 hours and be in bed by 2. That gives you 6 hours before you have to get up at 8, and if you're gonna complain about only getting 6 hours of sleep, screw you. Maybe the real problem here is that you choose not to get up until 3 pm on Fridays and you have only been up for 9 hours when you try to go to bed. You make the choice about being awake before work or after work, and you have chosen after. Everyone take note of what time he wakes up and sees this post as evidence.

Also, don't try and lay down that bs about not being prepared last weekend. I was in much worse shape than you and I still whooped you up and down the fairways. Get better at golf if you want to win.

Preparation

More so than any one technical aspect, I've learned this summer that succeeding at golf is all about preparation.

I'm not making excuses here. On Friday, I knew all day long that I would have to wake up very early (by my standards) to play golf very far away on Saturday. I knew when I came home, I should just crawl into bed and go to sleep.

The nature of my job makes it difficult to do that. This time right now, 1:11 a.m., is like the start of the evening for me. I won't be surprised if I don't fall asleep until 4:30 a.m.; that's just the nature of being a copy editor. You need to be at the top of your game at midnight, which makes it very difficult to try and drive home and be asleep by 1, 1:30. Golfing on Saturday on 3 1/2 hours of sleep, after staying up just sitting here on my laptop for several hours doing nothing, was a perfect example of not being prepared: I burst out to an early lead on adrenaline, and then when the lack of sleep hit me, I tanked. Hard.

As the scoreboard shows, I think I'm a marginally better golfer than Alex is. The key is in the preparation. I always wear sunscreen, bring tons of water, Gatorade, sometimes a soda ... my fashionable argyle socks are often a point of discussion, but when you're looking through the deep, high rough for a ball, I bet any guy I play with wishes he had high socks on. Everything I do, I do for a reason.

Alex sometimes fails to prepare properly, and it comes back to haunt him.

The issue going forward is going to be, with the title still very much up for grabs, I think both of us will realize the crucial nature of solid preparation. Friday night, I'm coming home and going to sleep. Period.

And on Saturday evening, when I'm driving to work, I'll have extended my lead after a solid round at our fifth-to-last course of the summer: Hancock.

I know this, because I'll have been prepared.

Canasawacta- I told you it was a marathon

Strub really really should not have let me beat him today. I was feeling awful when I woke up, and tried to tell him to forget it and that I was just going to sleep in. However, he dragged (drug? drugged?) me out of bed and off we went to beautiful Norwich, New York, home of the whatever random basketball tournament we saw there today.

I hit a good tee shot on the first hole and immediately felt better about my chances. I proceeded to hit my next ball I have no idea where, and things went downhill fast. I hit a 9 on the par-3 second hole after losing my first 2 balls. However, Strub struggled on 3 and I hit a few good shots to gain a little confidence back. I finished 9 holes up 6 based on strong driving and good play around the green. I hit the approach irons a little better, but my real problem is still the putter. The last 2 weeks have been Sahara Desert-dry, and I have been putting awful since then. It rained last night, but I still couldn't hit a good putt all day. I think I 3-putted 15 times today.

For some reason, the 9th hole does not end anywhere near the clubhouse. There is a shack with presumably food and drinks, but it was closed today. I really could have benefitted from something more than Burger King breakfast in me, especially since the groups in front of us were so slow that we took 2 and a half hours to play 9 holes and it was getting dangerously close to lunch time.

The back 9 saw me and Strub trade strokes back and forth and go nowhere. The highlight for me was 18, which was a short par 4 protected by several bunkers. I had been contemplating whether I would lay up or go for it for several holes, and I decided to go for it. I ripped the best drive I hit all day and I was confident I had missed the bunkers on the front edge. When I got up to the ball, I saw that I still wasn't safe- I was actually in the backside bunker. My bunker play has been atrocious for the last 2 weeks. The problem is that I don't have a plan for bunkers, other than don't hit in to them. I have been in 2 bunkers in the last 2 weeks, and needed multiple shots to get out of both of them. However, this time I lucked out a little. The rain had beat the sand down, and the ball had only slowly rolled in, so it was sitting up on top of a nice packed surface. All I had to do was make contact with the ball and knock it out. It was just like hitting off a range mat- you want to catch all ball, or as much ball as you can. I cleanly played it out, had a birdie putt, and then fittingly 3-putted for bogey.

The back 9 ended up a tie, so I beat Strub by 6. The way I played, I deserved to lose badly. Canasawacta also features a lot of holes with such severe dog-legs that you cannot hit driver, which takes away a lot of my length advantage and should only help Strub. Instead, I closed the gap from 13 strokes to just 7. This is why I was not worried after Thursday. I know that I play consistently better golf than Strub, so as long as I don't have another meltdown, I expect to comfortably reel him in and then pass him.

Canasawacta

Not a good day of golf for me. I shot 118 and gave back six strokes, and while I'm still leading, I shouldn't have given any back today.

I'm disappointed that after this many rounds, I'm not showing the improvement I thought I'd have made. Though there were a few bright spots today -- particularly with the putter -- this was not a step in the right direction for me.

More later.

It's a marathon...

not a sprint. I have played consistently well all summer, and I am not worried. I had a single bad day. We contemplated this sort of meltdown at the beginning of the season, and decided to drop each of our worst scores. This will be my worst score, so in reality, nothing has changed.

Throwing away a summer of solid golf ...

... It's sort of sad to say that that's what happened tonight at Tioga Country Club.

Honestly, I couldn't believe what I was witnessing tonight, out in lovely (aha) Nichols: the self-destruction of a young man who, I thought, had harnessed his emotions and his game to a respectable level.

Tonight, Alex Racketa imploded.

The damage was done on the course's toughest hole: the 521-yard par-5 4th hole, an uphill-then-downhill intimidator that surely has done in many a golfer over its years.

Two tee shots into the woods. A long iron down into the next fairway over. A looping short iron into a tree. A looping short iron into the sand trap. Two poor chips. Of course, three putts. And, somewhere, a couple other strokes I must not even have seen; by the end, adding to an unspeakable, unimaginable, season-ruining 15.

That's not a triple bogey -- that's triple par. And in one hole, 8/9ths of a lead carefully built over 180 holes around the Southern Tier had disappeared.

Sure, there were two golfers on the course tonight. And don't get me wrong: I thought I played pretty well, considering the exhausting heat and continued dry conditions. I carded a 49 on the front 9, and if not for a usually-the-worst-hole-of-the-day-by-either-of-us 11 on no. 16 (another par 5, at least), I would've broken 100 on the day.

I can sympathize with the fact that it was not a perfect night for golf. I'm sure Alex will blog about how we had to play very quickly, jumping around to try and get in as many holes as possible; at one point, we decided we were only going to fit in 12 holes and would have to come back to finish the round another day. (We started at 1, played 2, then skipped to 9, finished through 18, then floored it back to 3, cutting off a group putting on 2; we finished with probably 8-10 minutes left before total darkness.)

But the truth is, I stepped up. Whereas a month ago, if one guy tanked, the other guy's game would've similarly suffered (see: Blue Stone), today, I refused to let that happen.

I was particularly proud of the putter today. I made a number of 8-to-10-footers that, on a regular day, I would've been overjoyed to drain one. A common refrain for Alex this summer has been, "You really missed an opportunity there," as I pick up my ball from 3 inches from the cup, having missed a four-footer just left.

Today, with an "I-can't-even-believe-I'm-typing-this" 22-shot swing (!!), I didn't miss the opportunity. And now, probably more surprising to me than anyone else, the Libous Invitiational is mine for the taking.

- - - - -

Quick hits on Tioga: I thought the bartender was way more attractive than "golf course hot," but Alex disagreed; the clubhouse here is definitely hidden, and I'm sure I wasn't the first guy to be confused by its secluded location and indescript door; I've been very generous in rating these courses, but I can't say I'd want to go back to this one. The time factor and the location -- wayyy out of the way -- don't help, but the long grass and weeds weren't enjoyable, the par-3s weren't memorable, the goofy doglegs are just that, the water wasn't particularly nice ... I guess it's nicer than Dimmock, but I don't think I could rate it above any other courses we've played this summer.

A whole new ballgame

To say that the Summer 2010 Libous Invitational turned around today would be an understatement.

Updates later.

Saturday doubleheader wrap: A disappointment

On one of the hottest days of 2010, we played both River Run II and Endwell Greens.

With the unbearable conditions, I don't think anyone predicted we'd finish the day with no changes in the overall score -- but that's what happened.

River Run II wasn't quite as nice as I thought it was going to be, based on its website. It was alright, but not as nice and manicured as I'd hoped from the lavish descriptions.

I played pretty well on the front, but surprisingly, when we went to the back and each hole was shorter (and a par 3), I played worse. I dropped four more shots on the day as Alex finished strong on the last few holes -- which has become, unfortunately for me, a trademark of his game.

Of course, I broke 100 -- for the first time -- but that's really nothing to be proud of on a par 56.

Endwell Greens just played absolutely impossible -- there's no other way to say it. I'm actually relatively impressed with my 112 considering how tough it was to drop the ball onto the green. These had to be the hardest greens we played all year, without a doubt. Alex was cursing at them, and if I wasn't playing slightly better than him and trying to maintain the mental edge, I would've done the same thing.

I ended up beating him by four on the day, missing a 2-foot nothing putt on the final hole (No. 3; we had to start on 4 because the club championship was still wrapping up when we arrived).

We did play with others on the day, but I'm writing this post in a hurry because we're leaving shortly to play the season's 11th course: Tioga Country Club. Chris Vito and Jay Boulia joined us in the morning; Vito played tremendously well on the back after really stinking it up on the front. Jay, as expected, beat the three of us -- it really irks me that he's still better than me at this point.

In the afternoon, Chris Ameigh joined us and shot 150, but it was good to hang out with him again. I also had some interesting conversation with the girl driving the drink cart around. She was nice.

Needless to say, as is always the case with these things, I feel very confident in the after-Alex-works-a-full-day round. I've eaten an awesome late lunch, put on suntan lotion and bug spray, hydrated all day and scoped out the course online. If I don't win on a day like today, I probably don't deserve to win the whole thing.

Also, it's 90+ out again right now, and it still hasn't rained this month. Hopefully Tioga does a respectable job watering its greens, or we may be chipping past sundown on, from what I've gleaned online, is a pretty nice course.

Saturday Doubleheader

Strub has guaranteed that he will eat dinner in the lead on Saturday night. He has 2 rounds to make it up, and one is a par 3 course. I presume he will have the advantage there, because my T wedge is mysteriously bent, and my pitching wedge is less mysteriously bent. However, even if he brings it a little closer in the morning, my longer game should stretch the lead in the afternoon. The smart money is on me pulling farther ahead.