Underdog Golf Blog

Every day each one of us is faced with a series of choices. Some of these choices will inevitably get grouped into the mundane doesn’t require any thought category. We make them and simply go on about our day. Other choices require a little more thought but don’t make a big impact on how our day, week or lives will play out afterwards. Think “what will I have for lunch?” or “what shirt am I going to wear today?”

I come to you today with a confession. My practice has lacked over the past few weeks due to some external and internal circumstances and my scores of late have shown this. But with all things of this nature, there was a lesson to be learned. Sometimes you need to go easy on yourself and realize you’re only human.

My schedule lately has been hectic to say the least. Between golf practice, working out, working a full time job, keeping a healthy relationship with my girlfriend and trying to maintain the slightest bit of a social life to avoid entering “hermit” status, I don’t have much downtime. Sadly this lead to a burnout moment where I questioned myself and everything I was doing with this blog. As I said, I’m only human.

Beauty is an astounding quality of life. It is one of the only things in this world that transcends medium. Beauty can be found in a person, a building, a landscape or even an idea. The perception of what is beautiful will vary from person to person and opinion to opinion, but everyone is able to identify beauty in their minds.

I was watching the Australian Open on the Golf Channel this evening just after returning home from the practice range. While practicing I had been focusing on keeping a consistent tempo and the level of tension throughout my body during my swing; just repeating in my head, “tempo, not tension” over and over the entire time I was there. The smoother the tempo and the less tension I felt the more graceful my swing felt, almost like I was waltzing through my bucket of practice balls.

If I had to sum up this weekend’s efforts into one line, it would have to be, “Big gulps huh?…Welp, see ya later.”

Man, talk about a doozey. Had you asked me Friday after the practice range what I thought I’d be shooting come Saturday and Sunday, I would have told you 89 with ease. I was hitting every one of my irons great and my driver even better. I had developed a mishit on about 10% of my wedge shots but thought I had solved it.

Everything happens for a reason. Whether we like it or not, what happens right now will directly or indirectly affect what happens in the future. Spending most every lunch break on the putting green could lead to lower total putts in a round. Shooting a 103 on Saturday could lead to you wanting to play again on Sunday and shooting a 98, which might happen to be your first time breaking 100 with your new set of clubs. And a really bad shot could somehow subconsciously explain what is happening with your body that is leading to you hooking a large amount of your golf shots.

I was oddly enough fortunate to have all three of these scenarios happen to me this weekend. I played my staple course, Balboa Municipal, on Saturday afternoon and ended up shooting a 103. While I did it with only 31 total putts, my poor ball striking sat heavy on my mind.

When we’re kids everything is new to us. With each new experience we gain a little bit of knowledge about the world. These little bits of knowledge stick with us and in conjunction with our environments form our personalities, opinions and routines of how we do things day in and day out.

So true is the golf swing. When I first started taking lessons with Tim I knew nothing about how to correctly swing a golf club. We started with the basics. I learned proper grip technique, how to address the ball, correct posture, alignment, swing plane and so on.

Expectations… they can improve or ruin an outlook on just about any situation; whether it is a movie, a first date, a raise… or a round of golf. By setting high expectations we run the risk of turning a positive situation into a negative one if it doesn’t meet these imaginary benchmarks, even if the overall outcome is relatively good.

Take going to a movie for instance. I learned years ago that if I want to enjoy a movie no matter how good or bad it was according to everyone else, I had to go into with no expectations what so ever. This has allowed me to become one of Brendan Fraser’s biggest fans and enjoy a plethora of other movies I wouldn’t have, had I gone into it expecting greatness (even though I think Brendan Fraser is great).

How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich:

1) Get peanut butter, jelly and bread.
2) Slather peanut butter on one piece of bread
3) Slather jelly on another piece of bread
4) Put two pieces of bread together
5) Nom, nom, nom, nom

How not to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich:

1) Get peanut butter, jelly and bread
2) Smash all items together as hard and fast as possible and throw them to the right or left of you, or any other direction but straight
3) Get angry and scream about how you are the worst peanut butter and jelly sandwich maker that has ever lived
4) Get more ingredients and do the exact same thing and expect different results

One of the best things about getting away for a week is getting out of the daily routine. Forgetting about work, stress, daily anxieties that might have crept up on us, and just chillin out max and relaxin all cool. This is perfect for resetting our minds and bodies and getting the much needed time off that in turn will lead to better efficiency in whatever we are putting our minds to in the long term when we return from this break from reality.

For me obviously, this includes my golf training. I felt like I was getting very frustrated and putting a lot of unneeded pressure on myself. So taking a week off in Costa Rica was exactly what I needed. Coming back to the states, I felt relaxed, rejuvenated and ready to take on the world. Then came my alarm at 5am on Monday morning. My first pre-sunrise work out in over a week. My first 7am putting practice. My first day back to work, and so on.

Have you ever read a book and literally every two or three pages your saying to yourself, “man, I do that all the time”, or “sheesh, this guy hit it spot on”. Zen Golf: Mastering the Mental Game was one of those books for me.

One of the things I wanted to achieve while on vacation this week was finally get around to reading Zen Golf and once I started reading it I was instantly hooked. I finished it in three days reading as much as I could when I had some down time (I have it on my computer so I wasn’t able to read it out on the beach).
First things first, no matter what level you are at in your golf game, I recommend you go get this book and read it ASAP. I’m going to try and keep this short as Maria is staring at me right now with the “get off your computer, we’re on vacation” look, so needless to say, my writing time is limited.