EnderinAZ

Oh man, I haven't thought of Ivar since I quit flying through SeaTac. Best fast food clam chowder ever!

Interesting discussion. So I just went out to the garage and grabbed a wedge. Gripped it lightly and did some 1/2 swings while trying to turn my hands over after the impact zone. Easy. Gripped it my normal and tried again. This time it took a bit of effort to start the turn over in the right spot. Last try I was strangling the club. Very difficult to get the club to do anything. Try it. I would be interested if anyone has different results. Cloudy and cool today and was a nice day to walk. My right calf is still sore from the brutal cramp on Friday, but good enough to walk. Picked up the Four Foundations of Golf and have started the read. And, hence I changed my expectations for the round. I worked what I spent time on the range this weekend and it worked for a while. Now when I look at the grip conversation and my little experiment I am almost positive I started bearing down on the grip pretty hard, because I started to bring the clubhead open to the ball. I could not get the club to turn over. Normally this onslaught of faded and 2 sliced balls would have cratered my round. Instead, because I could feel my hands not coming closed, I simply changed my grip a bit. This straightened the ball out, I had good distance with a little draw and had a lot of fun. My expectations were that this weekends driving range work had not shown enough success to make to the top of my swing habit stack so it would eventually fade. When it did, it was no big deal.

Oooo cold days like that are good in some ways and bad in others. The good is the 3 hour 15 minute round where the course is essentially yours. The bad is the extra two hours it takes to get warm again once you get home. Oh yeah... goose grease on a green? Can you say Nasty?! Good morning spies, and happy new year! Phoenix is featuring a thermal inversion this morning and the smoke from last nights fireworks is still hanging thick in the air and not a breath of wind. Air quality according to Accuweather is 142 and in the unhealth category, so the wife is staying in doors today. So Saturday's golf practice survived Saturday night's sleep and reappeared on the range on Sunday. We shall see if it translates to the course this afternoon!

I am in the NO category. All the stuff earlier posters say they watch golf for: How to get out of trouble, shot making, set up, club selection make up what 4% of actual televised golf? The rest of the time you get a 5 minute overhead view of 1, yes just 1 guy looping around the flag stick on a 22 foot putt only to see the ball roll by the hole. Why not put some cameras around the green so we can see the subtly breaks too. Heck they hide cameras in the bases now in pro baseball. Then zoom you are on a tee box for a 12 second look at someone on a tee box. Whack they hit the ball, you see if fly and land. And suddenly we are on that camera overlooking yet another green watching another golfer circling endlessly around the flag, or we will spend two full minutes on a caddy/pro combination as they chat on the fairway. Are they talking about golf and the next shot or the caddies youngest son's birthday party they are missing tomorrow? Who knows? Might as well focus on a patch of the rough, you know right up close and see if you can watch it grow.

Another place to look is the Ten Percent Happier app/web site. The site is dedicated to moving through life's trials and tribulations with the help of little meditation sessions. 10 - 15 minute directed meditations on how to get passed being pissed off at work, or on how to be kind to yourself, and some on just how to do mindfulness effectively. I use the "Walking Mindfulness" techniques all the time on the course. Allows me to enjoy the day while playing badly and grind away back into scoring well by just enjoying the process of making a golf shot.

Had my knee done in January. If he is 3 days into recovery he hurts a bit and is bored. Take him with you to get the pizza. Gets him out of the house and out for a bit of a walk that is just long enough to really make his day. Hope everybody has a safe and happy new year and does not become a statistic. I read a blurb on a local news site this morning that there were over thirteen thousand deaths due to drunk drivers on new years day in 2021. Scary eh? Nice and cool here today, 64 for the high. Sun and some clouds will be the recipe for my range practice this morning. I really want to play well tomorrow. Lost three balls on Friday. Two in the water and one in a palm tree. Just keeping those balls in play would have dropped my score from a horrific 89 to a reasonable 83.

Went back to the range today. Still trying to find that sweet spot that produces a repeatable swing. Buggered up shoulder has been making it difficult since the last surgery. Found one that repeats huge distance that is straight or with a draw and an occasional hook. It is a shoulder pain avoidance swing that starts with my hands way out across the target line to the right and finishes with my hands and arms way way behind and left of the target line. Goes far, but nearly impossible to aim. So took the feeling of openness, of having room between my torso and my arms so as to approach the ball with a small inside out motion and applied to to several swing changes. One that seems to work well and is very repeatable is to push both hands and arms as far down the target line and away from my torso as possible. This gives me plenty of room, and supplies a natural lag on the downswing. My hands stay quiet, my hips and torso can snap quickly or move deliberately and I can give the ball a good accurate whack with any club in the bag. Now I am going to go sleep for a few hours. It is a coin toss if that feeling of a swing that worked, one I can feel as I write, will be there in the morning. We shall see....

Chipping and pitching reasonable after a long layoff. I would call that a successful day in and of itself!

How did I play today? Well like crap with some really rotten luck. Clipped the top of a palm tree and watched the ball disappear into the ball of growth at the base of the fronds and NOT COME OUT! Lost ball, 2 strokes. Two holes later ball is falling nicely to the edge of the green which is on the edge of a pond. We all here an audible crack as the ball hits the ground and leaped out into the water. On the back on a slippery slopy green I putted a down hiller. Good putt but snuck past the hole and looked to slow to a stop a few inches below the hole. Except it didn't. A fifteen foot come backer which I missed. Then with 5 holes to go and my game coming along nicely, 4 pars in a row, my right calf started to cramp and I am walking. I limped along for a bit then got a ride from one of my foursome. Yeah I was glad to get home and put this day behind me.

Yeah, that just warm up is probably a very good idea. I tried to take what I worked on on the range today to the course. Nope didn't work. Took 4 holes to get the range out of my head and just play. Dumb!

Oh yeah, this I know. Implementation is the issue!

My big thing when I am playing is I finish the pre shot and set up a little off. Ball an inch too far away, I am standing just a little too upright, hanging onto the club with the "old" grip, something like that. I see it, and know it is wrong. I feel it and know it is wrong. I even go as far as telling myself it is wrong, that this is the old swing set up, and I just swing away. Then the ball does not fly the way I want it to. THIS is the habit that MUST go away!

Birdie balls a lots of fun! They fly just like a golf ball and the farthest I ever hit one was about 50 yards. Tough, durable, but will stick in tree branches. My place in Oregon was 5 acres of Juniper trees and they would temporarily eat my birdie balls. Then we would get a day of wind and I would find them on the ground again.

Changing swing habits is a long and difficult process. What you are able to change on the range, for me at least, seems to take a whole lot longer to change on the course. But, I was doing the same yesterday in anticipation of being released from "holiday with the family mode" and able to go play with men's club today. Got my turn first while retaining spine angle down really well on the range and today will see if that holds today on the course or will the old swing habits slowly take over (and ruin) my score today.

Good morning all! We take number 2 son to the airport at 7 this morning and I officially get the keys to the golf cart back! Playing at 12:30 this afternoon, long after the frost has lifted. Supposed to be up to 70 or so today (but we all know that high temperature will peak this afternoon about 2 for maybe 12 minutes) so I might wear shorts. But the wonderful hot summers here have melted off anything that could be misconstrued as northerners skin and I shy away from cold like a house cat avoiding water. So maybe shorts are not in my future for a couple of months yet.

Good morning spies. Cold here in Mesa this morning, 43. Clear and will get into the mid 60s after a lengthy frost delay this morning. No matter family is still here so no golf until Friday when they leave. Love my son to death but, his presence is interfering with my golf!

Do you swap them out yourself? I love shaft experimenting, but I am not very good at pulling graphite shafts. Guess I need to get a Maltby shaft puller

Oooooh that is such a nice putter! It is hard to believe it feels so good and balanced on the end of the shaft when it looks so odd and is so big. When I first picked one up to try I thought I had a shoe box on the end of a stick! My putter might be in jeopardy if I could putt the Armlock of that putter. My Sim2 is now on the high side of 4 years old so it also could be on its way out of the bag.

Hmmmm I wonder if that would work for a new driver?? Merry Christmas all!

Time to head to the range and do a little "measuring".

That is NOT a Christmas present I would care to acquire!

Good morning spies. Going over to the course after it warms up some. There is frost on my neighbors roof this morning so I do not want to tread on the grass. Anyway going to go check the depth of the river that the back 9 became Friday night. Hopefully a great deal of the water has made its way off the course. I normally walk , and let my Navigator haul my clubs. I may have to forgo that for a week or so as to avoid slogging through the mud and sod that is so soft I sink up over the tops of my golf shoes!

Not playing today...tomorrow .... maybe Monday. Home course is under water.

Aren't we all?? Frozen tee boxes? A friend of mine used to bring a portable drill motor with a foot long 1/8 inch bit. We all laughed at him until he stepped up onto the first box, drilled a hole, and slid his tee into the proper depth. After that we demanded he leave the drill on the box until we had all teed off.

Horrible coffee in the morning does not set the tone of the day well.... I worked in Algeria for a good number of years at a natural gas production site. The Algerians are great people but their view of coffee was: on Monday fill a monster electric coffee urn with water. Take 2 full 10 ounce jars of Nescafe Classico and dump into the urn. Stir with a large wooded spoon. Tuesday top off urn with a bucket of water and add two more jars of Nescafe. Repeat every day until Sunday evening where they cleaned the urn. By Saturday the coffee was truly vile.