The weather was perfect today in CT and I knew I’d find myself at the range. I ended up with 3 buckets of balls and really started to work on my swing. I’m focused on the turn and trying to avoid the sway. I tend to chunk the ball when I’ve swayed so at worst, I’ve got myself a warning system in place and ready to go.

I spent about an hour hitting balls. picking out targets and rotating through my clubs. I think I must have gotten tired towards the middle and started really hitting the ball poorly after a great start. After 5 solid drives, my driver went back into hibernation. After 3 or 4 pop ups and mishits, I put it away for safe keeping back in the bag where it will remain for most of this season.

I also think I’ve found that I’m rotating my hands too much at impact, unlike last year at this time, I’m hooking the ball consistently which is the opposite of my normal slice. I know my faithful slice will return at some point though - it’s lurking around. In the meantime, I’ve got to find a way to get the club head square at impact again.

Distances are a bit hard to gauge at this point but I did manage to hit bunch of balls cleanly with my PW, GW and LW.

PW is 100-110 yards at 90-100%. I just can’t seem to hit it much further than that.
GW is 80 yards at 90%.
LW is 50 yards at 90%

After the range, I hit the putting green and took about 100 strokes, setting balls up at various distances and lies. My left hand low grip feels great on the course, but I do think I need a new putter. Because of how thick and solid it is, it seems as if there is very little room for error in speed. A tiny bit extra sends te ball flying, and a tiny bit less lands me a ridiculous distance from the hole. That said, my new grip, along with a slightly new routine seems to have me on target and closer to the pin than I can remember from last season.

Finally, 30 minutes chipping - my least favorite practice drill. Happily, I did well using my PW as my primary chipping club. I’m confused if that’s the right club to use, but I did fairly well with it.

After a 2 hour practice, I feel like I should be getting ready to try out for my high school golf team - too bad I’m 38 and not in high school. Or good enough to make any sort of team.

Now it’s time to watch some golf on TV and relax before dinner!

Hit the range today for a bit and really focused on trying to keep my wrist flat at the top of my swing. It took a half a bucket but I finally was feeling it. It was subtle but when my wrist stayed flat at the top, I felt like my swing was much more on plane and was actually swinging around the arc better.

The other thing I noticed was how smooth my swing felt when I was able to keep my wrist flat. Super interesting to see how such a subtle movement can affect my swing.

Can’t wait to hit another bucket this weekend and work on it some more.

What I did well:

• flat wrist action
• hit solid pw, gw
• felt I hit the driver well
• solid contact on hybrids

• Slow down!
• Stay focused
• turn and don’t sway - when I make a full turn with my shoulder and don’t sway, I make clean contact with the ball. I sway way too much and too often
  

Tashua Knolls 16th strategy
Originally uploaded by msirkin

Ok, here’s an example of how I’m going to score better this season…

Shot 1: Lay off the driver. On this example hole, the 16th at Tashua Knolls (495 yards from the whites, par 5) I can regularly hit the ball about 200 yards with my 3 hybrid. The tee is high up above the fairway, so I get a good extra 10-20 yards.

Shot 2: Use my 5 or 6 iron to punch the ball up about 150 more yards in the middle of the fairway. From here, I’d normally try to use my 3 iron or hybrid and try to get it up close the green. If I was lucky, I’d have a 30-40 yard chip to the green (a shot I’m not so great with). If I was unlucky, I’d be way right and OB.

An alternative if I was really playing well would be to use my hybrid 5 here and try to skip shot 3.

Shot 3: Use my pitching wedge to get the ball as close to 100 yards out as possible. I’d actually prefer to under hit this shot to make sure I was 100-120 yards out.

Shot 4: Pitching wedge from 100 yards is about my best shot. Worst case here, I chunk it and try again from 80 yards. Best case, I’m putting for par and happy with a bogey.

I can’t wait to get back out there!

Been thinking more and more about putting since it’s the only thing I’m able to practice regularly during the winter. I read a recent article about grips and have decided to try a left hand low grip this season. While I eventually to buy a new putter with a bit more feel (the thing I have now is a fricken brick), a new grip might just be the ticket.

Left hand low feels really awkward, my hand muscles don’t seem to want to adjust to the feeling, but I’ve been putting about 50 balls a day in my basement from different distances and it’s feeling pretty good.

My guess however, is that new putting grips more than anything encourage you to think good thoughts as your brain tries to adjust to the new grip. We’ll see how it plays this season!

TASHUA KNOLLS WILL OPEN ON GOOD FRIDAY, MARCH 21, 2008.

Sweet!!!

The sponsorship offers are rolling in… just working out the details before I make an official announcement…

I’m planning to spend all day with the wife and when she asked me what we should do, I suggested hitting the range to hit a few balls.

I forgot that she doesn’t play golf.

Oops.

TaylorMade.com has a very slick (but who knows how good) custom fitting application on their web site. They let you plug in tons of stuff like typical distance, shaft type and accuracy (you drop balls on a fairway, err, in the rough). Once you finish, you click the recommendation button and voila.. time to buy a new driver!

The site is suggesting that I get the r7 CGB Max, 9.5 loft. Yea, not this year (unless TaylorMade wants to be my first sponsor and sends me one)…

As I was reading this post on The Grouchy Blog about Tilghman and Faldo being corporate shills, I decided that I’d like an official golf sponsor.

I offer several key sponsor benefits:

1. Complete coverage on my blog that includes gear review, ads and more
2. I’ll wear or play with whatever you send me (and blog and twitter about it). I play about 25 rounds a year on various CT and Myrtle Beach courses.
3. You get great PR for sponsoring perhaps the worst golfer possible.

Golf is Hard (the blog) is wondering and opining (is that a word?) which version of golf is actually the hardest.

1. Real golf.
2. Tiger Woods 08 on the Wii
3. Fantasy Golf

Which is harder?

Real Golf
Real golf is pretty darn hard. I’ve been playing for about 10 years and have yet to break 90. Umm, 95. It takes dedication, talent and tons of time to get better at real golf. I’d say out of 10 stars (10 is Tiger Woods), It’s a 7.

Tiger Woods 08 on Wii
Not that hard at first - but I tried my game on Doral and shot +15. In real life, I’d probably shoot +35. Real golf is harder for sure. I’d give Tiger 08 on the Wii 4 hard stars out of 10.

Fantasy Golf
So here’s the deal with fantasy golf. It’s super easy when Tiger is playing, otherwise it’s hard. Really hard. Not harder than real golf, but I’m giving it a solid 5 hard stars out of 10. Take this past week for instance… I had to change my lineup on Sunday because just about everyone else I had picked either “MC” (missed the cut) or was playing horribly. I stuck Allenby in just before the deadline and nabbed 14 quick points. Thanks to the weekly preview, I managed to give Luke Donald the start.

So there you have it.. real golf it turns out is quite a bit harder than Tiger 08 on the Wii and Fantasy Golf.