Still, A Bad Day of Golf is Better Than…
I’m playing this week in the Pacific Amateur, a golf tournament in Bend. This is the 15th annual Pac-Am, and I’ve played in 14 of them.
Golfers play three rounds, and if you play well enough to finish in the top two in your flight, you qualify to play in the championship round, usually at Crosswater, but this year the final round will be held at the Nicklaus Course at Pronghorn.
I’ve qualified to play in the final round twice, and after my round yesterday, I have no idea how that could have possibly happened.
I’m a 12-handicapper who can hit occasional good shots. But most of the time I’m hitting shots that cause me to wonder how I could hit such bad shots when I’ve been playing this game for more than 40 years.
After a first-round 91 at the Sunriver Meadows Course, I followed it up with a stellar 96 yesterday at Aspen Lakes in Sisters. During one three-hole stretch, I carded an 8, a 10 and a 7 – 12-over par for three holes.
I was hacking short shots, long shots and in between shots. One drive went 30 yards. One chip that I needed to go 10 yards went 50 yards.
It reached the point of being completely embarrassing, but you have nowhere to hide. I’m playing with guys who usually shoot in the 80s, sometimes in the 70s. Most of them know how to hit chips and pitches and shots from the sand. For whatever reason, I’m a mental midget who’s clueless around the greens.
And then, of course, I played a practice round with some of my buddies yesterday afternoon at Lost Tracks, and what happens? I shoot an 82 and was only 2-over on the back. I hit every shot like I knew what I was doing.
How could that happen? Well, by then I’d downed several Corona Lights combined with a couple of straight shots and an IPA, so I was just a little more relaxed. Plus there was no pressure. And three of us played the back side in an hour and 15 minutes – we were whipping through the holes, and I had no time to think about anything but hitting the next shot.
We’ll see how it goes this morning.
