OK, results from T54… I can sum everything up by simply telling you right now that I finished one stroke out of cash. Sigh. Now, I wouldn’t mind that fact if I had played well and “oh man, one more stroke was all I needed” – but this weekend I felt like I played mediocre-to-sub-par golf and then find out I was a stroke out of cash.

T54 has the players complete three rounds of golf in a single day – no small feat in the winter, and especially tougher when we had a snowstorm dump a lot of fresh powder over New England overnight. In fact, it was almost a miracle I made it to the tournament at all since I left my house at 5:15 AM and didn’t make it to the park’n'ride (about 40 minutes from my house normally) to meet up with other carpoolers until just after 6:30. The highways were a disaster, with nothing being plowed for the first 20 miles of my drive and everyone was just single file trying not to spin out or slide off the road; in hindsight I probably should have just stayed home and not risked it, but I kept moving on and eventually made it to the first course with 5 minutes to spare before being sent out to play. Phew.

Every round played very similarly, with a whole lot of “what the…” on both sides of the spectrum. Round 1 was a great example, where I took a 4 on the monster ~800′ hole that finishes uphill, with O.B. lining the full right side of the hole and trouble on the left both close to the tee and again once you get near the pin. A 4 is a good score in good conditions, let alone when there is fresh snow everywhere, the discs are having a tough time staying dry, and the teepads were in rough shape. (The volunteers did dig up the tees, but that course only has natural tees so they could only be made so good – mostly you had to be careful that you didn’t slide on the snow-pack.) I follow that hole with a 4 on a short, ~225′ downhill ace run. Sigh. And so it was all day.

Overall, I think the only part of my game that didn’t abandon me was my midrange game. My upshots have always saved me from having much worse rounds, and when I could play my shots to the base of the pole and know that I didn’t have to worry about skip-aways or weird pick-up-and-roll events it definitely helped. Unfortunately the flip side of that coin meant I got very nervous standing over almost any putt over 8′, and I even blew about three putts during the day from inside 15′. The drives were not terrible, but often times I ended up playing a game of inches were the difference of an inch left or right was the difference between making a gap and having a perfect drive, or hitting something and being stopped very early on the fairway. Even some holes, like Hole 12 at Pyramids, I took a perfect drive off the tee and as the disc started to fade back to the ideal spot at the top of the hill, I got a little kiss back to the right off of a tree. Fading out naturally would have been a beautiful long anhyzer upshot to the basket, and instead I got a jacked angle from off the fairway, blew my “out” and ended up carding a 5 for the hole.

It was a frustrating day as far as my performance went, but I had good guys in my group all day and I definitely had a good time. Playing in the winter definitely has me jonesing even more for the spring/summer months though.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Disc Golf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.