I felt the need to document my play from this past weekend’s Greater Hartford Disc Golf Open due to just how miserable my performance was out there. With luck, being forced to fully review my rounds will help determine just what has gone awry in my game and prevent such a catastrophe from happening again in the future.

Wickham Park is a tough course when it wants to be. It’s not an easy course by any stretch, but it can certainly not be unthinkable to come out close to course par (58) if you’re playing intelligently and some of the top guys can routinely finish a round around 54 or better. In the first round I threw an abysmal 66. First hole of the day (Hole 2, for those that know the course), I duff my drive low into the ground where it grabs an edge and skitters Out-of-Bounds. I take my upshot, leave myself 20′ from the pin, and proceed to miss the putt to wind up with a 5. Next hole no real drama, but don’t take the 3 I wanted and card a 4 instead. I miss 15′ birdie putts on holes 4 and 5. I par 6 and 7, and my head is in a good place so far still for the round. Sure, I’ve already missed 3 putts inside 20 feet during the first 4 holes, but being +3 isn’t the end of the world and this can still be a decent round. I then take a 5 on hole 8 after a less-than-stellar drive lands on the edge of the treeline and I have trouble making a respectable upshot (and after approaching again, miss yet another 20-footer). Par out hole 9, then go OB on 10 into the boccee court. Hole 11 card a 5 after taking another OB penalty going over the wall on the right side of the hole. 3 on 12, 4 on 13 after my upshot doesn’t clear the last guardian trees on the edge of the pocket and I miss my putt, 3 on 14 as well. Hole 15 I putt low into the basket to try for deuce (third missed deuce attempt from inside 20′ this round). Hole 16, late wood just outside the pocket means I take a 3. Hole 17, 4th missed deuce putt from inside 20′ as I putt low yet again. Hole 18 my drive somehow doesn’t make it up onto the second plateau, and trying to muscle a TL with an uphill runup into a headwind I stand the disc up and go into the road for another OB penalty: miss the comeback putt due to the bushes between me and the basket, despite making a valiant run at it - another 5. Hole 1, miraculously no drama and the round is finally over.

I never got into my own head all round, at least as far as my spirits were concerned. I kept telling myself that every shot was a new shot, and I truly believed myself. But it was one of those rounds where anything that was going to go wrong, did go wrong. I rarely take an OB penalty at Wickham, especially knowing the course as well as I do when you know exactly how a disc would need to be thrown from almost any spot on the course in order to find it, and I took 4 that round. My rounds are usually pretty good at damage control (mostly), and I had five 5’s on the card - the OB’s certainly didn’t help that fact though. Four missed birdies all within 20′, and other missed putts from inside the same range for 3 or worse. I’m not a great putter, but that was abysmal stats even for my usual track record.

Round 2 was nothing special, shooting a 62 from the long layout (long tee 1, long pins on 7/9/18) which yes shaved 4 strokes off on a layout that probably plays about 3 par strokes tougher overall. And despite feeling fairly tepid about my 62, it still came back with an unofficial rating of 958. The first round? 893. Yes, I’ll say it again, 893. -sigh-

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 past Saturday I played in my second disc golf event of 2008, the Mount Kisco Ice Bowl. The Ice Bowl series is a tradition held every year in the disc golf community with the tag line “No Whimps, No Whiners” [sic] held during January/February as charity events meant to help raise proceeds towards local food banks. On top of that, it’s a great excuse for golfers to get together in the colder months for some competitive play. After a solid 6-8″ of fluffy stuff hit the ground from Thursday night through all of Friday, the weather held out for Saturday to provide a nice balmy high of 35 degrees with no precipitation to speak of.

I had never made it down to the course at Leonard Park in Mount Kisco, NY, but the two primary things I had heard about the course were certainly true: the baskets were ancient, and the tees were pretty bad. Honestly, I feel that I would have preferred uneven tees with roots and stumps in them to the slick hard-packed snow we were forced to deal with all day though, since most teeboxes offered certain death (or at least a broken broken bone) if you tried to get too aggressive since you would almost guarantee yourself a slip & fall. The baskets were indeed old, some dating back to the installation of the park in 1977, with shallow baskets and modified chain assemblies which had second sets of chains added in after the original single-chain models were installed. My biggest beef with the baskets came twice during the day when I had putts go clean to the bottom of the basket when suddenly the disc just hopped up and out over the rim. Putting is not the strongest part of my game in the first place but I would much rather beat myself up over dumb putts than curse a P.O.S. basket that simply throws the disc back out simply because it isn’t made/designed well as a catching apparatus.

My play for the day was sub-par by my own standards: I only would have taken 2nd in the Advanced division, and was 5th out of 6 in the Pro field by 7 strokes (10 from 3rd, 12 from 2nd, and 13 from tying for the win). During the first round I simply couldn’t put anything together, and played mediocre golf throughout. I finished 10 strokes over par, which for 19 holes essentially equaled “bogey, par, bogey, par, bogey, par…” for the entire round and honestly that was more or less what my scorecard looked like. Survived the entire first round without a single birdie, and was actually DFL by 2 strokes over the lunch break. Round 2 fared better, with two birdies on the card (missing my 20′ deuce putt which would have strung together the turkey) but my game bonked in the last 6 holes and I racked up a quick couple of bogeys to end up +4 on that round.

Going into the day I had brought a good deal of some FLX plastic that I had heard good things about for the snowy/cold conditions, and for the most part I was very pleased with the results. I threw a FLX Challenger almost all day as my putter/upshot disc and I found it to have a great feel in the cold and it flew very much like a Wizard so my learning curve was real low since that’s my usual putter of choice. The FLX Buzzz was a great addition to the bag, providing a little more feel of my disc for those mid-range shots where I didn’t want to pull out the Super Roc (although that did have some shining moments itself that day). The FLX Surge stayed in the bag since it was white - bad color for snow - and I really didn’t trust myself to throw an untested driver in tournament conditions. The FLX XL was put back in the car after a few throws (only 1 in competition, the rest during warm-ups) when I wasn’t liking how hyzer it was coming out of my hand. I’m hoping I can dial that one in at least by next weekend’s event.

Next weekend is Tournament 54… 54 holes in 1 day, 18 holes on each of three courses. If the snow can melt a little bit and I can get out of my own way, I know the payout goes to the top half so I’m looking to save some face and hopefully bring home a little green next weekend. We’ll see how it goes.