How Good A Golfer Are You?
Apparently the average golf score is somewhere around 106. When you consider that many golfers are shooting scores in the 70s, 80s and 90s this must mean that an awful lot of men and women are shooting in the 110s, 120s and above. Perhaps that sounds familiar?
But let’s face it; no matter what we score most golfers are looking for the Holy Grail - the one thing we think that will suddenly have us shooting much lower scores. There is a whole industry producing gizmos, gadgets and DVDs all promising that this is it! I’m sure we’ve all bought a few things, some good, some bad. And yet we still keep looking, watching the latest infomercial of the Golf Channel convincing ourselves that a few dollars more on the credit card won’t hurt that much.
But if you seriously want to improve your game there are no short cuts. You need patience and commitment to practicing the correct things, perhaps taking some golf instruction, and sufficient on-course experience. If you go to the range once per week and play two or three times per month you will need a more long-term view of your golf game and accept that perhaps it is going to take some time before you are hitting low scores.
But, just how good a golfer are you? Notice that I am not asking you what your average score is, because although it tells us something it does not give us the whole story.
I’m going to assume that you play the same golf course, or courses, regularly, and I’m hoping that you still have a few scorecards in your golf bag or hidden away in a drawer. Get them out. If not, then start doing this from now on. We are going to play a game.
Look at your scorecards and write down the best you have scored on each hole. You will find that the total for 18 holes is better than anything you have ever scored. The really cool thing, however, is that this is how good you can be. OK, so maybe you normally shoot a 6 on that tricky par 4, but twice you made par - and you can see over every hole just how good you can be. Of course, putting it all together in one round is a different story, but even with your current game you can see what is possible.
We can get so down on ourselves sometimes about our game that we forget that we can actually play some pretty good golf. And this takes us onto the second part of our game.
The scorecard doesn’t lie, but we are going to go a bit deeper into what is happening in your rounds by keeping an additional golf score - trust me, this has the potential to revolutionise the way you feel about your golf.
Every spiritual tradition tells us that what we put our attention on grows. So we are going to start putting a wee bit more attention on the good, the positive.
So, now we will start to record our good shots. That also includes those that involve good course management.
For example, I was playing a course in Guanajuato, Mexico recently and was having one of those days. I think the balls that I had bought from the shop had been birds in their previous lives as they seemed to have a definite attraction for the high branches that lined the fairways.
So, here I am looking down on my ball and the pin is about 140 yards away but with many tree trunks in-between. So what do I do? I could take a rescue club, keep it low and pray for the best, but the odds of hitting more wood were really high, although what a shot if it came off. What did I do? I took my putter and gave the ball a good solid hit out onto the fairway. OK, so you’re not likely to find that on the Greatest Shots of Mahadeva DVD (don’t worry, there is not another DVD about to hit the shelves, although this one would be mercifully short!), but it was a good, sensible shot that meant that I was safe with a chance to save par, rather than cursing myself deeper in the woods.
So that shot was recorded, as was, I’m happy to say, the lovely one I subsequently took to get it onto the green. The hole score was a 5 (two putts), and on my Good Shot score I had a 4 (two good putts, the one to the green and the knock out of the trees).
Once you start to do this your course management will become better. Looking to play the maximum number of good golf strokes in a round is a very different mindset from trying to avoid bad ones.
So, even if you walk off the course with your regular score, you may find that a surprisingly high number of those were good shots. And how different would knowing that make you feel?
Mahadeva Ishaya is a monk of the Ishaya Order, and also an avid golfer. He is the publisher of http://www.golfinthemoment.com which is committed to helping golfers of all abilities realise that mastery of the “inner game” of golf is not only vital, but simple and enjoyable.