Graham Averill will turn 50 this year and he’s freaking out. Instead of buying a motorcycle or getting a tattoo, he’s decided to try to get really, really good at golf. He’s a 13 handicap attempting to reach scratch in a year. Welcome to his midlife crisis.
“Make good choices.”
That’s what my wife tells me every time I walk out the front door. It doesn’t matter if I’m going to the grocery store or meeting the boys for a beer. “Make good choices.” I’m 49 years old and she treats me like I’m a teenager living in an After School Special destined to buy drugs from a hooker and drive drunk around Dead Man’s Curve while not wearing my seat belt.
I can’t blame her; I have a track record of making bad choices. Should I have another beer or go home? Should I buy the sensible sedan with great gas mileage or the truck that guzzles gas like a frat boy taking down keg beer?
I’m not proud of it but if there’s a fork in the road, I’m probably going to choose the wrong path. That kind of poor decision making can be problematic on the golf course. I see windows where there are none, think I carry my driver further than I do and consider punching out a formal sign of surrender. In short, I’m an idiot. I play the course with my ego and it gets me in trouble.
The good news? Making bad choices is an easy habit to break on the golf course and it can have an immediate impact on my score. It’s low-hanging fruit that has nothing to do with my swing or how well I hit the ball. And making better choices isn’t the only low-hanging fruit I can pick to lower my scores.
Putting
I am a notoriously bad putter. But I’ve gotten a little better in the last few weeks by doing the simplest thing possible: I started lining up my putts. It’s not magic. I’m just reading the green and pointing the line on top of the ball towards the spot I want to hit. I’ve never bothered lining up my putts before because I didn’t want to take the time to do it. If you’re going to miss, miss quick.
But you know what’s better than missing a putt quickly? Sinking a putt. Taking the time to use the alignment mark on the golf ball has helped me sink more putts, particularly in the six- to 10-foot range. Draining an eight-footer used to be a miracle that happened once every few weeks but now I’m dropping almost 20 percent of putts at that distance every round. That’s not as good as a scratch player (39 percent make rate at six to nine feet) but it’s a step in the right direction. And I’m still working on the skill. Aligning the ball takes practice and learning to trust my initial read when I’m standing over the ball ready to putt takes time. But I like the process of aligning my putts. It forces me to slow down and be more deliberate about every decision.
I’m losing 1.7 strokes per round to a scratch golfer on my putts overall so there’s still plenty of work to be done. I still need help reading greens and when I play a new course with different green speeds, my three-putts come back into play. But I’ll take the strokes where I can get them, especially easy ones like this. Every stroke helps.
Ego check
Pop quiz: Your drive missed the fairway and you’re tucked behind some trees. There’s a window with a direct line towards the green but it would take a hell of a shot. Do you go for it or do you punch out onto the fairway?
Obviously, you go for it because you’re not a bitch, right? Wrong. You punch out. It’s not the sexy play. It’s not the play you tell tall tales about at the bar after the round but it’s the play that keeps your score down. The idea of punching out goes against my nature which has been developed over time in our culture that tells you that heroes go for it. Always. But I’m slowly figuring out that the little punch shot out of trouble might be the most effective tool in my bag.
That’s a difficult assertion to back up with hard data. There’s no way to measure the impact of punching out of trouble as opposed to going for it in the realm of “Strokes Gained.” But the proudest I’ve ever been of my golf game recently was on a long par-5 when my drive ended up just right of the fairway behind a robust, full hardwood. I had a couple of options. I could try to wrap it around the right side of the tree with a draw and hope to land on the front side of the green. But if the draw didn’t work out, I would send the ball into the woods to the right of the hole. Or if I got too aggressive with my start line, I would send the ball into the thick of the tree in front of me. In other words, it would take a perfect shot.
Maybe it’s because my mother always told me I could do anything I want in life but I have no problem convincing myself I have that perfect shot in my bag. And yet, on this particular day, I was able to assess the situation objectively and discern that going for it was beyond my capability. I took my 5-iron and punched out to the fairway on my left. It was a beautiful surrender, trickling 90 yards in the general direction of the green. I was able to get on with a full wedge and two-putt for par. Hell, yeah!
It’s not going to show up on any app that tracks my game but that punch-out probably saved me two or more strokes on that par-5. I’ve lost track of the number of blowup holes where I go for it and only dig myself deeper into a pit of despair.
I haven’t completely set aside my ego. I still think my driver can cover distances it’s incapable of but maybe that’s my inability to do math at play. Numbers are hard.
I know that going after this low-hanging fruit has a lot of potential. It’s not sexy but there are strokes to be saved simply by playing smart and making good choices.
Damn it. My wife was right all this time.
Dig deeper into one golfer’s struggle to get better at golf in middle age and read last week’s Scratch By 50 to learn how Graham is coming to terms with his short game.
Golfmiburk07
2 months ago
First of all, if he’s working with an instructor for any length of time and his takeaway goes to the position in the picture at the start of the article, that instructor should have been fired already. Second, none of these articles have any tangible substance to them. We keep reading because it’s like a car accident, curiosity keeps us looking. There is no real data provided and nothing discussing rounds played and how he is actually improving. What’s the actual practice regiment? What are the courses played and stats from rounds to show improvement? Where’s the detail?
Sean
2 months ago
You would think a site like this would have some sort of editorial rigour and tell him how to present it better. It’s just written and presented in entirely the wrong way to document such a “quest”.