Graham Averill has turned 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 started this project as a 13 handicap attempting to reach scratch in a year. He is now an 7.8. Welcome to his midlife crisis.
Ups and downs, man. Golf is a freaking roller coaster.
For instance, I suffered through a pretty significant down a week ago when I played terribly during the first tournament I’d ever entered. Honestly, that tournament was the crescendo at the end of some fairly poor play. I spent a couple of weeks leading up to that competition playing middling golf—not bad but not good. My swing didn’t feel great. My approach was a little off. And my handicap was rising.
The difficulties with the tournament just put a punctuation mark on it all and forced me to question my decision to play golf at all.
So, yeah, I was low.
And then two days ago, I walked 18 holes with my teenage son and played the best round of my life, shooting a four-over-par 76 on my home course. The round took a chunk out of my handicap and all of a sudden, I was riding high and optimistic about the future.
Ups and downs.
It would be easy to gloss over the downs and dismiss them as part of the process—every golfer has bad days so why dwell on them? But progress isn’t always linear. Sometimes, you get worse before you get better and I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have had the best round of my life without those bad days.
The poor tournament play sent me into a spiral of self-doubt which forced me to reach out to my coach for guidance and support. My main issue was the driver. I was pulling every ball off the tee hard to the left, finding deep rough. I sent my coach videos of my swing and we got to work. He diagnosed the issue—a severely closed stance that only got more closed with every pull off the tee—and immediately had me address the situation with my alignment. My closed stance was exacerbating my tendency to pull the ball so his solution was to open my stance and try to induce a fade.
We started by taking two alignment sticks and running them like tracks, one next to the ball pointing just left of the target and the other along my toes pointing further left of the target. Without changing anything else in my swing, I started hitting balls with that new wide-open alignment and the impact was immediate. I worked through my bag, hitting slight fades with my wedges and irons. When I got to my driver, the slight fade turned into a big, ballooning slice. I sent more videos to my coach and he had me step closer to the ball. The slice turned into a baby fade.
I spent a couple of days experimenting with the new setup until I was comfortable enough with it to take it onto the course. Opening my stance so drastically on that first tee was scary. My miss is to the left but here I was aiming left. But I committed to the change and even told my son that I was going to play a fade off the tee all day.
And that’s exactly what I did. I hit a beautiful fade that landed just shy of the green on the opening hole, a short par-4, and then proceeded to land fades in the fairway all morning, finishing the front nine at one under par. I lost a little distance off the tee but the consistency was off the charts.
I fell apart for a couple of holes after making the turn, scoring a couple of double bogeys after sending a couple of shots out of bounds, but I managed to right the ship and finish strong with a series of pars and one birdie thrown in for good measure.
It was delightful, and really encouraging, largely because I don’t think I had my “A” game. There were the aforementioned errant strikes that went out of bounds but also a couple of chips that I misplayed and putts I’d like back.
I know I’m never going to have a perfect round of golf but I could see room for improvement in this round while still scoring well. That’s encouraging.
Let me be clear: in no way do I think we’ve suddenly “fixed” my driver. I have a feeling the big stick is going to be a constant battle throughout this process. It’s frustrating but I feel that my game is wholly dependent on how I’m hitting the driver. If I keep it in play, the rest of my game is good enough to score low. But my driver misses are huge and costly and they can quickly tank a round. I’m hoping the fade will minimize those misses but I know there will be more lows after this high wears off. I’m sure of it.
But that’s OK. That’s golf. You gotta enjoy the roller coaster ride, celebrate the victories and learn from the losses. So far, so good.
Dig deeper into one golfer’s struggle to get better at golf in middle age and read last week’s Scratch By 50 where Graham learns that tournament golf is hard.
https://mygolfspy.com/news-opinion/scratch-by-50-tournament-golf-is-different/
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