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 8.2. Welcome to his midlife crisis.
Tournament golf is hard. I spent the last few days fully engrossed in competitive play from walking inside the ropes with Jacob Bridgeman during the Biltmore Championship PGA Tour event (more on that below) to playing in my first competitive tournament. The PGA Tour event was enlightening. The amateur one was sobering.
I’m coming off a string of some pretty good golf so I had relatively high expectations when I entered the Skyview Open, a two-day tournament that celebrates the history and culture of Black golf. I played well while traveling during a work trip and I followed that with a couple of rounds with some high-school buddies where I got to show off my new game. Before I started this project, my buddies and I had matching handicaps and we finished every round we played more or less even. This time around, I beat them both by more than 10 strokes and I didn’t really have my “A” game.
So I was feeling good when I signed up for the Skyview as an experiment for this project. I wanted to see how my game held up under intense pressure and the Skyview seemed like the perfect opportunity to test my game in a legitimate tournament atmosphere. It’s a two-day event with a competitive amateur division and a separate pro division. It typically attracts the best golfers from the region so I had no delusions of winning the thing but I thought I would at least put up a decent score. I was familiar with the course and knew it had tricky greens but forgiving fairways. In the past, I’ve hit it long enough to have easier approach shots on the par-4s and a couple of the par-5s are reachable in two for me.
That is not how the tournament played out.
The first day started well enough. I was nervous as hell but managed to rein in that restless energy and began my first 18 with three pars which included the hardest hole on the course, a long par-4 with a tough approach shot to an elevated green protected by bunkers and burly rough.
I was doing everything well. Finding fairways, sticking approach shots and two-putting just like you’re supposed to. And then I carded a triple bogey after hitting my tee shot into thick rough. At the time, I didn’t realize I could take an unplayable and I wasted three strokes trying to get out of the tall weeds.
I rebounded with a par but the lingering emotional trauma was inescapable. As I got deeper into my round, my former miss with the driver crept back into my game and I started pulling the ball off the tee into trouble. My iron play was good and I was putting well but it doesn’t matter when you keep finding your ball just beyond the out-of-bounds stakes.
I was paired with a couple of really good golfers on that first day—a 26-year-old relatively fresh off of a D2 college golf career and a middle-aged dude who won the tournament the previous year by posting back-to-back 69s. They were both sticks but even with my early triple bogey, I was hanging with them through the front nine thanks to some pars and one fortunate birdie.
But I stacked up a couple more triple bogeys on the back and finished with a 90. It was a high score but I knew I was hitting the ball well enough to make some improvements on the second day. I would play it safe off the tee and hit away from danger. With that strategy, I could drop several strokes during my second round.
I believe this is what experts call “naivety.”
I did in fact keep the ball in play more often off the tee by accounting for my slight pull with my alignment but the rest of my game fell apart. My irons were inconsistent and I caught a case of the three-putts.
Side note: I’m convinced that putting is 1% skill and 99% headspace.
I finished with a 94. Even worse than that score? I wasn’t having fun. My playing partners were great and it was a beautiful day to be on the course but my swing felt so “off” that I started to dread the holes ahead of me. I felt trapped. I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to withdraw so I played the last few holes lugging my existential dread with me, finishing bogey, par, bogey.
I drove away from the tournament with a newfound respect for golfers who can play well in those situations but I also spent some long, uncomfortable moments questioning my involvement in the sport altogether. Why am I wasting time trying to hit a tiny ball into a hole at the end of a field? I should spend my midlife running marathons or painting landscapes. Sitting in a field painting sunflowers sounds nice.
The frustration and self-doubt lasted a full 12 minutes but by the time I got out of my truck, I recognized my disastrous tournament for what it was: just some bad golf. And it wasn’t the only bad golf I experienced recently.
I mentioned getting to walk inside the ropes with Jacob Bridgeman in the Biltmore Championship. I got to see first-hand as he collected birdies on his way to victory. But I also saw another pro go in the other direction, scrambling for pars and bogeys as he hopped from bunker to bunker. He’s a professional golfer and he was playing very human golf right in front of my eyes.
And that past Skyview champion I got to play with during my first round also had a bad day. He regressed on the back nine, collected an eight somewhere along the way and decided to withdraw from the tournament on the 18th hole after losing his ball in the woods. It was obvious this guy was good at golf but he didn’t have it that day. Just like I didn’t have it that day.
I’m six months into this golf makeover and my swing and game are still very much a work in progress. I’ve cut a lot of strokes off my handicap and I’ve made some improvements but nothing is cemented. I’m still grooving in new movements and old swing flaws still creep back in when I’m fatigued or under pressure. That’s just how it is right now.
And in a certain way, shitting the bed in a tournament feels like a right of passage. It’s incredibly uncomfortable because you’re stuck out there alone with the terrible “C” game that you brought to the course that day and you’ve got a hole it out 18 times over. It’s a very specific kind of torture. And it’s possible that I really like it.
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 if his golf game can travel.
Leave A Reply