Time Off For Golf: Round 1, Room for Improvement

It was a good day to play golf. It was sunny and 75-ish with low humidity. Nice, nice, nice. I headed down to Old Hickory to begin my whirlwind golfing tour. That's a somewhat fancy course, but they always have coupons for cheaper play available via clickit, and it works out being a good deal in my estimation.

I should probably mention that my plan for all this golfing includes attempting to get some exercise by actually walking while I play most of the time. I even used some of my Amex points to get myself a sweet little collapsible cart to push my bag around on. It's made by Clicgear, and it's super cool. (The Girl, who thinks she is funny keeps claiming it looks like one of those jogging baby strollers. Naturally, I think that is far less amusing than she does.) Anyway, I was paired up with three other guys today, and Old Hickory has a lot of distance between some of the holes, and I didn't want to slow them down. So I ended up riding.

I was riding with an older guy named Steve. Steve is apparently a pretty good golfer, but he hasn't played much lately. At least that's what he kept telling me. He also decided that a couple of other guys needed explanations of what they did wrong when they hit a couple of bad shots. I don't know how I avoided his advice, but I don't think I would have received it very well.

Since the course is awfully tough, with sand all over the place and trees on most holes, I usually play from the white tees when I play with my boys, even though it's awfully short from there. Today, I played one set back with everyone else from the golds, and it's definitely a different course from there. Still, my driver, which is absolutely locked in on finding and flying over almost any out of bounds marker on the course, got confused today and managed to hit 9 of the 14 fairways. I even managed to put together a run of 4 pars in a row on the front 9 and shoot 47 on the outward set of holes, but the tougher back nine beat me up, and I shot 54 on them, for a grand total of 101. I couldn't putt or chip worth a damn today. So there's plenty of room for improvement in the next couple of weeks.

The shot of the day for me was absolutely plastering a 350 -360 yard drive on the third hole. It's nice to tee off to a downhill fairway with a tailwind.