Less Golf, More Often

One of the great things about Salt Lake City is a climate that allows for clearly defined seasons. We get all four. Winter is entirely too long, fall is definitely too short, spring is way too fickle, and no one can really agree on summer - though, you will never hear a word of complaint from me. Golf season slowly comes and quickly goes with the change of seasons. Some enthusiastic sorts choose to start the golf season a little sooner than others, or to end it a little later than most, and there are the few fanatics that play locally in every month of the year. But, for the most part, November through mid-March is Utah's off season. As great as the golf-indulgent, warm weather months are, though, there are some real benefits to having a clearly defined off-season.

To start with, November and December end up providing great opportunities to re-introduce yourself to your wife and kids. While the holidays typically garner all the credit for promoting large amounts of family time, the inability to hit the links may be the more responsible perpetrator. Additionally, these dismal, cold weather months give extended down time allowing you the chance to reassure your boss that you are capable of a 40 hour work week, and to build up your depleted vacation time. Another area not to be taken lightly is the inadvertent productivity, born out of utter boredom, which can cause you to accomplish a few things that you have been putting off since . . . well, the beginning of golf season. And finally, there is an inexplicable phenomenon where your swing somehow cures itself over the long winter layoff - to the point that your first round of spring regularly ends up being far better than your final few rounds of the previous year. This is an oxymoronic tenet that I have chosen to call Less Golf, More Often.

I have decided that adherence to this principle could be the key to improving my game, I just haven't figured out how to implement the idea. This paradox has manifested itself over and over again throughout my golf experience. Here are a few examples that you may be able to identify with.

1)  After the above-mentioned long, winter layoff you tell your wife before you leave the house not to ask about how you played when you come home, due to the long moratorium. Yet, upon playing, you find that your swing and your score far exceeds all of your expectations and effectively ruins your golf game until mid-summer by severely, and instantly, over-inflating your sense of potential relative to par.

My 72 at The Ledges was a classic "better than expected" round to start the season

2)  You arrive at the first tee of the first course of a multiple-round golf trip. You have just spent the entire first leg of your expedition incessantly informing your buddy about how terrible you expect to play initially, that you are just looking at the first round of the trip as a warm-up, and that you just hope to be playing well by the final few rounds. Without fail, though, you go out and shoot 6 or 8 strokes below what you thought possible for the "warm-up round," make yourself salivate over your probable scores for the rest of the trip, and proceed to shoot progressively worse until you have to abandon your scorecard on your last round just to survive your cataclysmic collapse.

Did I mention my 72 to start the season? I need a round like that in September.

3)  Your extended family or friends have heard from your wife for years that you like to golf and have therefore tried repeatedly to get you out for a round with them. Knowing, they like to play a few side games and place a few handicapped wagers, you have expended an equal amount of effort telling them how you have only played a round or two in what has been a very busy year, and that you would really rather not play until you have had a chance to go to the range, hit several buckets of balls, and make some attempt to resurrect a very rusty game. Inevitably, however, they succeed in getting you out before you ever have a chance to make it to the range or to try to develop just a bit of short game feel. You remind them again at the course of your out-of-practice condition, repeatedly, and finally seem to convince them that you need all the help you can get. Inexorably, however, you go out and shoot the round of your life, win all the side bets, take all their money, and wind up labeled as a "sand bagger" for the indefinite future - and never get invited back for the chance to show them that it was an absolute fluke.

4)  You have just spent money that you don't have on a new driver or on Golf Digest's recent recommendation of the latest and greatest set of irons. Again, your expectations are realistically low, you have consciously allotted time to grow accustomed to the new look and feel, and you are just hoping to hit the ball well enough to begin formulating an opinion on whether or not you made a wise buying decision. In spite of your caution, however, you go out and hit the club or clubs like you have been playing them for years. If you were demo-ing them, you immediately go buy them. If you had already purchased them, you congratulate yourself on your terrific judgment, and triumphantly throw away the receipt. Then . . . you find that you are never able to hit them as well again. Not ever.

Do these strike a chord? I am guessing that to the long time golfer these examples ring as familiar as cleats on a cart path. All of us have experienced this paradox and the resulting unanticipated euphoria in the moment, as well as the crushing and perpetual letdowns that they always seem to generate. The key in avoiding this boggling beginner's luck, of sorts, would appear to lie in the sought-after, but elusive, "bottling" of that first-time experience. No doubt there are infinite, and plausible theories on the psychological and physiological factors that cause this condition, as well as continual conjecture on the cure or cures. For my purposes, though, I am convinced that that the answer exists in the intangible ability to consistently play Less Golf, More Often.

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