Match Play Qualifier

Yesterday was the biggest tournament of the semester so far, and one that I really wanted to do well. The top 16 players from each Tour qualify for the Match Play Tournament, and the winners of the Tournament get a free round at the World Tour golf course (definitely the nicest course in the area, it's 18 holes of replicas of famous golf holes around the world, they have Amen Corner from Augusta, 1 and 18 from St. Andrews, I really wanna play there) 70 dollars in gift cards to the golf merchandise store, and Order of Merit Points. I played a course called Man O' War. It's a difficult course. There's island greens, lots of water all down the fairways and in the landing areas, and deep bunkers. I decided going in that I wasn't going to focus on the tendinitis in the left arm, I was just going to focus on each and every shot and hopefully qualify. I ended up shooting 85 and that was good enough for 14th of the 16 that qualified. I'm assuming I'll play the kid who was 3rd, and I think I can beat him. He's in my classes, and he just got promoted to our Tour from the crappy Tour below mine, and I think his 78 he shot yesterday was a fluke. So I'm confident I can advance past him. Once I signed my scorecard and walked out to my car to load my bag in the trunk, I realized how bad my elbow and wrist hurt. So I'm happy I got through the qualifying, and now I'm going to play again today with 3 kids from class who wanted to play with me, and then I'll take some rest from golf like I did last week.

We had our first quiz in the Rules class last Friday, and boy was it a doozy. Here's a link to a rules quiz exactly like what I'll be taking through this class. Try the 10 question basic, it's a different language. http://www.usga.org/playing/rules/rules_quizzes.html
I got 4 out of 10 right, and that was the class average. Once everyone finished, Lew explained that this would be the easiest quiz we take all year, and because we've never experienced a Rules quiz, he would take how many we got right and add it on to our next quiz. So it was extra credit, thankfully. But he said the more quizzes we do on that site I posted, the better prepared we'll be. So I'll do a few of those each day. I got an e-mail from the Academics Counselor today during class and it turns out my Business teacher is letting me get that transfer credit I've been trying for. John e-mailed me a syllabus from the class I took at ICC last spring, and the counselor said it wasn't good enough, but he let the Business teacher decide, and he thought it was comparable to the class I was in right now. That means no more 7am class!!!!!!!! That is such a relief. Now I can watch the finale of Highway 18 and the premiere of Big Break 10 on Golf Channel tonight! Normally I'm in bed before those shows start, but now I don't have class till 11 tomorrow!!!! Ahhhh how sweet it is.

The Lesson/Rules of Golf Class

We've been in school for 4 weeks now, but each Friday that we've gone to our Rules class, our teacher has been gone. His name is Lew Gach, and he's one of the top Rules Officials in the entire world. He's been gone on Friday's because he officiates professional tournaments. So this week he was actually here to teach. He's even cooler than the other pro's on staff. He has officiated over 300 PGA Tour, Nationwide Tour, Hooters Tour, Buy.com Tour and Nike Tour events in his career. He's walked inside the ropes with all the top players, including Tiger. At the start of class, he gave us a run-down on his credentials, and one of the smart-alec kids in my class pulled out his rule book and interjected "What's rule 26-2?" Lew didn't miss a beat, and he spit out the entire rule word for word. There's 34 or 38 rules in the Rules of Golf book, and they're all a special golf lingo, and he recited it exactly how it was in the book. We were all shocked. The rest of the class consisted of us asking him what the ruling would be for all sorts of circumstances we've been in. He knew the answer to every single one of them. He had a pretty cool story about an encounter with Lee Trevino he had in 1979. Lew was in charge of the scorer's tent at a Tour tournament, so when the players walk off the 18th green, they go to the scorers tent and make sure their scores are correct and they turn their score cards into the officials. On the 13th hole, Trevino's ball plugged, landed in its own divot, and Trevino wouldn't touch his ball until a rules official came over to tell him what to do. For a Tour pro, that's a pretty common issue, so normally, no one calls for the rules official. At the end of the round in the scorers tent, Trevino's playing partner asked him why he called for the official, cuz he knew what to do. Trevino responded "It's not my job to know the rules, it's HIS!" and he pointed directly at Lew. Lew cooly responded "Not today Mr. Trevino. I'm just here to make sure you added your scores correctly." I thought that was pretty cool. And Adam, I don't know if you know who Slugger White is, he's the Rules official we see on TV whenever a player calls for a ruling, but Lew is on the same level as Slugger, which is as high as it gets for a rules guru. So by the time I graduate, I will have learned from the best person available to teach us the rules of golf.

After that class, I had my lesson with the pro. The lessons are conducted in the indoor simulators that we have, there's 2 simulators in the room with the smaller putting green, and the third simulator is connected to the massive putting green in the other building. My lesson was on the smaller putting green, and luckily for me, the Ryder Cup was on during our lesson, so we both looked up to watch whenever we heard a big roar on TV. This is the same pro that worked at Valhalla in the 1980's (Valhalla is the course where the Ryder Cup is being played right now) so he was really interested in what was going on, but he didn't let it get in the way of my lesson. He really switched me around in what I was doing, and I think it'll help my putting out considerably. One problem I've seen with some of the pro's is that they make you feel kind of dumb for doing some of the things that you do in your golf swing, but this guy didn't do that. He showed me some things that I was doing that made me pretty upset with myself, but he didn't care, he just wanted me to know that what he was showing me will fix those problems. So I'll hit the putting green tonight once the Ryder Cup coverage is over, and hopefully I'll be more comfortable with my putting in time for the tournament on Monday. This tournament will be stroke-play, but next week is our match-play qualifier, and I really want to qualify for that because match-play is pretty awesome. I wanna get in there and feel the pressure you can put on your opponent and feel the pressure my opponent puts on me.

Tournament Numero Uno

The moment I had been anticipating since December when I decided to go here finally came on Monday: my first tournament. My tour was playing at Indian Wells, Myrtle Beach's "Golf Course of the Year" in 2004. It's the same course I played 3 weeks ago for my first open play round. I was so nervous on the first tee. I was playing with a 4th semester student and two first semester students. They all went first and no one hit a good shot, so that made me even more nervous for some reason. I stepped up and hit the best shot of my life, considering the circumstances, a perfect 3 wood right down the center of the fairway. I was left with 105 yds to the green and I hit a wedge on the green and 2 putted for par. Once I made that par my nerves calmed down considerably, so from that point on it was me against the course. The format was not the regular stroke play, it's a format called Stableford. Instead of making par or making birdie or bogey, you get points based on what score you made. Par is worth 2 pts, birdie's 3 pts, eagles 4 pts, and bogeys 1 pt. Anything worse than a bogey was 0 pts. To make things even wierder for a tournament, we had to play 6 holes from the blue (hardest) tees, 6 holes from the white (average) tees, and 6 holes from the red (ladies) tees. It was some golf holiday so they wanted us to play Red White and Blue tees in honor of that. Logically, I played all four of the par 5's (the longest holes) from the red (ladies) tees. That made them considerably shorter, and it paid off because I birdied 3 of the 4 par 5's and bogeyed the other, so that's 10 pts on those 4 holes alone. I hit the ball really well but once again struggled around the greens. I only ended up with 21 pts while the winner of my tour had 35, second place had 28, so that kid was too good for this tour anyway, so I wasn't too dissapointed about finishing 14 pts behind first. My 21 pts was good enough for a tie for 15th place out of 35 guys. I'm not too dissapointed, because it was my very first tournament, but I should have done better, and this next tournament on Monday will be different, trust me.

Today, my Short Game class and my Golf Fundamentals class met at the home golf course for what they consider "lab." I consider it practice/fun, but that's neither here nor there. For Short Game, we partnered up and we each hit 10 foot putts and the other person had to check the fundamentals of our stroke, setup, alignment, all that good stuff. The teacher went around to all of the groups to offer his advice based on what he saw with our stroke. Once we finished that, he had us all hit the same 20 footer for 10 extra credit points. So, one by one we all attempted the same putt. Only 1 kid made it, and we moved on to a 60 foot lag putt for the same 10 extra credit pts. The teacher went first and left it 5 ft from the hole, so he said whoever gets inside of mine gets 10 pts, no matter how many people do it. I think 5 or 6 people got those pts, I was unsuccessful at both putts, but I don't really care. So that was fun.

Once Short Game was over, we proceeded to the opposite end of the driving range where a whole bunch of third semester students were waiting for us. We were paired up with one of the third semester guys and we started hitting balls. The point of that was so that they could start getting used to giving strangers lessons. They had a checklist of things to do with each of us so they can see what grips we try and how it affects our ball flight. I was paired with a pretty cool kid from Minnesota. He had me hit a few balls with my normal grip, and I hit 3 perfect shots. So he had me strengthen and weaken my grip to see what happened, and it was wierd and different but it gave him a chance to work with me and suggest things that could help adjust to that change. I wasn't forced to keep any of the things he showed me in my normal swing, but for the duration of the lesson, we were supposed to just try whatever they told us to do. So we worked through the suggested things to try in like 10 minutes so he had me keep hitting balls cuz he really liked my swing. After a while, he had me hitting huge hooks and huge slices to see if I could. He had me aiming at a car in the distance and curve it at the yardage markers, it was a lot fun. I actually gave him some pointers because he hits the ball a lot higher than I do, so he asked me how I hit the ball as low as I do. I got a lot of possitive feedback from him about my swing, so I walked away very happy with the class. We'll have 4 more of those "labs" throughout the semester. I can't wait.

I have my first professional lesson tomorrow at 11, and I'm really excited. It's with the same pro that I played with last week. He told me to schedule a lesson with him so we could start working on my putting, and that's exactly what I plan on doing tomorrow. Lower scores, here I come!

My first Hurricane (ok fine, my first Tropical Storm, big deal)

While living here in paradise has its perks, it also has its downsides. Exhibit A: Tropical Storm Hanna. Whenever I turned on the TV and stopped on either the local channels or the weather channel, all I was hearing about was Hurricane Hanna, Hurricane Ike, and Tropical Storm Josephine making there way to the southeastern US coast. So I was keeping a close eye on all three storms as the week went on. On Wednesday, the academy decided to cancel Friday's classes in preparation for Hanna. That was pretty sweet, but it ended up kinda sucking because the weather wasn't good enough to hit the driving range, and the outter bands of the storm didn't get here until about 9 that night. So I was just waiting around for the big storm. By the time I passed out, probably around 11 (side note, I haven't been able to stay awake passed 11 the whole time I've been down here, hard to believe eh mom?), the winds were whipping and the rain was coming down sideways. So I had some nice background noise to help me sleep. Right around 3:30am, I was rudely awakened by Hanna and her 60 mile an hour winds howling through the complex. So I kinda sat there to see if my windows would shatter or not, and within about 10-20 minutes, the winds completely stopped. I learned later in the morning when I woke up, that Hanna made landfall at 3:45am IN Myrtle Beach. So the winds stopping signified the eye of the storm was right over us. And then another 20 minutes after the winds died, they picked right back up again stronger than before. That was a pretty cool moment when I realized I was in the eye of the storm. I always hear how the eye is NOT the spot to be in. But since it was only a Tropical Storm and not a, say, Category 5 HURRICANE, I was pretty stoked to have been right in the middle of the storm. So once Hanna passed on through, I turned my attention to Hurricane Ike. Luckily for me, Ike made a slight turn to the southwest and decided the pound the Bahamas again and head for the gulf. And Josephine was destroyed out at sea by wind shear, so it appears that all the hurricane excitement for me is done for now, but it was fun while it lasted.

On Tuesday, I played my first round of golf at a course called Indian Wells. It's definitely the nicest course on our 15 course rotation, and we were randomly assigned to the courses, so I was pretty fortunate to be playing the nicest. The three guys I played with were pretty cool guys. The guy I rode with had just moved down here the night before, and he's from Ann Arbor, MI. He's in my classes so we've been keeping in touch, which is nice. The other two guys were from Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and they weren't very good. I beat those two guys, but the guy I rode with beat me, even though I thought I beat him when we were done. He just has a really ugly swing, so it made me think that I was better, but he beat me by 9 strokes. I did not play well, but the greens and fairways have different grass than the midwest does, and it's a lot harder to play on. It's no excuse for me playing as poorly as I did, but it's something I'm going to have to get used to in order to bring my scores down to where I'm used to. Tomorrow, we play with one of our Pros at our home course Whispering Pines. Again, we were randomly assigned Pros to play with (we have 10 at the academy) and I was assigned with the coolest of the bunch, in my opinion. He's my golf fundamentals teacher, and having been in two of his classes already, he seems like he really knows his stuff and he should be fun to play with. I play again on Tuesday at River Oaks Plantation, not one of the nicest courses in our rotation, but it's definitely nicer than the courses back home, so I'm not complaining.