April Golf: April 2010

On April 15, 2010 I played at Rockaway. It was my father's birthday, and I am going to always try to play on his birthday as a celebration. I shot an 83 on a nice, spring day. I have a new GPS system for measuring my shots and I will probably try to use it to get an accurate guage of what clubs I should be hitting. Interestingly, my red hybrid hits the ball about as far as my four iron. I probably don't need both clubs. Anyway, nothing really memorable about this round.

Selected Rounds of 2009

This was the best round of the year. Actually, this 2 over par 74 was my best round ever at Rockaway River and my second lowest score at any course at anytime. Obviously the key was the 5 consecutive one-putt leading to birdies on 17 and 18. The putt on 17 was about 40 feet. It was very nice.

My Best Round of Golf

In June of 1994, I was in Ireland with my family and my father. We had brought over our golf clubs and had played the Rosapenna course in Donegal but we were busy sightseeing and visiting and had not had another round during the week we were there. On the day before we left we had attended the funeral of Uncle James, and afterwards we needed to head back down to Dublin to catch our flight back home. We decided to stay in the lodgings of the County Louth Golf Club, about a half hour north of the airport. Nellie and Sam and I had a small room with two very old and lumpy beds. My father had a room down the hall. We had arrived late in the afternoon, and this allowed us to take a long walk after dinner across the golf course over the dunes to the beach. It was a beautiful evening and as we went to bed, my father hinted that he might wake me up early for a round of golf. The course was a good one, it had hosted the Irish Open in the past and several other prestigious amateur events. Well, true to his form, my father knocked on my door at 4:30 and we were on the first tee 15 minutes later. It was cool and clear and strangely calm. There was no wind at all. This was a pure links course, and its degree of difficulty is certainly correlated to the breeze. But it was a beautiful morning and off we went. Obviously, we were the only two on the course. As per our normal routine, my dad and I hardly spoke as we walked and played. We had played hundred of rounds of golf together and rarely did we talk about anything, including golf. It was just always that way and we were both comfortable with it. I am sure it is by playing with him that I learned to never show too much emotion on the course, that if you hit a good shot, the right thing to do was to be humble about it. And if you hit a bad shot, it was even more important to keep cool. Anywho, as we played on, I hit good shot after good shot and after the front nine I was only one over par. At the eleventh hole I made a silly bogey on a par 5 to go to two over par. But on fourteen, I hit an approach close and made the putt for a birdie 3. A couple of more pars and on the 17th hole, I hit the green on the long par three, but I was 30 feet from the pin. The long putt was a double-breaker but low and behold it found the bottom of the cup and I felt my pulse quicken as I was now at even par. As I walked towards the hole to collect my ball, my father looked at me and said, "it looks like your getting all the rolls today". No high fives, no fist pumping, no yelling. It is just the way we did things and I loved it. But there was one more hole to go, and I played it with my heart in my throat. Sure enough, I made the par on 18 to shoot the best round of my life. It might always be the best round of my life. We headed to the clubhouse and we found Nellie and Sam having breakfast. It was not even 8 o'clock and we had played 18 holes. Amazing. Three hours later, we were all on the plane back to the good old US of A.