Goofy Golfer

I don't know about you folks, but I`m getting really pissed at this .. last friday was the umpteenth time I've had someone steal a ball that was in play.

This time we were playing one of the nicest courses on the Belgian coast when we were at the 14th par 5 , and I hit my 2nd shot to the green. My buddy overclubbed and landed a couple of meters behind the green.

When we arrived at the 11th, which teebox is right next to the 14th green there was an elderly guy , probably a local member practicing on the green...

By the time we were heading to the 14th green he was still there .. he picked up some balls from the green and walked of on the 12th fairway to search for more balls ...

Gone were my chances for an eagle .. and my ball..

Obviously the guy acted deaf and blind

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I was around Malaga last week and in the mood for 18 , the course closest to where we were staying was Baviera Golf so I called them and booked me a start time.

It was supposed to be a 20 minute drive, however with the new clubhouse (open since 2 years apparently) the 2 minutes from the highway are more like 7 with all the roundabouds you need to take to find the back of the course and the clubhouse parking.

So with less than 20 minutes before my startime I rushed in to the large clubhouse to pay my greenfee and pick up some rental clubs

The ticket said 13:14 ... almost ready to tee of an elderly guy showed up too at the first tee , apparently he was the first of 2 more to come and I was scheduled in with 3 german folks to play the course.

So no practice swings, "new" clubs .. and a course you never played before... obviously a recipe for disaster ..

I totally missed my T-shot .. rather than an expected 160-200 meters I usually do with MY 4 iron I shot like 120 or so ... but my ball was on the fairway .. unlike most of the other players balls. and it started rolling downhill..
Given that this was a shortish dogleg and I cut some corner I had only 130 to the green or so... I assummed I had to take more club with this set than I`m used to ..
I was right .. my second shot landed on the green, and after 2 puts I walked of to the 2nd tee with a par secured.

From there on my game got worse (what did you expect) ... Baviera is what it looks like ... a Tourist course .. fairways the sizes of ballrooms .. only your worst t-shot will miss the fairway .. and even then you're not really in trouble unless you have a tree blocking your swing.

My biggest problem however was getting used to the clubs.. the course isn't that long ... I can imagine people driving a couple of the downhill par 4's and on a lot of the holes my t-shots given the circumstances , a pretty dry course, should end up within pitching distance to the green, however none of my shots went the distance.. same with my approaches to the green.. I always lacked 10-15 meters .. even when taking an extra club ...

What struck me was that most of the water on the course was so fake... you'd see a man created , plastic covered hole in the ground filled with water. Ugly ...

Another annoying part was they way they blocked access for buggies to the greens. A white cord about 1 meter from the ground blocked access.. to my swing... Clearly some of the elderly people with buggies just drove around them and ignore the restricted area.

I think my first good T-shot of the day came at the 9th hole where I finally outdrove my fellow players (mind .. they using a Driver , me a 4 Iron) Needless to say my second shot reached the bunker 3 meter short of the flag after which I 3 putted ...

The second goot shot was my T at the 10th , a 160 meter Par 3, which I had no clue how to tackle with the set of clubs in my bag. A 5 would most certainly be to short and end up in the water, but given a good 4 , it would end up way behind the hole .. in the bunker, which I could only leave after 2 attempts :(
My crowd went wild because of an 170 meter shot ... I went frustrated coz of not getting out of the bunker ..

There's 3 holes on Baviera that I'd nominate in my favourite hole short list ..
The 12th, is a 532 meter (back tees) par 5 , where you have to negotiate yourselve a way trough a smallish valley ... not the typical footballfield size fairway but precision needed.

The Par 3 15th played from the alternative tees at the back of the 14th green, my fellow players told me you could choose between the 2 sets of teeboxen , they all went for the spectacular view... a 123 meter carry but probably 70 meter downhilll flight and somehow some people even assumed they needed drivers for that ... ok so there was some water in front of the green .. but nevertheless my first badly hit 7 iron was about 3 meter short of the green .. and my provisional 2nd was right at the back of the green. A well stroken 8 iron should have done.
I had to hit a provisional one as the hole played right into the sun and nobody had actually seen where any of the balls went.

The 17th is also worth a mention... It starts out over water and then you reach an uphill fairway .. your perfect shot lands on the top of that fairway where you have a clear view to the green which lies under you and where you realize it is a sharp dogleg.. however if you don't reach the top of the hill you have a blind shot to the green.. and I wasn't really pointed out the good direction for my shot .. .. but the views on that hole were great ..

I managed to end the last hole in the same fashion I played the first, par... so I was in happy mood when driving back home after almost 5 hours on the course ..

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Today was one of these days I was proud living in Belgium.

We're not YET used to seeing this on the European Tour, but we hope for more ;)

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Friend of mine just sent in this link on yahoo

Over the weekend, a golfer's routine swing in the rough at the Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine, Calif., struck a rock. Not so different from the way you play, right? Only this time, the impact caused a spark, and the spark set off a blaze that eventually covered 25 acres, according to the Steven Buck, General Manager of Shady Canyon Golf Course, and required the efforts of 150 Orange County firefighters, writes the Associated Press.

Now that sounds like fun ... setting the golf course on fire...
So that fire brings on a hole lot of questions regarding the rules .

Is fire considered a temporary obstruction such as temporary water ? Where did the poor guy have to drop his ball ? Did he find his ball back ? If your ball melts during a round , can you replace it ?

But most of all ... what was his penalty ? :)

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I think I played my worst round ever today ..

There's a couple of courses around Antwerp and somehow we never managed to play at Ternesse before... today we finally managed ...

The weather has been pretty dramatic for the past couple of weeks , so I wasn't really expecting a course in good state.. I was expecting temporary water on the fairways etc. (On days like this you really don't want to play at Bossenstein) .But they had announced good weather for today ..

Due to the not so great weather I hadn't played for a while

So let's start with the good news... we stayed dry ... not a single raindrop... and we even saw some sunshine.

My first 4 holes were ok .. I was playing my handicap as expected.. but then things started going downhill...
I missed a couple of shots and not a single put dropped... over the course of the day I had about 6 puts that lipped out and 2 that made a 360 turn before the dropped in the cup..

My shots were mostly first grass.. then ball and therefore I didn't have any distance ... most of my shots were about 60-80% of their regular distance ... when we finally figured that it was my ball placement a couple of good shots came back but there were fading way more than usually .. so I missed even more fairways ...

A round to quickly forget ...

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A couple of weeks ago I was travelling to the UK with some spare time
I had a meeting around 1500 but my plane arrived already at the airport around 0730,
Between the airport and the conference location there were about 10-15 golfcourses, afterall this was the UK. I decided toe plan ahead and try to make some online reservations for a T-Time, google maps learned me what courses were around,
so looking at their websites , I decided to try online reservations,

Most courses either did't not have an online booking form, had a broken link to an outsourced site , or you couldn't make reservations on the correct day, some of them only allowed reservations up to december 2009 , and so on..

So the next step was trying to mail to the email addresses on those sites, out of about 10 addresses tried, only 3 mailed back .. 1 of them told them they had no availble times on the day I asked, the other 2 just replied with a telphone number that I'd need to call to make reservations.

I checked the year.. indeed this is 2010, the internet has been around for ages, but apparently making online golf reservations from abroad still isn't possible.

Which brings you to the next problem, opening hours, I arrived at the airport at 0730 local time. I had a couple of phone numbers ready to call.. none of the courses / proshops listed opening times.. so I just started random dialing till after about an hour later someone picked up a line. They got lucky I jumped in a taxi and drove over there.

The weather was great .. being the first round of the year .. my scoring was ok... and I was fully relaxed by the time I arrived at the conference.

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When Ian Poulter told the world last year that he wouldn't return to the French Open because he was disturbed by a local photographer clicking away on his backswing , my first reaction was , ah common.. you're a pro.. you be used to this kind of things , and yeah offcourse that's going to disturb you.

After yesterday I know he's right ... I was playing at an event at La Tournette and a bunch of photographers were shooting pics of the visitors playing on the 17th green and the 18th tee, or the bushes around there..

I teed up , looked at the 18th fairway ahead of me and started my backswing, umpty seconds later the two photographers started clicking away and I looked at them, rather than my bal.. I missed my teeshot.. the ball ended up somewhere in the bushes ... Bummer.

Well.. for the rest of the day .. 2 pars and one birdie , on the 12th a 500m par 5 , a good t-shot, a good second shot and my approach was a pitch away from the green. The ball was lying about 25cm below my feet, but somehow I managed to perfectly pitch it within 3 meters of the hole and holed it out.

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And the season hasn't even started fully yet !
And what a birdie... the SI 1 3rd at the 3 Eycken, a hole where I didn't even make par over the last year. A 335 meters doglegish par 4 that requires a long t-shot between 2 three rows far enough to the left in order to be able to reach the green in 2. My teeshot was actually way to much right , but it was a longish one. I had no line of sight to the green, so I had 2 options, either to lay up and go for a pitch and put, or to really draw the ball around the trees and go for the green.

My brain decided to lay up, my body apparently decided to go for the green, with about 3 irons short to actually reach it.

So from around 140 meters front green I hit my iron 9 , it nicely shaped around the corner, out of sight .. I assumed I hit the bunker , big was my surprise when I saw my ball on the green about 1 meter from the hole , put, birdie ..

It made my day, and my week :)

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I wasn't planning to play any golf soon .. with the snow covered fairways many courses are closed . But my homecourse sent out mails this friday that it was actually open for play, well 7 out of 9 holes are open obviously wintergreens open ..even the wintercup and mondays senoirs games were planned to go on as normal as possible. I realized that this might be a once in a lifteme opportunity to try.

My first plan was to go on saturday but the weather didn't really agree with that .. heavy winds made the -2 feel like -20 Sunday morning I was the first on the course ... it felt a bit strange .. the teebox was covered with snow but the greenkeepers were busy cleaning the wintergreens .

After trying to force a tee into the frozen ground I realized I did have wintertees with me. ... I never saw my first ball fly .. but my 2nd ball was OK .. about 30 meters left to the green.

I Played 6 holes ... only 7 were open and the Green keepers were clearing the 8th green so I let them do their job.

I actually even played Par on the 7th hole , altough the snow was flattened on most of the fairways there were some parts where even if you hit it straight in the middle your ball would be lost ... I can imagine that when the snow starts dissapearing there will be plenty of balls found in the middle of the fairway or even 2-3 meters from the greens .. where today you couldn't find your ball anymore. With 10-15 cm of snow.. spotting the difference between a small imprint of what could have been a ball.. or just a bird .. it's almost impossible ..
even with the brightest colored balls.

Anyhow .. some pics are below and more in the Snow Golf gallery !

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It was 7 weeks ago since I had last been on the course, or even hit a ball. Way, way to long ... the first tee was pretty scary.. would I still know how to play ... the sun straight in our eyes, pretty difficult to see where your ball was heading .

Even with no idea where my first shot I was lucky enough to find it in the middle of the fairway I scored bogey ...

The wind was strong, much stronger than we're used to .. so on the 4th tee we ran into the first real problem, both our balls arrived on the 7th fairway I had to play my 2nd shot over the bushes separating both fairways only to arrive on the right fairway with our second shot. 150 meters front green, I pulled out my 5 iron, and told Peter "I'm gonna put it on the green", gues what . . I put it on the green, my GPS measured 173 meter.

The next hole the wind took my teeshot again, my ball enterred the deep rough from where I magically escaped with a 6 iron, well .. escaped .. I almost reached the green.

The 8th was also pretty scary.. a 130 meter par3 , into the wind so I figured a 7 iron should be able to do the trick , pretty straight ball, good direction but it catched the wind , it must have traveled aprox 170 meters, 120 in the good direction then 50 back in the wrong direction. A pitch should take me to the green, however the wind decided against it and pushed the ball into the greenside water. It was pretty dry so I could actualy clearly see and play it. Which I did. My sandwedge came out all muddy and so came my ball it rolled onto the green. I was too lazy to pick it up and clean it and 2 putted. When I picked it out of the cup I noticed it wasn't my ball bummer. The ball I hit was surely my ball I had seen my logo on it , the ball that came out however wasn't, weird.

The final hole was also pretty interresting, the wind took my ball to middle of the the 3rd fairway under the three that splits that fairway in tow... but with a clear line of view to the 9th green. With a no risk , no glory mentality I took out my 3 iron and hit a green in regulation from the wrong fairway. Too bad I three putted ;)

17 pts stableford over 9 holes after not playing for almost 2 monhts .. I was satisfied .. I just hope next round will be sooner :)

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