Another Slice

I’m still working hard on Dave Pelz’s approach to mastering the short game.

I was out a few weeks ago with a friend.  I was on the 4th fairway– dead-center, 90 yards from the pin– and I started to explain Dave’s clock-face visualization: essentially, if you imagine the face of an alarm clock, the position of your hands in your backswing can be anywhere from 7:30 (for very short) to 9:00, to 10:30, to high noon (or midnight, depending on your optimism/pessimism quotient).

Anyway, after explaining to my friend that a 90-yard shot should probably be a 10:30 backswing with a gap wedge, I proceeded to airmail the green by a good 20 yards.

My friend, barely suppressing outright guffaws, suggested that maybe I should’ve set my alarm a little earlier.

Anyway, as the accompanying photo portrays, my progress is often slow going.

And uphill.

I’m lucky I enjoy this game so much.

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I’ve been doing a bit of casual research into how one might imaginatively cheat in match play.

All this for the plot of my novel-in-progress, Risa and the Dog, and the Aspen Two-Million Winner-Take-All.

I’ve been a little surprised at how few really good suggestions I’ve garnered, when I’ve asked around for help.

So here’s one, courtesy of the late Andre the Giant: just strangle the guy to death.

You might recall the P.G. Wodehouse golf stories.  In one of them, a bunch of Roaring 20′s gangsters are playing a friendly round (with their bodyguards following at a discreet distance), and they come upon a dead body on one of the greens.  (I think he’d been gunned down, mob-style.)

Anyway, the corpse is in somebody’s line, so the gangsters very calmly solve the problem by declaring the stiff casual water.  Hence: a free drop.

That won’t work in the book.  I can’t have people getting wiped out on the 12th fairway of the Aspen Municipal Golf Course.  We have pretty relaxed law enforcement, but we still frown upon outright murder.

So I’ll have to keep looking for ever-yet-more-novel ways to cheat.  If you have any ideas, please drop me a line.

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And after they were done playing a single match that lasted three days, the guy who won had to play the very next day…  and lost.

What a surprise.

(Cartoon, as always, thanks to Steve Morrison.)

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So I’ve been spending a lot of time (actually, most of my time) working on the new book, RISA AND THE DOG…, and what reading I’m doing is basically research into ways you can cheat in a golf tournament.

So I was gonna write a blog post explaining what I’ve been doing, and went to Flickr.com to find a photo.

So I type in “golf cheat” and “cheat golf”, and all I find are cartoons and photos of Tiger Woods.  Aren’t we over that yet?

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Just when I was about to drag the shag bag out of the basement and hie myself out to the course to start my self-promised season-long regimen of working on my short game, THIS HAPPENS!

And it’s supposed to snow all through the weekend.

So what else is new?

The picture on the right, by the way, was taken in a more-pleasant time.  I couldn’t even consider getting out there now.  I’ve got a fresh 12 inches on my driveway, with much more scheduled to come.

Last week I was concerned that I seemed to be re-directing the club from the top.  Everything seemed strong, but tending to go left.  I guess I won’t be worrying about that for the next week or so.

(Thank heavens I spent 8 hours yesterday doing initial springtime yard clean-up.  I probably won’t be seeing anything but snow for a while.)

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They even have to post it in front of churches!  How do we manage to forget something that’s so elementary?

I recently suggested to my 15-year-old that he kick off the golf season by reading Dr. Bob Rotella’s Golf Is Not A Game Of Perfect.  Seeing as how the school year still has plenty of weeks (months!) left to go before summer vacation, he doesn’t see the logic in reading anything he isn’t absolutely required to read, for the moment.  But I’m hopeful he’ll get to it, sometime this summer.

Meanwhile, I’ve started in on Dave Pelz’s Short Game Bible. (1999)  It’s about 400 pages long, so it’ll take some fortitude to get through it all, but as we all know…

The key to scoring is what you do from 100 yards in.

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Well, the Olympics are over, and they were even better than one might’ve hoped.

Croatia, which had my favorite flag, wound up with 2 silver medals (men’s alpine super combined and slalom) and 1 bronze (men’s 10K sprint biathlon).

Our nearest neighbor, as far as I can tell (his parents live 4 blocks away) Chris Klug, competing in his 4th Olympics, finished a strong 7th in the men’s alpine parallel GS snowboard competition.

The cool thing about the Olympics– and you should be able to say this about almost every athletic competition– is that everybody who competes is an absolute winner.  True champion.  I realize that people get disappointed when a given individual doesn’t succeed, but it’s the commitment and the dedication that set these athletes apart from the rest of us.

This week, locally, we’re hosting a World Cup Paralympics event, the last of the season heading into the championships in 2 weeks up in (!) Vancouver.

My 15-year-old was out at Buttermilk on Sunday, and he said, “They go really fast!”  These, also, are world-class athletes, not “handicapped” people you have to feel sorry for.  They motor.

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All sorts of stories from the Winter Olympics.

Definitely, my favorite flag is the one from Croatia.  So far, they’ve won a silver in the men’s super-combined (alpine), which Bode Miller won.  (Super-combined is one run of downhill, one run of slalom.  It used to have 2 slalom runs, but they’ve shortened it.  Probably just to save time.)  And a bronze in the men’s biathlon 10K sprint.

Anyway, the flag reminds me of the 1959 movie The Mouse That Roared.  Peter Sellers in multiple roles, the duchy of Grand Fenwick declaring war of the USA and subsequently invading.  Their flag looks nothing like Croatia’s, but what the heck?

Croatia, you might remember, was one of the two large countries subsumed under the rubric “Yugoslavia,” by Marshall Tito after World War II.  (The other country being Serbia.)  Two sub-sets in one nation built out of seven historic countries, with different languages and even different alphabets.  And plenty of age-old grudges.

Anyway, the only one of them that I think of, when it comes to winter sports (other than sniper fire) is Slovenia, which struck me the one and only time I was ever there, as sort of a lower-elevation set for The Sound Of Music.  very pretty sub-alpine place.

Hope you’re enjoying watching the Olympics.  Vancouver, not surprisingly, is doing a fantastic job as host city.

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So they’ve had to cancel training for the men’s downhill at the Olympics.  Rain, sleet, etc.

Some friends went up there a few weeks ago– albeit for free– and were greeted with rain at the bottom, freezing high winds at the top.  And I thought to myself: Sounds like Stowe!

Anyway, back here in Colorado, we haven’t had an epic winter thus far.  (And I bought a new snowblower this past fall.  I should’ve saved my money.)  But at least it hasn’t rained.  You have no idea what rain can do to “dampen” the collective spirits in a ski resort.

Tomorrow morning I’ll probably have to console myself with a mere 6 inches of fresh snow on Aspen Mountain, or out at Snowmass.

I might even wind up, if I dip into the trees, looking a bit like the guy in the picture.  He looks like he could do with a hot chocolate.

Speaking of which, I was driving down my street the other day, and there was a guy walking down the street with his back to me, walking really stiffly.  And I mentioned to my wife, “This guy looks really cold.”

And we drove by, and it turned out to be a neighbor who’s a ski instructor, dressed in civvies.

And the reason he was walking so stiffly was because he’d had hernia surgery the day before.  And he said that he was planning to be back teaching in a few more days.

A Few More Days!  Imagine that!  I don’t know much about medicine, but that’s pretty incredible.  Years ago, I had a roommate who had hernia surgery, and he was laid up for months!  (Granted, his may have been more severe, and he wasn’t exactly a world-class athlete, but still…)

So whatever the mess our health-care system is in, at least sometimes they can actually heal you!

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