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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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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Did you ever notice how it always snows right before a ski event?  Not two weeks ahead of time, when you’re doing course prep work, but right before it?  When you specifically don’t want it to snow?

Well, we finally got some new snow over the weekend…

… and the X-Games start Thursday.

And it’s supposed to snow again Tuesday.

So now I’m getting calls to “volunteer” to help slip the courses, starting with practice on Tuesday.  Through the weekend, I presume.  (Though ESPN apparently pays you to help.  Which in itself is a pretty foreign concept.  Getting paid to help out at a ski event?  How corporate can you get?)

On the bright side, one of my kid’s friends left her bike in the yard this fall, and despite of repeated pleas to take it home, it’s still out there.  It made for the subject of my wife’s Christmas-card painting this year.

And now that we’re done with football– except for the Super Bowl, which I don’t count as real football– I’m starting to wonder when I’m gonna start clicking on the Golf Channel for brief, surreptitious fixes.  And I’ll be wondering how soon my son’s going to mention the possibility of driving down to Battlement Mesa for a quick round.  So far, we’re settled into a pretty good ski groove.  But that’ll have to end, someday.

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I know it’s only the end of January, but hope, as they say, “springs” eternal.  And “Spring” is just around the corner.  Somewhere.

And so this year I’ve got yet another exercise-related plan for improving my golf game.

Last year, all I heard was “core training.”  So I’ve set about doing more abdomen-related stuff, in hopes that all this “core values” talk really makes sense.

Intuitively, it seems reasonable.  I’ve found that I strike the ball better– and more consistently– when I’m aware of the mid-body resistance in both directions of the swing.  Like coiling and uncoiling a spring.

The hardest part, really, is keeping my balance in those 3-inch heels.

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courtesy of Steve Morrison.

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Regardless of Tiger’s troubles, as far as I can tell, they’re still holding The Masters this year.

Which reminds me of a story about all the mindless interviews that get conducted by non-sportswriters in the 2 weeks leading up to each year’s Super Bowl.  And one player, whose name I can’t remember, after pointing out that there were over a billion people in China who didn’t even know the event was about to take place, added, “And if this is the most important football game ever played, how come they already have another one scheduled for next year?”

This is a photo from the par-3 tournament they hold every Wednesday at The Masters.  Nobody’s ever won the par-3 tournament and also the 72-hole main event in the same year.  True or False?

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