MyGreenJacket.com - A hacker's quest to play in the Masters

Dear loyal followers. I think we’ve reached the time when I need a break again. Things are starting to hurt; I am getting some weird aches and pains from playing golf almost every day. I am going to take some time out for the best part of three weeks, during which period I will be travelling overseas and doing a bit of regular work to earn some money – such as reporting at the Belgian Grand Prix. I won’t be touching a club.

Although it may seem alarming to take three weeks off at this stage, with my deadline to reach scratch just a few months away, I believe it’s needed. I took two weeks off back in May and it was an absolute winner. I resumed at the start of June and had the energy to keep at it solidly from then until now, with just about one day off per week. I need that recharge again.

What have I achieved since that last break? Well, I’ve gone from a 21 handicap to an 18 and I’ve also broken the 90 barrier on multiple occasions, so it’s been a useful period with much-improved scoring. Of late I’ve started putting like a pro and become deadly from inside 10 feet – just a pity about the sorry (but pretty typical for me) 9.63% greens in regulation stat I’ve had this month. This means that I’m normally holing big putts for par, bogey or double, hence all the putting form is doing is keeping my scores respectable. When you only have a birdie putt once or twice a round, even the best putter on the planet is going to struggle to keep it under 80.

My long game continues to be the bane of my life, in other words. My fairways percentage continues to hover around the 26% mark, and more to the point, my fairway misses are usually still getting me into major trouble a lot of the time.

Chipping still needs work. It’s often good and I get plenty of up-and-downs, but the bad ones are too bad. I’m talking double-chips: my average chips per hole where I chipped is 1.14. Not good – but that’s probably only one or two shots per round and not the reason I’m shooting in the 80s. On average I’m putting 1.72 times per chip and 2.15 times per green in regulation. The latter is some way off the 1.7 average of the best European Tour pros, but then when I do occasionally hit greens I’m very rarely as close as those guys.

The only stat that really seems to sum up my improved putting (and account for my improved scoring) is my 4.53 one-putts per round (34 in 135 holes) this August. According to the European Tour stats today, that would put me above the likes of Camilo Villegas, Niclas Fasth, James Kamte and Danny Lee. I’d be tied with Peter O’Malley in 153^rd on the one-putt stats. Granted, these are the lower reaches, BUT these, are professional golfers who regularly break par, so it’s nice to find at least one department where I have the edge on a US Amateur champ and a Presidents Cup player. The only real difference in my opinion is that their one-putts are usually for birdie or par at worst. Not for bogeys and doubles. Which tells me what I already know – it’s tee to green that needs the sort-out.

Anyway, since I’ve just discovered I’m better than Camilo Villegas I’m going to stop there while I’m in a good mood. See you all in September!

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Alright, alright…I didn’t get a birdie or an eagle on the weekend. But I’m not lying when I say I got a guinea fowl. The unfortunate incident, which resulted in one very dead bird, happened on the 22nd hole I played on Saturday. That was the par-five 13th, where the termination of this silly bird’s life resulted in a rare solid drive losing a great deal of distance.

Instead of landing on the fairway and releasing down to give me a shot at reaching the green in two, my ball crashed into the thing’s head and resulted in a brief squawking (I assume, since I was far away) and beating of wings (very evident from the tee). Still, from where I was, I seriously doubted I could have done any real damage.

But when I got to the bird, all ready to admonish it for robbing me of 50 metres of run, I found a twitching corpse surrounded by some bemused other guinea fowls, who were clucking and pecking about the place as if their friend had been hit by an asteroid and they couldn’t quite believe it. I suppose in a way that’s what happened.

All I can say is, it’s a pity I had to kill a guinea fowl. If I was going to kill a bird with a golf ball, I would much rather it had been an Egyptian Goose, an animal whose tyranny and ill humour knows absolutely no bounds.

On another note entirely, I think I’m warming to Dustin Johnson. After what happened at the PGA Championship, I reckon he deserves a Major now. After the events of Pebble Beach and now Whistling Straights, what a crazy year he’s had! That said, I’m pleased Martin Kaymer won it. I think I might have tipped him for a Major earlier this year, and it’s nice to be right for a change! Proves I’m not totally mad…

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It’s always good for tourists to receive vital information about their destination upon arrival at the airport. That’s why I have made sure they are told about the My Green Jacket project the minute they arrive. To this end, I have become the Face of Cape Town Golf. Or the Back, in this case. There’s only one golfer with his picture on the golf pages of the OFFICIAL 2010 Cape Town Visitors’ Guide, as produced by Cape Town Tourism, and that golfer is me. If you don’t believe that this is me teeing off on Westlake’s 13th hole, check out the same photograph in my gallery….

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Never fear, I haven’t been shooting over 100 again (although I did come within one of doing so in yesterday’s medal after making an exceptional 11 at the 16^th), I just wanted to share that said medal round was also my 100^th since joining Westlake in September last year.

I’ve also played about 16 rounds at other courses around the country (everywhere from Steenberg Golf Club to Leopard Creek), which makes a reasonable amount of golf in 11 months. I suppose it’s nothing dramatic in terms of actual playing time – it equates to about two and a half games per week, and many people do that. Plus, not all of them have been 18-hole rounds.

However, it must be borne in mind that there have been whole weeks where all I’ve done it hit range balls, and I did also take a two-week break in May. So I’ve been golfing a great deal more than just my rounds at the course, which is what this whole thing is about. Many people play thrice a week – of those only a small fraction trouble to practice for hours and hours too. And of those, only a squeaky percentage are people who are not exceptional prodigies – people like me.

Brief summary: my best round remains 87, and in the space of these 116 rounds I have moved from a 25 to an 18 handicap. ‘Very, very steady’ is about all you can say, but as I’ve said to numerous people, there wouldn’t be much of a story if this was easy. The whole point of this is that I’ve got to fight. If I’d come down to scratch in a few weeks, well, I’d be just another naturally talented South African golfer, wouldn’t I? And if that were so, the My Green Jacket project would not be audacious and therefore I wouldn’t get any sponsorship (still waiting…)

As for my 100 rounds at Westlake, and given my fee of R13000 for the first year, I’ve done some maths and worked out that this equates to R130 per round. That’s much more than I thought it would be after all this golf. Obviously it has still made a huge amount of sense financially because if I’d paid visitor green fees for all that golf I’d have spent in the region of R20 000…but nonetheless the R5000 entry fee does make the first year a bit of a killer!

The coming year will be a lot more reasonable, particularly if I can downgrade my membership, as seems likely to happen. But with my stop light antics having been little more than a bit of fun from a financial point of view, it looks like I’m going to have to make a plan for myself!

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