Father’s Day passed with several fun things happening. First, I got to play guilt free golf in the morning, and I shot an 84. Given the goal of playing par or better by Halloween 2012, I feel good about my progress. The secret sauce can be seen in the statistics from my Golfplan app.
In May, I was suffering from inconsistent play, and despite daily practice, was unable to make progress. Then I realized that trying to fix your own golf swing is a bit like removing your own gallbladder -something theoretically possible, but highly unlikely in practice. I sought professional help, and at Wakonda Club, we are fortunate to have Aaron Krueger who is a gifted instructor. Over two sessions, he was able to provide one critical principal that has changed my game. It is no surprise that it boils down to grip and stance, alignment and tempo.
It has been a revelation. This round occurred without my usual blow up holes, and I was surprised by the score at the end. And this has been no fluke -I have repeated it this past week and today, on a casual nine, I shot 46 despite a pair of double bogeys and a triple bogey. There is no question that professional instruction is the fastest way to improve.
That wonderful round on Father’s day was followed by swimming with the family and then a barbecue at home of L.A. Galbi, a Korean-American dish that I’ve always had in restaurants but never at home until I came across a recipe on Maangchi’s web site (link). It was clearly one of the best father’s day’s I’ve ever had.
I came across this wonderful archive article in the New York Times about the only golf course in Afghanistan. I hope it is still open. It’s proprietor is clearly a golfist, and yearns for the day that will allow young Afghans to play golf in peace. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/world/asia/15afghan.html
This is a link to John Richardson’s breakparblueprint site. On the page is a fun video of John attempting to birdie a longest and possibly scariest par 3 on the planet. You need to helicopter to the tee box and the drop is beyond scary. It reminds me of this par 4 in Maui that featured a 400 foot elevation drop to a green 400 yards out. I drove the green but three putted.
We lost my mom last year, but memories of her cooking remain. This dish, Pacific cod battered and pan fried called saeng sun jeon is one of my favorites to have with cold rice and kimchi. These little moments are how the departed live on.
On a cheerier note, the recipe can be had on Maangchi.com
With the advent of Spring and the new golf season, I sat down to figure out the barriers to shooting in the 70’s. All the tools are there: swing, equipment, course, and golf stretching back to my early teens. The biggest impediment, I decided, was my short game and putting. The stats (from Golfshot GPS) don’t lie.
Hearing the ball drop into the cup brings on a Pavlovian reaction...
I came across Seeitgolf while downloading the Masters app. It seemed silly at first, watching what amounts to golf porn, with money shot after money shot, but if you put yourself into the correct frame of mind, the imagery and sound of success becomes ingrained.
My first foray after immersing myself in Seeitgolf was typical with usual mix of two and three putts but subsequently on the back nine, I went one under over the last six holes after double and triple bogey to start. I drained 35 footer with seven feet of break uphill for birdie and followed up with an assortment of crazy one and two putts. It seemed natural and I lost the dread of landing my approach off the green -chip on and drain that ten footer.
The app is not entirely intuitive as it seems to have been composed on Flash or some other machination designed to ease app composition. It behaves more like a web site at times.
That said, drilling your mind, which the app says cannot tell between the imagined and the real, has it’s benefits. I strongly recommend this app for people who understand the mental dimensions of the game and can sit through about a half hour of meditative focus.
Putting (in orange) has improved since downloading Seeitgolf App
The statistics from Golfshot app shows my putting performance to have improved into the above average zone (orange line above) since getting Seeitgolf around the time of the Masters. It really works. If they could only add the ability to turn the ball dropping in the hole sound to an alert sound for the iPhone…
I took tax day off and played a round during an ice storm. Good for building character, playing in inclement weather is useful in testing your game against many more variables than just the usual yardage, light wind, lie, elevation, incline, etc. Add to it slickness of grip, 35mph prevailing winds, stinging rain and sleet, and hypothermia and you have a sport -Extreme Golf.
disclaimer -I am in no way affiliated with Shotzoom, maker of Golfshot GPS or Golfplan, or their most recent app, Tiger Woods: My Swing. I pay for all of the products I review myself, and am planning to try out this app for a later review along with comparable apps on the store. That said, I thought it would be worthwhile to mention this contest for Tiger Woods memorabilia I received from Shotzoom’s PR folks:
In honor of the start of the Masters tomorrow and to commemorate its partnership with the Tiger Woods Foundation, Shotzoom is giving away one-of-a-kind Tiger Woods memorabilia. From now through April 12, Shotzoom, the leader in active lifestyle mobile applications including Tiger Woods: My Swing, is offering Golfshot community members the chance to win one of six prizes:
· Grand Prize: One winner will receive a 1997 Masters Flag signed by Tiger Woods
· Second Place: Three winners will receive game-worn golf gloves signed by Tiger Woods
· Third Place: Two winners will receive a game-worn golf hat signed by Tiger Woods
To enter, just register at http://golfshot.com/contests/tiger-woods/.
You increase your chances of winning by telling your friends about the new Tiger Woods: My Swing app for the iPhone.
Tiger Woods: My Swing, the first instructional app from Woods, lets golfers capture videos of their swing so they can analyze it, compare it with Woods and their friends, and see their swing improve over time. Woods serves as a virtual coach, teaching golfers how to use swing line analysis and providing tips on specific areas of improvement. Like all of Shotzoom’s golf apps, MySwing integrates with the Golfshot community, the world’s largest active golf community with more than half a million active members. The app is available on iTunes for $9.99, and proceeds from the app benefit the Tiger Woods Foundation.
Addendum: 3/30/2011 -as I await the arrival of my iPad 2, I can now look back at this post and chuckle. In the year since this post, netbooks have tanked as over 15million iPads were sold. While hackintoshing is fun for a while, the stress of upgrading the OS is not, and I sold the netbook, sans OSX. The Macbook Air covers the gaps left by iPad, and in fact, it is fairly rare for me to need a laptop when I have internet access via my iPhone or iPad. The iPad2 will be the 3G version on AT&T -I chose it because I want the flexibility of buying a local provider’s SIM card when I’m abroad. The thing is this -I don’t think that Apple will want to launch iPhone 5 this year, even though most contracts for iPhone cycle around the summer. It’s like giving gifts to a girlfriend -the timing has to be right and given too frequently, you beg for contempt.
If you want to know what the iPhone5 will look like, I think you can see it in both the iPad2 and more importantly the iPod Touch 4G. iPhone5 will be similar to both with metal back and thinner. It will also feature a 4 to 4.5 inch screen. If it is to keep it’s battery life while getting skinny, it will have to get wider and taller. iPhone4 won’t be phased out but will become the cheap phone.
FROM LAST YEAR JANUARY -MARCH, 2010
The iPad launch yesterday was not up to the hype -you needed the device to have time travel capabilities for people to be satisfied. That said, the question for this first adopter among first adopters is, “Where does this fit in my man purse?”
I need portable internet access for many reasons -I write a lot and am working on several research projects as well as need to keep in touch with a vascular team -the iPhone (now disconnected from AT&T) still serves as my primary email device because the HTC TouchPro2 that I have from Verizon has a maddeningly inconsistent email app that jumps between HTC’s beautiful interface and the horrible, ugly Windows Mobile 6.5 bones underneath. Despite this, the TP2 has earned a semi-permanent place because of the $30 app called WalkingHotSpot which will turn the TP2 into a Wifi hotspot.
I have a maxed out dataplan and tethering plan through Verizon, so I am just using the data that I have already purchased, just not for a Windows laptop but also for my iPhone which I can now use again for my golf GPS apps.
The middle spot between a big laptop (my 15inch Macbook Pro) and the iphone is the need to have a bigger screen than my iphone especially for iTunes movies and content, but at the same time having a keyboard, with at least 5 hrs of battery life. The netbooks do fill this niche in terms of hardware very nicely, but the software just isn’t there. I have become very used to iLife and iWork -thinks look prettier and works nicer through these than anything in the Windows or Linux environment.
The solution came in the form of Hackintosh. The Dell Mini 10v is a netbook which seems to have been designed solely for Hackintoshing. Hackintosh is a non-Apple computer made to run Mac OS X. This technically is a breach of the software license, but I own the computer and I own the shrink wrapped software license for this Hackintosh.
With this, I have a portable internet solution that goes 5hrs on battery, and more with the additional battery, all for a total of $400 bucks for the hardware. If you choose to go this route, you should buy the OS license.
This works nicely for now, because Apple didn’t have something that effectively served my needs in this space. Now they have iPad. We won’t be able to get our hands on one for 59 days, 89 if you want the 3G/Wifi version. Maybe my netbook days are numbered.
I’ll tell you why. The trackpad, designed by Dell, is one of the worst pieces of industrial design ever created by humans. Dell, after I ordered the netbook, took my money but didn’t acknowledge I even ordered the netbook until I spent two hours on tech support. It was only through the graces of a very nice lady in India, that I eventually got a netbook 10 days later than promised. The next OS upgrade to 10.6.3 may break the netbook again, requiring another round of hacking, which I used to enjoy, but not so much anymore. The 10inch screen is adequate, but I know, compared to the OLED screen on iPad, it will be like night and day. I see that a lot of people are giving up their netbooks on eBay, and this is most likely because the hardware being, well, not Apple.
So I wait, with my proverbial tent pitched outside our local Apple store.
The winter is ebbing and spring’s arrival is a bird’s song chirping behind the grey fences of March. This is when my golf ambitions begin to rise, and I’m back in the golf hut for a another season’s preparation. My swing is much better than it was several years ago when I began this blog, but the real barrier to lowering my handicap was never ball striking, but rather the short grass and the grey matter. I’ve studied books on mind-spirit-action-golf, taken lessons from great masters of the game, and have electronically tracked and analyzed every aspect of my game. This year, I’m just going to go at it with just me, the sticks, and the tiny white ball. What’s promising about this approach -dumping several 15 footers for par over a weekend in a warmer part of our country a while back and managing my game for 2-3 strokes onto the green with twenty year old clubs that weren’t my own -my first round since last fall with no warmup or practice from the tips on an unfamiliar and challenging course I shot a 96 with three triple bogies. Just swing.
In May, I was suffering from inconsistent play, and despite daily practice, was unable to make progress. Then I realized that trying to fix your own golf swing is a bit like removing your own gallbladder -something theoretically possible, but highly unlikely in practice. I sought professional help, and at Wakonda Club, we are fortunate to have Aaron Krueger who is a gifted instructor. Over two sessions, he was able to provide one critical principal that has changed my game. It is no surprise that it boils down to grip and stance, alignment and tempo.
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 