What a top weekend

Look, I don't want anyone to think that I'm a golf obsessive, but...

We took an extra couple of days off last weekend. It was our daughter Kate's graduation ceremony in Cambridge on Thursday (2.1 in Law from Gonville & Caius College, thanks for asking - what a brilliant day), then piling everything from her room into the car and coming back to Nottingham Friday morning. Once we had unloaded everything from the car that just left enough time for 16 holes Friday afternoon/evening...

Saturday was our invitational pairs comp. John, the senior pro, caught me before the round to invite me to the Bridgestone Challenge on Wednesday, where I can have my balls assessed, apparently, to see whether I am using the optimum ones. I have been using Bridgestones for a couple of months now, and without a doubt they are the best balls I have tried - I'm using the 330's Tour Performance ones (yes, yes, I know, off a 20 handicap) for 'amateur swing speeds' so I'm looking forward to seeing whether I'm using the right ones according to their computerised system.

The competition itself was a great walk round. My partner was Christian: Austrian, a 28 handicapper and I don't think he's ever played to it! Thoroughly nice bloke, though I may have learnt some Austrian swear words. Along with us on the round was Roy Maltby and his bank manager Paul, who was encyclopaedic in those little golf shot definitions. You know the ones - a Dennis Wise (nasty little five-footer), Anna Kournikova (looked great but a poor result), Kate Winslet (a bit fat but otherwise perfect), Tony Blair (too much spin), Jamie Oliver (you really want to smack it but you can't), Richard Hammond (started off straight but veered off at the end), Rock Hudson (though it was straight but you were wrong), Princess Di (shouldn't have taken the driver) etc etc. In deference to Christian we didn't employ an Adolf (two shots in a bunker).

Interesting conversation in the bar afterwards about wives and their attitudes to golf. Christian said that his wife doesn't like him playing golf, so he only plays on Saturdays. Paul's wife is so hostile to him playing that if he manages to sneak in for nine holes after work, he has to put his suit back on to go home! I offered the opinion that they both needed to introduce their wives to the great game. Mapperley ladies have worked hard to increase Ladies membership and so several 'beginners' started together with some free lessons. That way they could all learn from one another and play at the same level at first. My wife plays three times a week, with me and with her friends, and our free time is now pretty much organised around the golf club. It's great.

Sunday was the big junior open comp, the Mapperley Bull. If Peter hadn't missed a 9-inch putt on the 18th he would have won it outright, but as it was he won Division 2 and is the proud owner of a new golf bag. 94 off his 27 handicap for a nett 67. Pretty good as he was on the end of a two-night sleepover at his friend Alexander's house and was shattered.

Julie and I followed the juniors round and both had record scores - I broke 40 on the front 9 for the first time ever and Julie had a 107 gross which beats her previous best by 3. It's really nice to play together and feel as though we can both progress reasonably briskly down the course. Julie's only been playing for a year, and I know more than a couple of men who have been playing for a lot longer than that who would love to shoot 107.

So that was the weekend - Kate's graduation, 52 holes of golf for me, a maiden competition win for Peter, a record score for Julie, the two older children at Glastonbury on a pair of free tickets I won in an Oxfam competition on Twitter and I even won a tenner on the Lottery on Saturday night. Hoorah!

The weekend's golf

One of the frustrating, or possibly reassuring things about golf is that no matter what you do on a particular hole, your score for the round stays about the same. Have you noticed this? You can lose a ball on a hole and then stuff the second one into the weeds, but that is almost always balanced by an unexpected birdie later on in the round.

Saturday, I had a bit of a nightmare, or it felt like it. Birdied the first, which was great, then balanced that up with a six at the long par four second. OK, not so bad. Had a seven at the fifth (I hate downhill holes), but chipped in for a two on the eighth (brilliantly, actually, I was over the back of the green behind a bush!).

Ended up with a 91, which is level par for my 20 handicap. 43 on the front, 48 on the back. Then went out for a few holes with the good lady later on in the day and shot 43 on the front again, but with a completely different pattern of good and bad holes. Maybe this is what they mean by consistency?

Sunday, played the back nine in 42, a new record for me (our back 9 is far harder than the front). I should have played the front too, but the course was packed.

I think the issue is that when things are not going well, a rank amateur like me stops trusting his swing - you start making a smaller swing, or you keep your head 'elaborately' still, which just makes me pull left, and either way your distances are out of the window and the score goes up. That said, a poor front 9 makes me more careful on the back, and you can save a couple. Conversely, if you have a good front 9, confidence is high and you play better golf. And then again, if you have a blinding start, you go for shots that truthfully you aren't good enough to play, and that brings you back down to Earth. In any case, the 18-hole score rarely varies by more than half a dozen shots.

Still, can't complain - managed to play 40 holes over the weekend.

Even better, my daughter texted me while on the 7th to tell me she had managed to land her 2.1 in Law, from Cambridge! I was so happy I birdied the 8th!

Golf - Great exercise

I've got one of those Nokia E71 phones that does email and satnav and so on. It's great, and I found a little utility on it called Sports Tracker. In essence, you do your workout - walking, cycling etc, and the GPS in your phone allows Sports Tracker to measure how far you have gone, and then keeps a record of it. Pretty good, actually - it also records how long your routine has been, charts speed vs distance and height etc too.

As an experiment, I tried it out on my Saturday morning competition round. Mapperley is 6307 yards off the back tees, which is just over 3 and a half miles. Add on a bit for 'military' golf - you know - left, right, left right, and walking between holes and you'd probably estimate what? 4 and a half, five miles?

WRONG! - over EIGHT and a half miles, with a variation in elevation of over 80 yards, which you climb four times.

Don't let anyone ever tell you that golf isn't good exercise!

John Daly

John Daly is following me on Twitter! How cool is that? OK, I know he's following thousands, but one of them is ME!

If you want to follow me on twitter too, I'm black_buzzer (it's OK, it's a fishing fly)

What's average?

I suppose I ought to define what I mean by average. Up to the beginning of last year I guess I had played about 30, 18-hole rounds of golf. I decided it was about time I did something about my 23 handicap, so started playing the competitions on a Saturday morning at Mapperley. As I have said before, it's not the easiest course, so I fairly immediately went up to 24...
The pic is our winter league team - L-R Me, Peter, Roy Maltby and Eddie Robson

At our course, we don't hold qualifiers in the winter, so I was able to play all last winter without any adjustments, and at the start of this year was averaging 92-94 for a round, off the back tees.

Hit a rash of form a month or so back and started shooting 84-85, so came down pretty immediately to 19.4. Never had a teenage handicap in my life and I'm thrilled. Short-lived though - had a bad round on Saturday and shot 94 again (two lost balls, pulled the damn things left, I never hit left!), for the extra 0.1 on the hcp, so back to 20. I WILL prevail, though, and you can read about it here!

Smart Casual

Much outrage at the club over the last couple of months as the committee has changed the dress code in the clubhouse to 'smart casual'. I sort of knew it would raise eyebrows among the senior members, but in an attempt to stage a coup, the 'antis' managed to push through an Extraordinary General Meeting to debate the subject. Fortunately, through heated debate ranging as far as allowable colours of trainers, the committee developed a rear-guard action, including approaching the English Golf Union for guidance, and maintained their grip. People remain free to occasionally put a pair of jeans on to go for a drink of an evening...

For what it's worth, my opinion - Golf is its own worst enemy on this one. On the course, it's a game of modern materials, ceramics, composites and technical fibres. There probably isn't another sport outside Formula 1 where so much money is spent on product development and new ideas. I've just changed over to Bridgestone balls because they seem to fly another ten yards further compared to the Srixons I used before. Yet in the clubhouse, and I don't just mean mine, this is a general rant, there is a substantial number of people who seem to want a golf club to remain a sort of weird 1930's gentlemen's club, with the emphasis on gentlemen - there are still several courses in Nottinghamshire where women are not welcome in the bar, and how strange and backward is that?

Now, I wouldn't want to tell anyone how to run their clubs, but golf clubs have to understand that there is a huge constituency of people out there, business and professional people in their late 30's, early 40's maybe who, like me, have stopped playing squash or other more aggressive games, want to do something different, would undoubtedly love the sport of golf, but wouldn't for a second put up with the bullshit, or the perception of bullshit, that often accompanies golf clubs. The dress code is probably the prime example of that. I argued the point with one of the members on Saturday morning, and he talked about 'traditions'. I think he's wrong - what he means is 'standards', and while I would hate to throw out sensible or honourable traditions (or even daft ones, come to that), 'standards' should move with the times. A jacket and tie was 'smart casual' in the 1930's, while a pair of jeans was workwear. Now, a pair of jeans is 'smart casual', but even I wouldn't want to see people cluttering up my lovely clubhouse in dirty overalls. I look forward to taking my turn as a dinosaur!

Start Here

OK. Why 'one tanned hand'? Obvious if you think about it. The golf glove goes on the left hand (If you're right handed) so you get a suntanned right hand, a pallid, fish like left. Could have called it 'V-neck tan' too, but it wasn't as snappy! Would be a good name for a clothing brand, so if anybody fancies it - I want royalties!

First, some background. My brother Andrew is four years younger than me. He and I have always been a bit over competitive (OK, I have, not so much him), so we have had an unspoken agreement not to play each other's sports. He played football, I played rugby, we both played tennis, but he made it through to County coaching (I didn't, I'm not bitter...), I played squash, he played badminton and so on. He has played golf since he was about 6, and despite playing about four times in a good year, maintains a handicap of around 10, and could have been much lower. I naturally avoided golf, and heaped much scorn on the game, as was the family tradition. When I was 42, my knees went, really quite quickly, and despite a few months of physio it was clear that it was time to give up squash. I'm built like a prop forward too, so maybe it was time. To avoid playing golf, I even took up crocquet for a while. What a tedious game that is. 3 - 4 hours and you can be an hour between shots.

Then, about five years ago, a client of mine (I run an industrial marketing communciations business) asked whether I wanted to play in their company golf day. Cutting a story short, I borrowed clubs, played, was dead last but enjoyed it, played again six weeks later with the same bunch and was SECOND, and was hooked, hooked, hooked (not the shot, the obsession!).

My youngest son, Peter, who was nine at the time, wanted to join in, so he has had lessons for quite a lot of the intervening period. Now he's 14 he's starting to really develop both in terms of his skill level and also physically, so I'm expecting him to start coming down quite quickly now. He, like me, is not 'talented' - we're never going to play professionally - but it's nice to be able to play a game together. My wife Julie started last year, when the club ran taster sessions and cheap lessons to encourage lady members to join, so rather than being out-driven and depressed playing with us, she was able to make a few friends of people all in the same boat, so they could be frustrated, elated and elevated together. She was delighted to get her first handicap certificate a couple of weeks ago, and has already come second (in Division 3) in two competitions.

We're all members at Mapperley Golf Club in Nottinghamshire, a beautiful but mildly vicious sloping, hilly course with quick greens.

Hope you enjoy reading the blog. All the best, Martin