New Record! New Handicap!

OK, this won't impress everyone, but I shot a new record low score of 83 at Mapperley on Saturday. Striking the ball really well for a gross twelve over. I even left a couple of short putts out there, so I KNOW there's a sub-80 round in there somewhere! It was one of the club majors, the Davis cup, so we're off a maximum 18 handicap. That limited my points score to 42, and limited me to 4th place in Div3, 7th overall. If those two little ones had dropped though, I would have had my name in little gold letters on the honours board.

HOWEVER, it was enough for the powers that be to drop me to 18! 17.7, if you're really interested. The chart shows how my handicap has moved since I started playing the club competitions last year. 24 to 18 since April, that's not bad for a fat middle aged bloke, I reckon.

To be fair, if you couldn't score on Saturday, you couldn't score at all. Not a breath of wind, you could go for your shots with confidence. The greens were a bit slow, after hollow tining and top dressing on Thursday, but for all that they were running well. The key to my new ball striking is to extend through. I think I have been shortening my swing a bit and I'm consciously making sure that I am striking all the way through now. Just need to learn to get the ball to the hole now with the putter. I'm leaving too many putts five feet short. I generally make the return putt, but not every time and four or five 3-putts on a round is killing my scoring at the moment.

Sunday was the first mixed comp that Julie and I played in. Aggregate stableford, which just means that you add the two Stableford scores together. 56 points - 73 won it, so we were quite a long way off the pace. Played in a group with Anne Poxon, who I hadn't seen since 1976, when I played tennis and her two sons James and Steven were winning everything in sight. Apparently James went off to America on a tennis scholarship. Came up against Tim Henman and was beaten in three sets, put a Stanley knife through his strings and never played again. I don't know whether that's an insight into top level sport or an insight into top-drawer petulance!