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By now you know I shot 81-71 at the Professional National Championship at Turning Stone in Verona, NY. My number one goal for the week was to get through the practice rounds and pro-am and then be able to complete 36 holes walking, which I hadn’t done in 3 years. My expectations as to my play were fairly low, but the idea is to play hard and shoot as low as you can, so of course I harbored some hope of making the cut. I haven’t really played well on a difficult course in 7 or 8 years, and since I have less than 10 tournament rounds under my belt since I withdrew from the PNC two years ago my chances of making a cut that is fairly difficult due to the 310 players playing for 90 spots after 36 holes were probably not so great. All that really doesn’t matter when you get to the first tee, so I planned out the 3 days of practice to save my legs as much as possible, since historically I have always over practiced before the start of the event and wound up gimping around the course just trying to finish. As a past champion I am among the 20 or so players that get to play in the pro-am the day before the event, which to my great benefit allows carts. The tournament starts on a Sunday, so I drove the 6 hours from my house to Turning Stone Wednesday night, picked up Rick (Buonincontri), the guy responsible for building the website (along with John H), who offered to caddy for me.
The tournament is played on two courses to accommodate the big field before the cut, so one course is played once and the other eventually 3 times. The pro-am was to be played on the Adunyote course where the tournament would finish, so the plan was to play the Kaluhyat course 9 holes at a time on Thursday and Friday. The Adunyote course is a big course with fairly wide fairways and fast, sensibly undulating greens that measures 7350 yards. The Kaluhyat course is much shorter at 6950 yards, but much quirkier and fraught with trouble. My tee times were early/late, which is what I wanted as it gives me more recovery time between rounds, but my early time was 7:45 off the back of the K course. It was so far out to the tee that you had to take a shuttle that left 25 minutes before your time, which meant that to warm up properly I was going to have to be at the course at 6:15, which means I was going to have to be up at 4. I have done that in the past, but I was hoping for a more normal type of beginning to the day to get myself up and running.
Anyway, I played OK in the practice rounds and made 3 birdies in the pro-am, where I botched the par-3’s but shot around 75, so I felt Ok with things. What was really bothering me was how short I was driving the ball, and when I filmed it on Friday I saw that my swing had gotten really short. I have always had a tendency to get a little shorter and faster on the course, so on Saturday I told Rick to watch my swing and to tell me how far I was getting it back. Even when I tried to make my backswing fuller I would ask Rick and he would show me that I was still hardly 3/4. I decided that I needed to make my set-up and swing more athletic, which meant staying more in motion over the ball with a couple of longer waggles and a bit of a right knee kick as a trigger, and more “catch” at the top with the wrists feeling freer while I tried to complete my upper body turn without over twisting my lower. I started to hit it further and by the end of the round I felt pretty good about it. The morning of the first round I felt OK and warmed up fairly well, and I hit the first 2 fairways and greens, missing 10-15 foot putts on both. I hit a middling drive on our 3rd, a long par 5, and after a good layup I bladed an 8 iron into the front bunker and didn’t get it up and down. I hit two more good shots on our 4th, but then things started to unravel. I was trying to get the club back further but as Rick told me later I was not really getting it to happen, and my normal timing sort of went out the window. I started hitting the ball left, and on this golf course misses were penalized severely. I actually got it up and down on 2 of the last 3 holes to shoot 81, and after walking the course, which was measured by someone as 19,000 steps with lots of elevation changes, practice was out of the question. So it was back to the room where we had plenty of beer in the cooler, and we watched Billy Hurley win at Congressional, which by the way was very cool.
On Monday I did my normal thing when I have late tee times (1:15), which is to get up at my normal early time, do my exercises, eat breakfast, read and watch TV, then go back to bed for an hour or two. We got to the course earlier than usual and I brought out the video and shot a couple of 7 iron swings before it started to rain, and I saw that in spite of what I was trying to feel it was still pretty short. I decided not to fight it and to quiet everything down a bit, so I began to take a little more time over the ball and to try to feel less rushed at the top. I would just go with my 250-60 yard drives and depend on my iron and short game to shoot a decent score, which in all honesty is the way I have always played. I lipped out a 30 footer on the first hole, birdied the par-5 3rd hole, missed a straight in 3 -footer on 4, parred a couple then missed another 3- footer for birdie on 6, then parred until I birdied 12 and holed a bunker shot for birdie on 13. I bogeyed 17 and left a birdie hanging on the lip on 18, but in the end I had hit 12 fairways and 14 greens and shot 1 under, my best score in I don’t know how long.
As in any big event that you aren’t really adequately prepared for the short game and putting were two more headaches to tackle. I had been chunking pitch shots at an alarming rate, but a great practice session on Thursday really helped with my confidence and my short pitching really held up nicely. On Sunday I was mostly too far out of position after my second shot to have any hope of getting it up and down, but when I did have a normal pitch I performed well, and did the same on Monday. My putting was not very good Sunday, so on Monday I decided to unglue my upper right arm from my side and give it some freedom. This proved to be great for putts over 5 feet, but on those two straight in 3 footers I missed the putter wobbled off line and one went right and the other left. After that I stuck the right arm against on anything 4 feet and in, and otherwise kept the arm away from my body. Those are the kind of things you can only figure out when you are under pressure, and hopefully that will be a winning formula going forward.
So there you have it, and I have to say that I am pleased with results, as my body allowed me to accomplish my main goal of surviving the walking and my game was good enough to shoot under par on a 7350 -yard championship golf course. Just as important is the fact that I now have a much better idea of what I need to work on to get ready for my Section Championship and Senior Section Championship in August, where I get to ride in a cart.
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