There are a lot of unique and varied reasons why people play golf. They run the gamut from fresh air and exercise to competition to camaraderie to simply avoiding yard work around the house. Because of the nature of the game, it is also that one sport where you can actively approximate the experiences of the greats of the game.
Regardless of the talent level, amateur athletes can never truly experience getting into the batter”s box at Fenway Park, running off-tackle at Candlestick, or filling the lanes on a fast break at Arco Arena. Such is not the case in golf. You could try to chip it in from just left of the 17th green at Pebble Beach, just like Tom Watson did to win the 1982 United States Open. That”s why local golfers love to qualify for the NCGA Zone at Spyglass Hill and Poppy Hills. These are the same fairways that have been walked by Tiger and Phil, by Arnie and Jack.
When all is said and done though, the major quest for avid amateur golfers is to improve, to get better, to low their handicap, to more often than not win the $5 bet from their golfing buddies. Everyone knows of a golfer who has improved over a relatively short period of time. Sometimes the game is just taking hold and the improvement is rapid, sometimes lost skills and talents are regained, and sometimes the improvement of a single aspect of the game can make all the difference in the world.
Improvement occurs on all sorts of levels, from the PGA Tour to the Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit to the little kids who go to Ted Matilla”s summer classes at Buckingham. The poster boy for this kind of positive change that was impressive and unexpected is golf professional Steve Sticker.
Of course, it”s easy to recite Stricker”s most recent accomplishments, as they are fresh in our minds. In July, he was in the final Sunday pairing at the British Open, playing along the leader, Sergio Garcia. In August, he won the Barclays at New York”s Westchester Country Club, his first victory on tour since 2001. Top-10 finisher at two of the other Fed Ex Cup tournaments put him in second place for the year with only Tiger Woods ahead of him. A top-notch performance at the Presidents Cup for the victorious American team was icing on the cake. The 2007 season was the best one ever for the 40-year-old Steve Stricker.
Yet it wasn”t that long ago that times were tough for Stricker. In 2003, 2004 and 2005 he was 189th, 151st and 162nd, respectively, on the PGA Tour money list. He had won twice in 1996 and then once in 2001, but then his game went south. Stricker was one of the featured players in John Feinstein”s best-selling book about the 2005 Q School. In December of 2005, trying to get his exempt status back so that he could return to the PGA Tour, he came up short, finishing two shots beyond the cut line.
The story our there is how Stricker and his tour buddy, Jerry Kelly, set up a mobile home on the driving range at Cherokee Country Club in hometown Madison, Wisconsin. They put fake turf in the mobile home, opened its sliding doors toward the range, and pounded hundreds of balls daily into the snow banks and snowdrifts.
It was during those cold-weather sessions that Stricker tightened up his swing. Always a rock-solid putter, Stricker had been hitting fewer fairways and fewer greens and making more bogeys. The swing improvement was monumental. Case in point is that according to Shot Link, the stats keeper for the PGA Tour, no one hits it closer to the hole from inside 125 yards than Steve Stricker. So, if you hit it closer than anyone else and you just so happen to be the sixth-best putter on the world”s top golf circuit, you are bound to improve. Stricker”s $4.7 million in earnings in 2007 is the proof. Amazingly, all this has been accomplished even though he is the 142nd-ranked tour player in driving distance.
At the end of 2006, Steve Stricker was named the PGA Tour”s comeback player of the year for having jumped from 162nd to 34th in earnings. This year he took an even bigger step, jumping from 34th to fourth on the money list. Is it possible to be comeback player of the year two seasons in a row?
Locally, Chris Fisher of Lakeport has shown remarkable improvement of late. Currently second in the net division for the season-long On the Links Golfer of the Year race, Fisher has seen his handicap drop from 12 in May to 5 in October. Always a solid ball striker, Fisher has become much better with the short game and the course management aspects of the game.
Talking to Fisher earlier this week, he told me that his goal was to stay or improve upon his 5-handicap status and play competitively against the area”s top golfers such as Juan Lopez and Craig Kinser next year. Fisher, a 40-something who coaches junior varsity basketball at Clear Lake High School, is one of those rare middle-age linksters who has made impressive improvements in his game at an age when most golfers usually don”t get noticeably better. He gives hope to all of those bogey golfers who want to get better and shoot in the 70s.
The feel good story of the spring of 2007 was the Kelseyville High School golf team that not only went 48-0 in Coastal Mountain Conference play, but also advanced through the North Coast Section Tournament and into the Tournament of Champions. Five members of that team — Brent Hamilton, Schuyler Bloom, Nick Schaefer, Jonathan Bridges and Hipolito Perez — went from being 15-handicap golfers in 2006 to single-digit handicap players in 2007. Hamilton was the most glaring, improving to a 1 handicap by the end of the season.
I”d like to think it was the coaching that made them better but truth be known, they rapidly improved because they put in the time and more importantly, they were young. A lot of times youthful golfers will go from a 30 handicap to a 14 in the course of the summer because they are getting bigger, stronger, smarter and better coordinated. It”s all about improvement and in the case of young people youth will be served.
