Last Saturday I teed it up at Buckingham Golf and Country Club in the inaugural Lake County One Man Scramble. The One Man is a new, one-round event that appears to be a pretty good way to kick off the local golf season. Because of the weather and lack of daylight during the winter months, even the most avid of Lake County golfers don”t get to tee it up as often as their counterparts in Palm Springs or Arizona. The One Man is a good way to dust those cobwebs off the clubs, tee it up, and if you make a less-than-respectable shot, you get a free mulligan to try and improve upon your previous shot.
In late October I shot a 3-over-par 75 at Buckingham in the season-concluding Tournament of Champions. My 3-over-par score was good enough to come in fourth overall and to win the TOC”s senior division outright. My score that day was based upon playing the ball down, counting each and every stroke, and dealing with the added pressure of holding off the top senior golfer in the area, former Upper Lake High School coach Craig Kinser.
Five months later we bumped the ball through the green while playing winter rules, freely took a bevy of mulligans, and the end result was that I still shot a 3-over-par 75, the very same score I turned in that day at the TOC. Yes, it”s true that I haven”t been very active on the links during the past four months. Instead, I have been pacing the hardwood sidelines, coaching the boys” basketball team at Mountain Vista Middle School and filling in as the coach of the girls” program. Nonetheless, very little good came out of my One Man Scramble round.
While the One Man appears to be a format ripe for low scores, it”s also a difficult one to play as far as the golfing body and the golfing psyche are concerned. At last October”s TOC, I hit 40 full shots, had seven assorted chips and flip wedges, and took just 28 putts for my round of 75. Last Saturday I took 74 full swings and probably somewhere near 25 chips and 50 putts. As I walked off the 18th green, my left knee, a victim of too much basketball and four previous knee surgeries, was all puffy and swollen. I felt like I had just completed a 36-hole Public Links qualifier instead of an 18-hole lightweight fun event.
I also found it difficult to focus upon shot after shot since there were so many of them. If I had an 8-iron into a green, I found that I had a good focal point and I would probably hit the shot onto the green to within 20 feet. Yet when it came time to take my mulligan to improve upon that 8-iron shot, I found myself over-swinging or attempting a shot that I would never attempt if I were playing out my own ball. I play a fairly conservative style on the golf course, but I found that the One Man brought out the worst in my ability to strategize my way around the links.
I had a great pairing on Saturday, teeing it up alongside Juan Lopez and Norm Rentsch. Lopez is a talented power player who has won just about everything locally. Rentsch is an ever-improving golfer who has a silky smooth putting touch. Lopez was interesting to watch because I think I”m safe in saying that every time he busted a big drive some 280-plus yards up the middle of the fairway, his mulligan swing went farther in distance but also was a lot more left of the intended fairway target. When you”re playing well, the One Man negatively encourages you to crank it up for that mulligan shot, leading to over-swings and flawed swings.
For the first 18 years of the Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit, I have been a regular in the championship flight. In fact, during every one of those 18 years, I have been ranked somewhere in the top 10 at the conclusion of the golfing campaign. However, with my next birthday being my 60th, I have seen my skills digress, most notably in the power aspects of the game. While Lopez or Billy Witt or Brad Pendleton can bust it off the tee in the 300-yard range, a rock-solid tee shot for me is some 60 yards behind them on the average. Going driver/5-iron on a 400-yard par-4 hole puts me at a distinct disadvantage when my fellow competitors are hitting their driver and then knocking a sand wedge onto the green.
During the past few years, I”ve been the Michael Allen of the local circuit. Allen is the Bay Area native who is exempt on both the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour. I”ve entered local events on the scratch or championship level while playing in others on the senior division level for the 50-year-and-over crowd. However, my long-term partner in many of the region”s two-man scratch events, my son Nick, has had to put local competitive golf on the backburner as he prioritizes his civil engineering classes, concrete canoe competitions, and a really cool summer internship at Kansas State University. So, with Nick exploring new horizons, I will focus on playing in senior events this year and stay away from the long-ball knockers in the championship flight who also seem to have much steadier putting strokes than I do.
Nonetheless, I will miss playing with the big boys. I got lucky with my Juan Lopez-Norm Rentsch pairing on Saturday because there were an unequal number of seniors entered in the One Man. I find that the golf course etiquette among the scratch flight golfers is usually superior to the vast majority of linksters who play in the senior or net flights. The scratch golfers are more likely to help each other look for lost balls off the fairway. They don”t zoom 150 yards ahead of the rest of the group in their motorized cart, hitting shots out of turn. You don”t have to tell scratch golfers to mark the ball on the green. And finally they have less of a tendency to complain about the greens, the course, the weather and the slow play of the group four holes in front of them.
When all is said and done, this is a changing-of-the-guard moment for me. After playing competitive golf for 46 years on a level where I had a chance to win most of the tournaments I entered, I now find myself playing in my own age group, often from shorter tees. I will miss playing with the big boys although I won”t miss getting smacked around by them, a semi-often occurrence during the past five years. In the end I still tee it up because I enjoy the game, I enjoy playing in stroke play tournament formats, and I like to compete. It doesn”t matter how much I think my game has digressed during the years because when you consider that I can”t hit the curve ball, don”t ever want to put on the pads again, and can”t elevate on my jump shot, it”s very apparent that I am playing the only game in town. And I”m still enjoying it, regardless of the uniqueness of the format.
