On October 20th 2010 I posted a blog about my friend, David West, who had set himself the challenge of becoming a scratch golfer in a year. David has blogged about his progress for the last 11 months and with his permision here is a a repost of his blog of last week where he reports on his best ever round of golf.
Please read on . . . .
Into The 70s
BY THE NOVICE,ON FRIDAY,2ND SEPTEMBER,2011
“I am a golfer. I golf. That’s what I do.”
These words came into my head during the back nine of my round yesterday. I shot 76. It was my best ever round by four shots.
Let’s get the qualifiers out of the way – I was playing on my own from the yellow tees where par is 70 and standard scratch is 68. I’m more than happy to view this as a round of eight over par. There’s more improvement to come.
A new personal best of 76!
This morning I had a session with my NLP Master Coach Dee from New Oceans. Dee has been trying to get me to believe that I am already a scratch golfer from just about the first day I met her. My thoughts yesterday seemed to suggest I’m finally getting the message.
We spent today’s coaching session investigating which techniques I employed while I played my best golf ever and looking at how I can re-use them at appropriate times in the future. So much of this game is in the head and yesterday my head was in the right place – for once.
It’s not even as if I played very well. It may be hard to believe but for the most of the round I thought I was playing quite poorly. My statistics of 33% of fairways hit and 33% greens in regulation back this up. What I did well was stay calm when I was in poor situations and scramble.
And I only took 29 putts. That helps.
Today I shall play another 18 holes and see if I can recreate the experience. The game feels good at the moment and if I can keep some consistency I can look forward to my challenge week with high expectations.
I’m certainly looking forward to it.
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