Confidence at Kennedy

I’ve struggled much more with the mental side of golf than the physical over my time playing. Sure, I have days where I can’t hit it out of my own shadow, but I can usually find a repeatable enough shot to hit a few greens and give myself some decent birdie looks. Unfortunately, more often than not, my hands start shaking over these putts, especially if a few have already fallen. (I talked about the ridiculous thoughts going through my head over a run of the mill bogey putt here.)

Growing up, my friends and I always wanted to take on the course in it’s hardest form. We played the tips, played the ball down, and didn’t give each other many putts. Getting beat down by the course was a badge of honor. This may be a good way to prepare for some aspects of competition, but it’s also a great way to kill confidence in a young person. They don’t put the Pee Wee kids in Yankee Stadium for a reason. I still expect my rounds to blow up at some point, and I finish many of my good rounds with the feeling of “holding on” instead of trying to make another birdie or two down the stretch.

I love the current push to make golf easier. In most places now, golfer are encouraged to play certain tees based on skill level instead of demographic information. It’s quite a bit more rare these days to find a scorecard that says “Ladies” or “Senior” tees. I also love the idea (most recently made famous by Bryson Dechambeau, although it’s been around for awhile) to play from the front tees until you can shoot a certain number, and then move back one tee at a time. I wish I would’ve been less stubborn to that sort of thing when I was a junior player.

These days, I usually end up at easier courses than I did when I was younger mostly because all the courses in my hometown were pretty tough. In the Denver/Aurora area, there are some difficult public and municipal courses (CommonGround, Fossil Trace, Murphy Creek, Saddle Rock), but some of the munis are short, wide open, and without penalizing greens. Due to this, I’ve shot more rounds in the low 70s (and one 69) in the last 4 years than I have my entire life, and even though I realize I’m not taking on the toughest challenges, I tend to play better now when I go play the harder courses. I’m still not comfortable when I have good rounds going, but my base level of confidence has gone up a bit.

Yesterday, I played at Kennedy Golf Course for the first time. My neighbor (we’ll call him D so he can’t say for sure that I was talking about him) and I had the second tee time at 6:10 AM. Kennedy has 27 holes, and they send us out on the Babe Lind 9 first, followed by the Creek 9.

I think D is in his late 60s, although you could convince me he was around 50. He has a Gary Player-like energy about him without being an asshole. He still rides his bike 60 miles a week and does push ups every morning. He can also talk your ear off about anything.

D played from the Gold tees (about 6500 yards) and I played from the Bronze (just under 7000). With the heat and elevation, the course didn’t play anywhere near these lengths for either of us, although the surprisingly thick rough did stop some balls from running out. We were paired with two other players. S was fairly new to golf, although he had flexibility to his swing that many seasoned players would kill for. He also played quickly for the number of shots he hit. He had to leave at the turn because “his wife wouldn’t leave him alone”. Our other player, J had some real talent and a beautiful, repeatable fade with his driver that I would consider trading naming rights for my kids for. S was chatty and seemed to have a lot of fun, while J was much more reserved. J gave me a few hole overviews since it was my first time at the course, but that was the extent of our conversations.

The Babe Lind nine is longer but tamer than the Creek nine. Pretty much every tee shot has an obvious bail out area, and the greens are large and receptive. I made it around with a mostly stress free 37 (+1). The “mostly” piece happened on the 605 yard 7th hole. We were playing into the wind, so it was probably going to be a 3 shot hole, but I was ready to go at a driver hard since there was no danger other than an interstate 50 yards left of the left most rough. Instead, I hit what would have been a shank if I was hitting an iron it was so far off the heal, and my ball rolled about 30 yards forward into the rough. So, now I had a 575 yard par 4 to deal with. I hit 2 respectable 3 woods, but still had 110 yards uphill into the green with hurting wind. I launched a gap wedge up to 15 feet and rolled the putt in for a ho-hum par. Nothing to see here.

The fun began on the Creek nine. This side is shorter, but it requires a lot more care from tee to green. The sight lines from the tee make it look even worse than it actually is. I started if off with a hack job double bogey. I usually keep a scorecard for myself with notes about distances and clubs I hit during a round, and this one was so bad I just wrote “F UP” in large letters. I made a par on the second, and I got my revenge for the bad double on the 3rd hole, a 400 yard par 4 with a tight fairway, when I rolled in a 15 footer for birdie.

The fourth hole plays like a par 5 in everything but distance. It’s 470 yards from the back tees, but it’s a hard dogleg left with large trees preventing you from cutting the corner unless you hit a massive hook. Luckily, I spent my entire youth honing a duck hook that would make Bubba Watson blush. It’s taken me decades to work that out of my game, but I usually can still call on it when needed. This time though, my ball stayed straight and went into a massive, bear paw shaped (as described by D) fairway bunker. If that wasn’t enough, there was a tree between me and the green, so I played an 8 iron to a collection area short of the green leaving myself a straightforward pitch. As straightforward pitches go, I proceeded to blade mine over the green (“I can’t believe that one didn’t spin”, he said, hoping no one saw the front edge of the wedge imprinted on the side of his ball.). Dead at this point, it took me 3 more shots to get that ball in the hole, so I had my second back nine double of the day and another “F UP” note for my scorecard.

I came back with another birdie on the next hole, a par 3 of 175 yards with a saddle shaped green. So, even after all the doubles, I was just 3 over for the day, and I felt more in control of my game than that number showed.

The sixth is a 550 yard, dogleg left par 5. It’s one of those holes that you have to play several times to figure out where to aim your tee shot. Without meaning to, I managed to hit the massive duck hook that I tried to hit on the previous hole, and we assumed my ball was going to be OB. I hit a second drive on what we thought was a good line, and I set out to try to scramble for par or bogey. As it turns out, my massive duck hook was sitting in the middle of the fairway only 180 yards out, and my second drive was 20 yards over the fairway. What’s that quote about luck and skill?

The green was guarded by a pair of bunkers and obscured by a few trees. I couldn’t see the flag from my ball, but I lined it up with the bunkers and sent a solid 8 iron on what I thought was a good line. D told me my ball was in between the two bunkers. I started mentally preparing for my chip as we approached the green, only to find my ball 15 feet from the hole. What’s that quote about luck and skill?

I ran the eagle pull in (surely skill here), and unlike my eagle on the 4th of July, I managed to make it to the next hole without texting everyone in my phone book. I felt calm. Calm was odd. Calm was rare. I wasn’t having the round of my life, but I had already made 3 birdies and an eagle to cover up some sloppy doubles.

This is usually when my hands start shaking and my heart starts pounding, but I felt like I could birdie the last 3 holes. I hit a nice tee shot to the par 3 7th, that got a bit unlucky and stayed just off of a slope filtering down to the hole. I scared the hole with my next putt, but it ran out a bit too much, and then I misread the comebacker and left with a bogey. But this wasn’t my normal ABFU or AEFU. I wasn’t nervous and tight. I hit all 3 shots confidently and how I wanted to hit them. They just didn’t go in.

We arrived to the 8th and had a 20 minute wait on the tee box. In fact, from this point on we had double digit waits on every single shot. Around this time D started getting a little feisty. I knew my drive on the hole I eagled had to have been close to the group in front of us, and since we were on the same tee box as them, I walked up and apologized to them. They kind just brushed me off as if they were still upset, so I left the tee. I told D, and he told me I shouldn’t have apologized anyway and that he’d never seen a golfer who was a good fighter, so he wasn’t scared of them. I wondered if he realized he was a golfer too. Maybe he’s more like Gary Player than I want to admit.

I ended up pulling my tee shot too far left on the tight par 4. I had to punch out, but I gave myself a decent par attempt which hit the hole but didn’t drop. Back to back bogeys, but I was still playing confidently and giving myself a chance.

The last hole is a quirky, 420 yard par 4. There’s a huge ditch running through the hole from about 250 yards to about 310 yards from the tee I was playing. I was a little miffed from the long wait and the 2 bogeys, so I considered blasting a driver. However, the wind was hurting a bit, and it had not been a good day with the driver so far. I decided to hit a 3 iron to the end of the fairway and proceeded to push it 40 yards right. My playing partner J told me he hit it over there all the time, and it would be alright. D proceeded to hit his driver on the same line as my shot, so we headed over to search. Of course, neither of us found our balls after being assured they would be fine, so my fired up neighbor declared that we needed to have a challenge. We would drop from the same spot out of the hazard and play against each other from there (for King of the Neighborhood bragging rights or something, I guess).

D is a decent golfer, but I am quite a bit better. He’s probably a 15 handicap while I’m a 3. He’s never come close to beating me in a full round of golf. However, I’ve spent most of my competitive golf career crumbling when the pressure is on. I had flashbacks to all the times I’d let rounds get away from me and lost to people I shouldn’t have. But this time something else fired through me. I felt ready. I knew I had messed up the previous two holes and the tee shot on the 18th, but I also knew I had flushed most of my iron shots today when I committed to them, and I knew that from 210, uphill, into a hard wind, D probably couldn’t reach the green, while I could with a long iron. We could see the flag but not the green from where we were. D cleared the ditch with his shot, but left himself with 60 yards up to the green. I dropped my ball near his divot, grabbed my 5 iron, committed to it, and felt the ball compress just before it fired out towards the green. I didn’t even have to watch it. I felt a rush that I haven’t felt in years from golf.

D said, “sounded like you hit that one a little fat”, and I, as if it was a reflex, said, “No, that’s about as solid as an iron can be hit. You’ve probably just never heard that sound before.” I had to start smiling in his direction before the words all came out so he’d know I was messing with him, an actual reflex I’ve developed as a people pleaser and conflict avoider. Thankfully, he laughed and appreciated the shit talk.

We still couldn’t see the green from D’s next shot on the upslope, so I had to wait to see where my ball had stopped. He hit a shot that he claimed was right at the pin. We pulled up the hill to spot 2 balls about 6 feet from the hole.

I was slightly farther from the hole than D, so I got to putt first. These kinds of putts have kept me up at night, but I just felt ready to hit it. The line didn’t matter, the stroke didn’t matter. There was something happening that was out of my control. I sent it on it’s way and watched it drop. I had not won anything tangible, but having this memory around to push out some of the misses in the past will count for more than any dollar bet.

I was happy to watch D drop his putt as well, but I still gave him some extra trash talk to keep his respect.