Just Wait Until He's In A Water Hazard
We're on the putting green.Since Eli 17.9 has started to really enjoy golf (he shot an 84 last week), we're playing quite a bit. We play together at least three days a week, and he plays another two or three days with friends.
For an ancient, I've started playing pretty well. In the very old days, I played to a five handicap, but then Eli was born and golf stopped for over a decade, really for sixteen years. I can still hit the ball, but my short game has been pretty poor.
Then I had an idea, and today, we're trying it out.
"How long is this hole?" I ask.
Eli consults the Bethpage Black scorecard. "Four hundred and twenty yards," he says. "Par four."
I consult a sheet of written instructions, currently sealed in a Ziploc bag. "Twenty-five feet plus seventeen feet for hole distance," I say. "That's a forty-two foot putt."
We find our place on the green and tee off.
"How far away were you?" I ask.
"Six feet," Eli says.
I consult the sheet. "Ooh, you're in the rough."
"What?" he asks, laughing.
"If you're more than five feet away on the drive, you're in the rough," I say. "That terrain type doubles the miss on your approach putt, so you need to be close on this one. Your drive distance was two-forty, so you have one eighty to the pin. That's fifteen feet plus eighteen feet for distance, so you have a thirty-three foot putt for the approach shot."
"Let me see that sheet," Eli says. I hand it to him. "Oh my god," he says. "It's all formulas. Wait, is this written in code?"
"Mostly," I say.
"Here, take it back," he says, laughing. He lines up his putt and strokes it within two feet of the hole.
"Looks like someone has a fifteen-foot birdie putt coming up," I say. He laughs.
"This is actually really fun," he says.
"Just wait until you have to hit a bunker shot," I say.
We played for about forty-five minutes, working through the front nine at Bethpage Black. I went -2, Eli went -3, and we had a great time.
____
I've been thinking for a while about the short game and how to practice it in a way that I'm fully engaged. I don't want to just line up balls and hit the same putt over and over. This is a problem for everyone, because the short game is important, but practicing it is real drudgery.
I had an idea yesterday: what if we could pretend to be playing on a course, where the outcome of every putt is important? That's when I started making rules and creating formulas.
Basically, you use a putt to represent every shot on the course, and your accuracy determines the distance and terrain of your next shot. If your approach putt is inaccurate enough, it's even possible to wind up in a real bunker, or need to chip from off the green.
Once you hit your approach shot, you just play out the rest of the hole like you normally would. Then you putt the score for the hole on your scorecard and move on.
It's complicated enough that you have to think your way through, so you're never just banging putts. And it makes practice have real stakes, because you're competing against each other and putting scores on a real scorecard. It makes everything more intense and so much more interesting.
I'm going to keep working on this, as a side project, because it has potential. Especially as an app, with a career mode, where you could play on a tour with different courses and work your way through the amateur tours to the pros and...
Yes, I get carried away. It's in my nature.
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