Golf Confessions

Do you trust your golf balls?  I have a couple of stories that may influence your answer. 

When I lived on the number three hole at the origional Sawgrass course, I used to go out on number four the par five late in the evenings and hit a few shots.  One afternoon I grabbed six balls from my shag bag and headed to number four for a few late afternoon shots.  I had a six iron and proceeded to hit the balls down the fairway.  When I got to my group of balls I noticed one ball was about twelve yards farther than the rest.  I didn’t pay too much attention other than I must have really caught that one.  So I proceed to hit the balls back down the fairway.  Again I notice one ball is all by its self about 10 to 12 yards farther away.  This time I take note that it is a Maxfli Blue Max.  So again I hit the six balls down the fairway and sure enough the Blue Max is the distance winner.  I did this little drill on other late evening and the old Blue Max was always the winner.  In this group of balls there was an assortment, Titleist Balatas, Pinnacles, Wilson, but nothing could match the Max. 

It is no doubt that we all would like to have a ball that would go true and far.  But if you are not expecting this extra distance you may find yourself over the green and in the swamp.  Golf balls can be a little hot or dead.

I was caddying for a friend at The Tradition in Arizona and he had a experience with a Titleist.  He got ready to hit his tee shot on a par three and when he went to tee the ball he could barely get it to stay on the tee.  The ball was so egg shape.  I took the ball and put it my pocket to give to the Titleist rep when we finished the round.  When we finished the round and found the rep I took the ball from my pocket and by this time it was perfectly round and fit perfectly through the round tool that some players use to check their golf balls.  These things happen.  A tour player usually plays three ball per nine holes, alternating them each hole and they start with three new balls on the back nine.

Another experience with an entire dozen of bad balls in a tournamnet situation came in the Tour Championship at La Costa.  My friend that I was caddying for was a Titleist man at the time and we had used Titleist in all of our practice rounds.  Well the morning of the first round he comes out of the locker room and gives me a dozen Maxfli and says we would be using these today.  I questioned the decision but he insisted that it would be okay.  The trouble started right on the first hole.  The drive seemed to be okay and about a normal distance.  But the approach shot came up about 12 yards short and this was very unusual for this player, he was very accurate with his rions and distance control was great normally.  Of course my yardage was questioned.  The next hole we experienced the same results-short on the approach shot. 

Well long story short, every hole that day we battled getting the yardage on the approach shots.  Shot after shot came up short.  It is very difficult to give yardage when you do not know how far the ball is going to travel.  You would think that all we had to do was just add a few yards each time.  But when you have hit shots a certain distance for years and all of a sudden the yardage is no good it is hard to adjust during the round.  Especially when you have bunkers and hazords to carry and deal with, a guessing game is not for good golf.  We eventually got into the club house with a whopping 79 and found ourselves in dead last.

Needless to say we had Titleist back in the bag the next day.  And since there was an odd number of players in the field and we were first off the next day and we were paired with a marker.  The marker was a young man from the area that played college golf.  My player is a fast player and we ran around La Costa in two hours and fifteen minutes.

We had before and afterwards used Maxfl and had no problems, but this particular batch of balls was definetely dead and we paid the price.

Moral of the story do not change balls the day of the tournamnet.

Fortunately for the player of today the procedure for manufacturing golf balls has improved and product uniformity is greately improved.    

Sergio Garcia used his time with putting guru Stan Utley to his advantage and has a one shot lead after the first day of play at The Players Championship.  Sergio has been struggling with his putting for a while and has tried long putters, short putters, left hand low and anything else that he thought might help with his slump.  Utley has helped many tour players with their short game woes.  If Sergio can match his putting with his ball striking he will be a force to contend with this week.

Phil Mickelson had a solid round in his defense of his title.  Phil will have to over come the fact that no player has repeated back to back.  Ernie Els was going along comfortably until he came to the short par three seventeenth.  On the tee Ernie was two under par with two holes remaining.  Ernie proceeded to triple bogey the hole and went to number eighteen tee at one over par.  Ernie did what most good players do, he hit two great shots on eighteen and sunk his birdie putt to finish the day at even par.  This shows what will be on the players mind on Sunday afternoon, no lead is safe playing number 17.