I Think I’m on to Something!

I played the back 9 at Torrey Pines North last week and shot a 47.  Using the 80BREAKR™ app, I realized what cost the majority of my bad shots.  Confirming this was my golf pro buddy Jason.  “you looked up!”

All together, I counted 8 “looked up” shots including topped tee shots, topped fairway woods, and a couple shanked pitch shots.  Today I used the game planning feature of the app and set my target to be “within my index”.  Meaning take the course handicap from my index, and plan to par only those where I did not get a handicap stroke.  Looking at the plan for a 43, I decided I could forgo bogeys on par 5’s and par 3’s, which made for a plan of 40.

Next I decided I would try to not “look up” before impact.  I also wanted to focus on slow back swing to get the most favorable swing tempo.  The most interesting thing happened, and golf was “easy”.  Taking away the “pressure” of shooting a low score, I could look at my hole plan and found I could focus on just that one swing, that one shot.  What stress was there in shooting bogey?  It was just a little more focus on watching the ball just a little longer, and slowing the back swing kept my tempo more consistent.

I was 1 over par after 4 holes.  Here was the birdie putt on the 14th, which I drained to be even for 5 holes.

 

Uneventful pars on the next two holes.  Standing on the 17th tee, par 3, my mind drifted to score, and I was thinking “I can do this all day.” like Captain America.  I promptly “looked up” and shanked the 8 iron into deep rough around the back of the 14th hole.  Hitting the bathrooms, and an unplayable lie gave me a 6 for the hole.  So there it is for me.  I know what to do and how to do it, but I have to sustain it not just for 7 holes, but for 18.

So the engineer in me wanted to understand how much more time I need to look at the ball to fix this problem.  To make the math easy, 100mph driver swing = 147 ft/sec club head speed.  If I stop watching the ball 2 feet before the clubhead meets the ball, that means I stop watching the ball 0.014 seconds before impact.  If I just watch the ball for 14 additional milliseconds per swing, I can get rid of  these round ruining shots.

I think I have the time.