Here is a short video I made from some clips I captured at the 2015 PGA Tours Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines. I like going down to the practice round on Wednesday because the crowds are small, parking is free and it’s the only day they allow video. It’s always a treat to watch the best players in the world play golf live. Hope you enjoy this little montage and make sure to click the HD button on the top of the video for best quality!
It was sad to see Tiger Woods continue to struggle and ultimately withdraw from the tournament due to injury. He has always played well at Torrey and I was there just two years ago when he won for the 8th time on this course. It baffles me to see him struggle so badly right now, especially with chipping. That just shows you how difficult this game of golf is both physically and mentally. If it can make the best and most dominate player in the history of the game fall this far and look this bad, nobody is safe!
In all honesty though, I am rooting for Tiger to get back to form. He is the reason the game has grown into what it is today and he has drawn millions of people into the game of golf over the past 2 decades. I know I personally probably would never had picked up the game had it not been for Tiger Woods. Before he won the Masters in 1997, I hadn’t even given a single thought to golf. I had never even picked up a club or knew anything about the game. He sparked my interest in this wonderfully cruel game and for that I will always root for him. It’s hard to watch where he is now, but if anybody can come back and rise once again to the top from where he’s currently at, it’s Tiger Woods. It might take him longer than the last couple times and he might have a steeper mountain to climb this time, but I believe he’ll be back. His work ethic and drive to be the best just burns too deep for him to just sink away.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the video! As far as my own game, I had a couple really good range sessions this past week, both short and long game and I’m looking forward to trying to get out to play sometime this next week. I’ll keep you’ll updated.
Got home from the annual Palm Springs tournament on Sunday night and I am so happy to report to you all that I have won the tournament for the 2nd consecutive year! Back to back championships now and I’m so thrilled! Unfortunately, I didn’t shoot that under par round that I was hoping for and I did make some uncharacteristic mistakes (I’ll get into that later), but overall, I played some real solid golf and in the end I accomplished the main goal of winning the tournament.
For those of you who didn’t follow me or read my posts from last year’s Palm Springs tournament, it is a 3 day event where we play courses at both PGA West and La Quinta. This year we had a field of about 90 golfers and although most of the field was just hacking it around, there are some really solid players that play in this event. On the final round, the top 4 leading golfers in the tournament all play together and this year’s final group found me playing against some extremely good players. It consisted of one who played at a division 1 college team, another who qualified for the Buick Invitational PGA Tour Event here in San Diego at Torrey Pines a few years ago (it’s now called the Farmers Insurance Open) and another a scratch golfer, who plays in many USGA events and was leading me by 3 strokes…not to mention it was about 110 degrees every single day. This was now my 4th year attending this annual tournament in the desert and I had won it the year before so I also had that little added pressure of being defending champ!
The first day we played at the Greg Norman, a course I had never played at before and it was extremely challenging. I’ve never played a true “desert” course like that before…it was basically only fairways and desert. Not much rough at all, but the fairways were narrow and you had to be deadly accurate both off the tee and on your 2nd shots or you were playing from the rock hard desert or losing your ball in the shrubs. Playing any course for the first time is always difficult, obviously why pros play practice rounds, but I played some solid golf. I ended up shooting a 78 (+6) with only 1 birdie, but was still only 2 shots off the lead after day 1. My ball striking was really solid, but I was disappointed in my score, I just could not figure out the Bermuda greens and putted terrible. My lag putting was horrid! Left countless putts 3-4 ft short, but was making most of the 2nd putts, but I did end up 3-putting twice. I’ve never played on Bermuda greens before and it’s something totally different than what I’m used to…so slow!! I also bogeyed two par 5’s, something I almost never do, both as a result of tee shots that found the hazards. So that is 4 shots right there that I should have the skills to avoid, so I left a possible low score on the course, but was still right there at the top of the leader board in 3rd place.
I’ve played this course each of the previous 3 years, so I have some course knowledge built up by now. I absolutely love this course; it’s challenging yet fun, beautiful and well maintained. This only problem this year was that the greens had been aerated, must have been a few weeks prior, they weren’t sandy, but the punched holes still slightly remained, certainly enough to affect putts. Nonetheless, I was most confident to play this course of all the 3 because I like the layout, my scores have improved every year here and I looked forward to trying to go low on a real difficult course. My ball striking remained solid, but I just could not take advantage of ANYTHING all day and didn’t have a single birdie, yet was still able to shoot only a 75(+3). 15 pars and 3 bogeys, one of the bogies was another 3 putt and I again bogeyed two par 5’s!! What?!? I seriously never bogey par 5’s and I had now done it 4 times in 2 rounds, was frustrating beyond belief. With my length, I expect to be making birdie on a lot of them and certainly never making worse than par. As I had talked about in my previous post before I left, my wedge game from 100 yards and in was my main concern and it came into play big time during this round. I had 5 shots from the range of 90-70 yards during the round and I only hit the green once!! That is really really bad and I was left having to scramble for par (which I did successfully) rather than having a solid look at birdie and a par almost guaranteed with an easy 2 putt. If I want to shoot under par, I must improve that part of my game, I’ll be sure to dedicate a lot more time to that area going forward. The low round of the day was a 73(+1) from a guy who shot 77 the first day. The person who was leading after a first round 76 ended up dropping back quite a bit and I jumped into 2nd place heading into the final round trailing by 3 strokes.
**Here is a video of my tee shot on the par 3 17th hole. You can’t really see the ball flight from the video, but I hit a 9iron that I tried to draw back to the flag…it finished about 15 ft pin high left. 2 putt par.**
Day 3 Final Round – La Quinta Dunes Course
This was a big day for me, all the work I’ve been doing on my mental game was going to come into play today. I’ve never been in a tournament final round pairing before, last year I played in a pre set up group, so this year I had some nerves cooking. I’ve never been in that type of situation before and I knew it was going to be great experience for later on when I play in bigger tournaments going forward, like Golf Channel Am Tour Events. I studied my yardage book the night before, devised a game plan and visualized playing the course in my mind. I even visualized them calling my name as champion at the banquet because I believe in the theory that if the mind can see it and truly believe it, then you can achieve it! I went in with the mindset of keeping my emotions in check and trying to just focus on playing one single shot at a time. I wanted to get lost in the game and try to go unconscious…I wanted to be in the “zone.” I knew which player it was that I was 3 shots behind and I knew at some point if I looked like I was gaining ground or in the lead that I would be watching his shots thinking “ok, now I must make this putt to stay 1 down or 1 up” so I tried to make sure I didn’t fall into that trap. In a sense I didn’t want to score board watch, I wanted to come down to the 18th hole not knowing if I was leading or not. I just wanted to stick to my game plan I set up the night before and play my game, that’s all I can do and in the end if it’s not enough to be the winner so be it.
I’m so proud of myself, I honestly kept focused on one shot at a time, when my mind did wander a few times, I recognized it and snapped back out of it immediately. I let go of any bad shots, maintained a positive attitude and neutral emotions and got into that elusive “zone” that golfers strive for. I honestly had no idea of my individual score I was so much in the zone, let alone where I was in relation to the lead. I could sense that I was probably in the lead, but wasn’t sure by how much if at all. They set it up so that our 18th hole was the 17th hole(pictured below) which is the #1 handicapped hole and I have heard the 1st or 2nd hardest hole in all of California! It is a long dog leg left holes with water all down the left side, extremely intimidating, but I didn’t think twice and stuck to my game plan of hitting a 4 iron off the tee. I hit it right down the middle of the fairway, where as the person I was battling the lead with took driver and hit it through the fairway into a bunker. He had an almost impossible 2nd shot and hit it into the water. He later told me that he was thinking in his head as he saw me pull 4 iron “wow he’s going conservative and playing it smart” He talked himself out of doing the same, it was nice of him to tell me how impressed he was with my mental attitude, my game and how I went about playing the course. I ended up winning by 4 strokes after being down 3 strokes going into the final round and accomplished my goal of back to back championships!! Now my mind is already set on that 3-peat next year and shooting an under par round. I want that under par round at that tourney, it didn’t happen this year, but I will have it!
I know this is a really long post, thanks for sticking around and taking the time to read it, thanks for all your support guys! You are all helping me make my dreams become reality one day at a time and I hope that I can help you all go after and accomplish your dreams as well…we are in this together, you all motivate me to be better and live a life which I have imagined. Thank you, hope you enjoyed this tournament recap! They haven’t posted any pictures from the tournament yet, so I’ll post a few when they get released.
If you look back at my post about my 2014 Golfing Goals, one of them was to win our annual work golf tournament. My team had shot (-10) both the last 2 years and we had finished in 2nd and 4th place respectively. I’ve wanted to win this tournament so badly, not only for the bragging rights, but to actually have the championship go to a team of employees as this tourney is in honor of our late owner who loved golf. I have been working so hard on my game over this past year, as you all know and this moment has been on my mind the whole time.
Our goal was just to improve on our consecutive (-10) 62’s and hopefully break into the 50’s and with any luck a shot to win. Well I’m happy to announce that we accomplished our goal and then some! We absolutely destroyed the course, scored an unreal (-17) 55, set a new tournament record and won the tournament by 3 strokes!! It was an unbelievable day, our whole team stepped up clutch in every situation we found ourselves in, I’m really proud of my team.
I started off pretty wild, slicing both my first tee shots out of bounds, but thankfully one of my teammates hit solid drives on both. We started on hole #7 which is the #1 handicapped hole, we had a pretty long 2nd shot of about 220 from the rough, but one of my teammates hit a beautiful hybrid to about 30ft above the flag. All 3 of my teammates putted, missing the birdie, but giving me a great read, I stepped up and drained the long birdie putt…a Tiger Woods fist pump ensued and that gave us big momentum and started us off on a crazy streak of 15 straight birdies!! We were sticking it close on almost every hole, inside 10 ft and we made basically every putt. We made 3 putts from over 25ft, a couple when it was our final putt, just clutch to keep the birdie streak going. I don’t think any of us expected to play this well overall, as I’m the only one on the team that breaks 80 and one of our players hadn’t even touched a club since last year’s tourney, but those guys played so well, it was truly a team effort and I’m so happy to be able to cross another item off my golf bucket list! We were kind of disappointed we couldn’t complete the perfect round and birdie all 18 holes, but we just couldn’t convert the birdie opportunity from off the green on the difficult par 3 4th (Our 16th hole).
We won some pretty cool prizes as well, one of which was 4 complimentary rounds to the host course, Rancho Bernardo Inn($85 each). Pretty awesome as this semi private course is just in perfect condition right now. It’s a very fun and challenging course and it has hosted both PGA and LPGA events in the past so I look forward to being able to play it for free soon!
I’ll post some pictures from the event when they get posted from the photographer here in a few days, but for now here is the picture of our almost perfect scorecard, what a round!
**Here are some of the pictures taken at the tournament in Palm Springs few weeks ago. The PGA West courses in Palm Springs are beautiful and it was a real treat to get to experience golf at some of the finest courses in the US.**
Spent most of my time this week at the range working on my long game to try and stop my shifting forward in my downswing. It’s something that my coach identified as a problem months ago when I first started getting lessons again, but I could never fully grasp the correct “feeling.” I dedicated myself this week to finding that feeling as I know that I have fallen back into my bad habit of shifting forward with my hips instead of turning through on the downswing…and it causes me to have real inconsistent contact with an either push or big draw ball flight. I feel like now I have finally figured out the correct feeling and my swing feels a lot smoother and my contact is A LOT better. Worked in front of a mirror, with swing analysis video on my phone and at the range and I’m seeing great positive results.
Me putting on #18 Dunes Course
I played a round with my friend on Wednesday over at the Vineyard to try and take my practice to the course and see how it would hold up during a round. I shot a disappointing 79, but my ball striking with my irons was really solid and my ball flight was a lot more accurate than it has been. My only problem this round was off the tee with my driver. I hit every single drive solid, with distance, it was just leaking left. I found the out of bounds off the tee 4 times on Wednesday, causing me to have 3 double bogeys. So I know what I need to work on again and it is straightening out my driver, the contact and distance is there, but I can feel I’m coming slightly over the top, now I just need to find the correct slot and that should straighten it out. Worked last night at the range for a bit and my driver was getting a lot better, still slightly leaking left, but definitely straightening out.
Chipping
My short game is the best it’s ever been right now, I’m really confident in what I’m doing with my putter. I’m finally getting consistent solid contact in the center of the putter face and it has greatly improved my distance control. The ball is rolling off the putter face as it should and my green reading is improving also. I’m the most confident I have ever been on the greens right now and I hope to keep it going
Our Group Day #2 at the Dunes Course
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get out and play this weekend, but hopefully next week I can get out 2-3 times and play some solid golf. If I keep hitting the ball like I am and straighten out that driver, I feel like I can go real low, let’s make it happen!
YES!! I’m still slightly in shock that I was able to win the tournament in Palm Springs this past week! It was my 3rd time attending the tourney and ever since my 1st a few years back, it has been a big goal of mine to get my game good enough to try and win, so this is a big accomplishment for me mentally. It proves to me that hard work and dedication really do pay off. I did not play as well as I know I’m capable of, left a lot of shots out there due to short game, yet it was still just enough to get the job done as I beat the field of 85 by just 1 shot by the end of Sunday!
**I have been putting off writing a post about the tourney yet because I have been waiting for them to post the pictures, but I think it’s time I at least clue you guys in and let you guys know that I actually won the thing!**
It was a 3 day tournament in Palm Springs…Day 1 we played at the PGA West Jack Nicklaus Course, it was 110 degrees and I shot a 79 (+7), putting me tied in 2nd place after day one (low score of day was a 75). This round was actually really disappointing for me, we started on hole #5 on a shotgun start and I was at Even par through my first 11 holes and then went +7 over my last 7 holes to finish. I think the heat got to me near the end. I was hitting the ball great all day, but near the end I started missing greens and could not get up and down to save my life. Went 0-5 on up and down over my last 7 holes and had a 3 putt. So even with the very disappointing finish to the first day, I was still only 4 shots back from the lead and feeling good.
Final Stats for Nicklaus Course:Score: 79 (+7)Fairways Hit (FW) 7/14 50% Green in Regulation (GIR) 8/18 44% Up/Downs 2/9 22%. Sand Saves 0/0 0% Penalties: 0 Putts: 33
Day 2 we played at the La Quinta Dunes Course and I tied for the low round of the day with a solid (+3) 75! We started on hole #14 on the shotgun start and something amazing happened…..the first two holes, back to back, I chipped in for birdie! Both were great chips that one hopped and fell into the cup, it was crazy and missed a 3rd on the next hole by an inch. So that start was a nice treat, but unfortunately I was not able to make another birdie the entire day, but played solid golf to only finish at +3. I doubled #17 which is the #1 handicapped hole, perfectly in the fairway, but I blocked my 7 iron and it found the water left of the green. I did not hit the ball well off the tee this day, but my short game was a lot better and as a result I finished the day tied for the lead going into Sunday!
Final Stats for Dunes Course:Score: 75 (+3)Fairways Hit (FW) 4/14 29% Green in Regulation (GIR) 9/18 50% Up/Downs 5/7 71%. Sand Saves 0/1 0% Penalties: 1 Putts: 27
Day 3 (Final) we played at the La Quinta Mountain Course, my first time ever playing at this course. It is a beautiful course, literally carved into the la quinta mountain side and it even features an island green, only it’s surrounded by rocks and not water like at Sawgrass. We started on #14, the 2nd handicapped hole and I hit it to about 12 ft for birdie…..then I promptly 3 putted for a bogey, ridiculous! I was very upset at myself, but I think in a way it almost freed me up to just go out and play and not worry about score or winning and just let the chips fall where they may. I hit a lot of close shots for birdie, but could not convert a lot of them, missed 10 ft birdies on #15 and #17 and even a 3 ft birdie on #1, horrible! I was +4 after my first 7 holes, but still striking the ball well. I was able to make some clutch putts coming down the stretch, a few birdies and finished my last 11 holes at just +1. I had no clue that my score of 77 (+5) was going to be good enough to win the tournament. We all gathered back in the clubhouse to hand in our scorecards and that was when I was told that I had won the tournament by 1 shot! I was in shock as the other person I was tied with on the final day had shot a 78. Needless to say you can tell that this was not the most difficult tournament, as my final 3 day total of 231 (+15) won, but I’m still extremely proud to top the field of 85 players and happy to accomplishing a big goal of mine. We played on the same courses where they play the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament, the rough was long and fluffy and it was 110 degrees + every single day. The Golf Channel Am Tour events will be more difficult and significant to win, but this win is a real confidence booster for me and a big stepping stone in my journey to become a scratch golfer. My goal for next year at this tournament is to shoot an under par round, I believe if I keep putting in the time and effort, I can make it happen!
Final Stats for Mountain Course:Score: 77 (+5)Fairways Hit (FW) 9/14 64% Green in Regulation (GIR) 10/18 55% Up/Downs 1/5 20%. Sand Saves 0/1 0% Penalties: 2 Putts: 32
**I will be posting pictures of the tournament when they release them so stayed tuned in the next week.**
My Journey 2 Scratch 