I should really rename Going Low. Today wasn’t low. It wasn’t even as low as my Quest for Par round at St. Peters earlier in the week. When I started this I assumed I would be breaking par all the time from the up tees, but that has not happened thanks to dumb mistakes and lack of birdies.

Today it was more of the lack of birdies thanks to another god-awful putting day. I had two three-putts on Par 3’s with decent birdie looks. I got too aggressive on both and blew them past the hole and missed the comebackers. I hit 10 greens and had decent looks on most of them. However, I was on the wrong (harder) side of the hole each time. Some of that can be attributed to another windy day. Most of the time when I was missing before today I was over-reading break. Today I adjusted to playing less break and got burned just as bad. In fairness, my misses were smaller a lot of the time and I lipped out, burned up the edge, or left it on it a bunch. My only birdie came on a chip-in today on the 15th.

My driving was once again good. I hit some absolute bombs to leave myself chips into the green. Too bad I didn’t finish them. I have basically eliminated my right miss and am working a nice draw. The only two misses right I had off the tee was when I was trying to miss right. One was a 3-wood avoiding the bond on 11 that runs down the left side. The other was a purposeful cut around the tree that guards the right side of the tee box on 17. Granted I overcut it into the other fairway, but that’s a good miss and that might be the first time in my golfing life that I had to go against my natural shot shape to hit a fade. I used to live and die off how big my slice was on the day.

There’s not much else to say. It looked like a good round if you only watched me tee to green and then waited for me to get to the next tee. Hitting the ball farther definitely is the biggest help in strokes gained, but if you can’t putt at all, none of that good work shows up on the scorecard. Also, I continue to be significantly better on the back than the front (+6 to +2 today). This is a problem I definitely need to figure out.

Back at it again tomorrow at Incline Village.