No, this is not about Cristie Kerr's 61 around this time last year that helped her win the SemGroup Championship. Nor is it about the pairings for the first round of three in this year's tournament--as interesting as the Meena Lee-Grace-Park Jennifer Rosales ("Can They Get It Going This Year?") group, the Maria Hjorth-Kyeong Bae-Angela Park ("Can They Break Through This Year and Win?") group, the Jeong Jang-Kelly Robbins-Jee Young Lee ("Who's the Best Seoul Sister This Year? And, Oh Yeah, Can the Other One Hang with Them?") group, the Morgan Pressel-Laura Davies-Cristie Kerr ("Who's the Best American Women's Golfer? And, Oh Yeah, Can the Other One Get Half Way Toward Winning Her Way into the LPGA Hall of Fame This Week?") group, the Brittany Lincicome-Se Ri Pak-Paula Creamer ("Hey, What About Us?") group, the Juli Inkster-Mi Hyun Kim-Natalie Gulbis ("Yeah, and Us!") group, and of course the Stacy Prammanasudh-Catriona Matthew-Lorena Ochoa ("Top-10 Machines") group are. (Ai-chan and Moira are in the tournament, so I'll have some people to root for, too! It's been a wet week so far and the course has small greens, so the big hitters should have a bit of an advantage.)
Ahem.
No, this post is about onechan's first "round" of "golf." Yeah, I dragged the girls away from the onsen (hot spring bathing area) we visited on Monday to check out what I thought was a huge putting green a short walk from our hotel. Turns out it was something I'd never seen before in my life: a par-33-33-66 18-hole "course" with holes ranging from 25-100 meters in length that you play with a modifed croquet mallet and modified cricket ball. When I almost drove the longest hole on the course on my first shot of the day, I admit I had visions of breaking 54. But after it took me 3 to get down from 15 yards out or so, despite the cup being almost a foot in diameter, I dialed back my expectations--my eagles were unlikely to offset my pars. The "greens" (in fact, a mix of mostly gravelly sand with some grass) were tiny but heavily contoured, there was actually rough and grass bunkers around them (we saw a guy mowing the fairways with a specialized mower, which cracked us up), and playing with a 3-year-old was not doing wonders for my concentration. Even though onechan has a great swing with the rolled-up small plastic picnic mat she uses to hit balloons with at home, she was having trouble gripping the "putter" mallet we got for her correctly, which made it hard for her to get more than a half swing going. Plus she wanted to chase after her ball the second she hit it and had no sense of danger or consideration for other people on the course. So before I settled for a birdie on my first hole, I knew I was facing a pedagogical challenge. How to do my best to ensure she would have fun, stay safe, and learn something about golf and golf etiquette--and still break 60 while doing so?
Fortunately, onechan's idea of playing golf was hitting it off the tee, picking it up, following me down the fairway (well, after she tried to skip to the second green from the first fairway right when the group ahead of us was hitting into it and I had to keep her from picking up or getting hit by one of their balls!), placing the ball 1-3" from the cup, and putting it in (about 75% of the time, that is--I had never known it was possible to miss from that length until that day). This meant we had no trouble keeping up with the foursome--a scary-good group of retirees with amazing course knowledge--ahead of us. Plus, we were lucky that the foursome behind us included two kids under 10, who were hitting every shot and putting every putt until they finally finished each hole, so we were not holding anyone up. This is a huge deal for me--my little brother and I grew up on the 9-hole golf course of the college where my dad still works and, being used to rounds of about a hour or so (less as we got older and better), our number one annoyance was getting stuck behind a slow group that wouldn't let us through. Lucky for onechan, I was even encouraging her to take more swings per hole and practice her putting on each green after we holed out.
Also lucky for her was my decision not to try to teach her too much about grip, address, aiming, or swinging that day. So long as she was pointed in the right general direction and not in danger of braining someone (who was bending over near her, that is--as I was for the two close calls I had that day!), I was going to let her figure the technical stuff out for herself. I can't think of a quicker way to get a three-year-old to quit than to try to police her into a good pre-shot routine with a fake club her very first time out on a pretend course. What I did try to teach her was to stand by the side of the tee box until after I had hit rather than running after her drive immediately, to stay still when someone else was hitting, to stay on our fairway, to not pick up anyone else's ball, and to keep her voice down as much as possible for an excited 3-year-old. Mission accomplished!
With the basic survival skills going over well, I was able to focus more on introducing her to some of the drama of the game and ways of sizing up holes off the tee as the round went on. I think I did pretty well on the former, but it's hard to say how I did on the latter--I think ok. Let me give you an example. I would give her a running commentary on my round as we played and answer her questions on my terminology as they arose. She already know that circles (birdies) are good and squares (bogeys) are bad from sitting with me at the computer "watching" the end of an LPGA tournament or four (that is, looking at the live scorecards of various players) but I had to explain what an eagle and a double-eagle were (as I had many good chances for them that day) and why they mattered (not in the greater scheme of things, of course). When I had a tough putt, I would ham it up and mutter "taihen!" and "muzukashii!" until she asked me "why?" (I never would have to wait long for that question!) Then I could show her the steep drop-off right behind the hole or how I expected the putt to break. When a tee shot presented some difficulties, I would cry out "abunai!" and then explain what seemed dangerous to me and what I was going to try to do in response. I figured the details weren't going to stick with her but the overall example of thinking your way around a course, with repetition, might sink in over time. And I certainly gave her a lot of drama that round!
After settling for birdies on three of my first four holes, my overly aggressive putting finally got the better of me and I bogeyed the fifth with a three-putt. But bounced back with two consecutive birdies. Unfortunately the front closed out with two par-3s in a row, and I butchered them as badly as I had butchered the first two, parring the first and bogeying the next to fall back to a 30 on the front. By this point, onechan was referring to herself as Karrie Webb, so I decided to call myself Tiger Woods b/c I was overpowering the course but having trouble with my distance control, just as he did early in his career. Plus it allowed for my normal emotiveness to be in character. And it allowed me to play up a little competition between us--Karrie was beating Tiger, who was just having a so-so round, according to my story (and, given the number of 2s she was making, it was probably true).
When I put it just past pin-high on the 10th, a 76-meter par-five, I got a little excited and started walking fast to the green. In trying to catch up, onechan tripped and skinned her knee--crisis! She was bawling at the top of her lungs, something she only does when she is tired, which meant there were good odds I wouldn't finish the round (especially because the tsuma was not happy about baby-sitting imoto and was stuck giving her opai back by the 8th green). But fortunately for me, I remembered we had wipes and lemon tea in the baby cart, so I was able to kill three birds with one stone--clean up the teeny amount of blood on her knee, give her a drink, and get her in a "golf cart" from which she could "caddy" for me until she felt better. Amazingly, this worked, and she was actually psyched for my double-eagle putt, which stopped dead center a half-revolution short of the cup. (Yeah, I hammed it up and fell to my knees with my putter still raised in anticipatory celebration!)
So I knew that with just two more birdies over the final eight holes I'd break 60--and with a great finish, I could put a scare into 54. Sure, there were 4 par-3s ahead of me and no more par-5s, but I figured I was due to get my distance control under control and have some putts start dropping for me (my longest birdie putt was like a four-footer even though the hole was looking like it had room for a basketball to fall into it). Onechan wasn't playing, yet was in a good mood; the tsuma and imoto had caught up to us in time to see the eagle putt drop and at least one of them seemed interested as interested as I was in seeing how low I could go. Perfect conditions, right? Wrong! Around this time, an exasperated group of retirees had skipped a hole to avoid the slow family of 4 behind us, and they were looking at me like I was going to slow them down. Did I mention that my second-biggest golfing annoyance is feeling like I'm slowing someone else down? People who like to speed should know what I'm talking about--you tend to imagine the guy who might possibly get stuck behind you if you don't get out of his way in the next 15 seconds will be as annoyed by the realization of that possibility as you would if you were behind his wheel. Normally this kind of situation wouldn't affect me much at all, but as I was rusty mentally, not having played much golf since 2004 (it took the tsuma the whole summer to get me to realize how bad it was that I was playing 3-4 times per week with onechan less than 9 months old--and once I did, I figured I'd better cut out the golf almost completely until I could bring her to the course with me), I let it get to me more than I should have.
If you've already done the math, you know the end of this story, but in case you haven't, let me just say that this is when all the times I've criticized Moira Dunn for not being able to finish a good round came back to haunt me. Despite failing to birdie the par-4 11th, I was able to birdie the 13th and 14th. So what do I do? Facing a good birdie chance on the par-3 15th, I four-putt for a double. And then I fail to get under par on any of the last 3 holes. Disappointing 61.
Like any good golfer, I have my excuses. Onechan started playing again on the 14th, which allowed the retiree group I had pulled away from to catch up with us again. I was rushing a bit more because imoto was getting impatient over that same stretch. We all were starting to get a little hungry.
But really, there's no excuse for that finish. My distance control and putting got worse over those final 8 holes (in fact, I was lucky to make the two birdies I did). Although I shouldn't have been feeling any pressure, I was, and I was even more frustrated with myself that I was. I mean, I've shot a 66 on a real golf course before and, as I got my handicap down from a 7 to a 2 in my first few years back in NY, I got used to putting myself in a position to break 70 fairly regularly (once my home course firmed up in mid-summer that is). And it's not that I just got good at playing an easy course--I was also regularly breaking 75 at the toughest course a reasonable distance from my apartment, playing almost as well as the best golfers in south of Buffalo and north of Jamestown, competing well in area tournaments and NYSGA qualifiers (I'll tell you the "what happened when I finally qualified for the state Mid-Amateur" story someday), and wondering just how good I could get. To--yes--choke on a pretend course when my chief aim was to leave onechan wanting to play again was just pitiful.
But she did want to play again--right after we finished the round, in fact! So we promised her we'd find her a course closer to Fukuoka and that we'd come back to this course. Not a bad round, all in all! (But I'd sure love to reply the final 4 holes....)
[Update 5/4/07: This link is for Oaktown Girl!]
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