How to golf real good

By

Mari Lowder

Your resident pro amateur friend who has been golfing 3 times.

I've decided to put all the helpful knowledge that I have gained into 10 easy steps. Just follow these guidelines while you are golfing and you'll always look like a pro. Even if you stink.

Step 1: The first thing you want to do when you are getting ready to whack that ball into high heaven is take a couple practice swings. I believe that 2-3 swings is good. I don't know why. For me, it doesn't matter if I take 400 practice swings, I either get lucky or I don't. But since everyone else does it, I'm there. This leads us directly into...

Step 2: There may come a time when after all your carefully placed practice swings you will line yourself up just perfectly to hit that ball, focus real hard, and Swifffth... miss completely. This has been known to happen to me multiple times. On the same hole. This will leave you feeling like a fool. A complete and utter idiot for ever thinking that you wanted to play golf with your husband and DIL. But fear not. Remember those practice swings we were talking about? Just pretend that you've taken another one of those. Odds are that your friends aren't watching very carefully and will think that is in fact what you are doing. If you look around with this dumbfounded sheepish look on your face they will know that you missed. And they might make you count it as a stroke. Not good.

Step 3: Don't lose your temper. It will invariably make you 1000% worse than you were before.

Related Tangent: I lost my temper on hole number 3. Oh sure I didn't curse up a storm, break the club over my knee, and throw my ball into the pond. But I wanted to, oh how I wanted to. Instead I just kept topping the ball which moved it about 2 feet with every hit. Too short to count for anything, too long to be considered a "practice swing". And then when I finally got a good hit my ball landed in a grove of trees. Lets be honest, at this point I looked around to make sure no one was watching and picked up my ball and threw it towards the green.

What?

Anyway, many many strokes later I finally got it in the cup. Cup? Is that what it's called? Well whatever it is, I got it.

Step 4: Graciously accept charity. Occasionally we all have hole no 3s and the resulting score ruins the rest of your game... and the rest of your night... and possibly the next day. When the score keeper asks what you got, be honest, and maybe (especially if the score keeper is your DIL) he will be merciful and give you a 10 instead of the 23 you deserved. Take the pity and move on. Otherwise you will dwell on how you were doing so well before that blasted hole and you can never recover now. And the rest of your game will be ruined.

Step 5: Praise the golfers around you. When someone you are golfing with hits an especially nice one, let them know it was good. Praise them excessively in fact. If they are too busy thinking about their own awesome hit, they will probably forget to give you advice on your own swing.

Step 6: Make simple goals for yourself but don't tell anyone what they are. For example, on the par 3 course that we were at my goal was to get each hole in 10 strokes or less. I failed (see hole no. 3) but due to my acceptance of charity and me not telling anyone my goal, I felt like I reached it because on paper and in my head there was success. My next goal is to have my total score be double par or less. I think I can do it.

Step 7: Learn the terminology, sorta. If you are going to try and use the correct terms for everything, then you darn well better get it right. Nothing says fool like "sandbox". Not that any of us would say that. I don't really use terms like par or bogey. I prefer terms such as 8 or 11. Someday my friends, someday...

Step 8: Develop some sort of disability. Luckily our golf game came right around the time that the plague returned. So when I felt like I wasn't doing very well I just coughed a lot so that everyone could hear me and know that whatever I did wasn't my fault. Hit it into the trees? Sorry, had a cough. Missed the ball completely? My bad, my lungs are burning. Use it wisely friends. You can't pull out the big guns all at once.

Step 9: Keep your head down. This is the cardinal rule of golf. If you don't get in the habit of doing it you're gonna hear about it all day receive loving advice because that will always be the reason that you screw up. So just do it. Keep your head down. Keep it down now.

Step 10: Have fun! Golf can be fun especially when you don't feel like a fool. Just follow these quick easy steps, remind everyone you've never been golfing before and go "fore" it! Heh heh. (I actually typed that on accident at first but it worked out nice don't you think?)

Here is a shot of Tyson (who has been golfing more than 3 times)

Here I am during my 2nd time golfing

Ah, the happy golfers. We do enjoy ourselves.