Today is the day (I actually wrote this about 35 days ago) I write something more than my daily musings. It is time to explain my five-year plan. The first thing for me to do is to make a confession, to bare my soul. So here it is, I am a GOLFER!! I do not just play the occasional casual round, hacking it around with friends. Every time I play, I have a plan, a goal, a round of golf for me is never just for fun. But I always have fun playing golf. I have said this many, many times, “I have played bad golf, but I have never had a bad day playing golf”. I am absolutely obsessed with golf. More to the point I want to be great. I want people to say, “Wow, he is a great golfer”. Now that is incredibly arrogant and I am not a fool, I understand how hard it is to be great golfer. I also know that I will never be a professional golfer. But, I think I can be a great amateur. So that is my goal, to be a great amateur golfer.
Ok, so being a top tier amateur is a nice idea, but just thoughts and dreams like that are devoid of reality. What makes dreams real are goals. Ways to quantitatively track progress. Also goals need to be more specific. Failure must be allowed. Because without failure there can be no success. So the next thing I am going to say will be thought as laughable, maybe even the ravings of a madman: I am going to play on the 2025 Walker Cup team. We, me and my teammates, are going to play Cypress Point, representing the United States.
Now to address the laugh factor: I am overweight and at times not taken seriously. I work on cultivating a jovial demeanor, of somebody who does not take life too seriously. But that is just a facade. At my core I am a true fucking competitor. I have a good golf swing, good distance, a good golf IQ, all intertwined with a creative approach for tackling a course. My mistakes are always mental, either from nerves or the main reason, me doing stupid shit without thinking. The mental deficit is not choosing the right play, the safest play, not the heroic one. But I think I am becoming smarter, I am learning and I will continue to improve.
So this idea, this goal, the journey so to speak is already underway. I started this maybe last March. I do not have an exact start date. So it been six months, let’s say. I am going to use April 1st, 2019 as the start date for what will now be referred to as “Operation Cup”. The all mighty GHIN states that on 4/1/2019 my handicap index was a 3.7. that is our starting point. The end point will need to be somewhere in the +4.0 range. To move one’s handicap that much will be tough, but I think I can succeed. I would not have started this undertaking it I thought I was going to fail.
To succeed means one thing, hard work. I need to train hard in a gym, I need to practice hard with a purpose, and I need most importantly to always think my way around the golf course. As an update, to show I am not completely unhinged, as of 11/15/19 my GHIN index has dropped to 1.4.
I have this drive inside of me, ever since I got sober six years ago, to be great. I have an innate talent for playing golf and it is something that I think I could be great at. Golf is one of those funny sports, amateurs are where the game is grown, it is where the game is really played. There is out there a whole world of amateur competition that helps define the game of golf. I also think with how modern technology has changed the way golf is played, someone in their late 30’s has the ability to compete with those that are younger. We see it every week on the professional tours, even people in there mid to late 40’s are in competition. So I think that if I focus on the mental side of golf along with a real focus on the strength and conditioning, I have a shot at making my dreams come true.