Category Archives: SF Flavor

Inching Ever Downward: Are Mid-90’s the New Plateau?

Originaly posted 9/11/08

This past Monday I headed out to Lincoln Park to play a round and see just how far along my inner game quest has taken me. The hard part lately has been expectation management, which is pretty much a constant with this game. It was overblown expectation that sank my ship the last time I played Golden Gate Park’s nine-hole course, taking me from five-under my best round ever to thermonuclear explosion.

Given that I only get to play a round every week or so, it is hard to keep my expectations in check. It also means I have lots of time to think about golf, and try to find ways to focus the next time I do play. This past Monday, I wanted to make sure I focused on having fun, and kept my expectations realistic. I really wanted to stay focused on playing every hole as if par were 5. Not as if it were a par 5, mind you, but as if par were 5. There’s a subtle distinction in there somewhere, I’m sure.

I also wanted to start working on pre-shot visualization: picturing the ball flight I want to hit for each and every shot. Without narration. Any time I catch myself thinking, “I want to hit a high soaring sand-wedge shot that sits next to the cup” I start over and try to just picture it. It is tough to do, but my golf self seems to respond.

The first four holes were far from stellar: double bogey, bogey, double, double. I was playing as a solo, and the threesome ahead of me was pulling away while the twosome behind me started pushing. The walk from the fourth green to the fifth tee was the turning point. I fought back the urge to go thermonuclear, and posited the question to myself: why do I play golf?

Re-focused on having fun and enjoying some time outside, I reset my expectations and relaxed. I found a key to focus on in my pre-swing routine for that next drive, and managed to par the hardest hole on the course. I got all jacked up for the next hole, took another double, and then parred the seventh.

I shot a 47 on the front, which isn’t a record for me at Lincoln by any stretch. I’ve shot a 42 on the front there once before. But I managed to keep my train running pretty smoothly for the rest of the round. I made a huge bogey save on #10, and then hit an 88-yard approach on #11 to within four feet to save par.

Coming into the home stretch of 15 – 18, I knew I was in good shape for overall score. I knew I was going to go way under my previous personal best of 98 at Lincoln, and might have even been facing a chance to break 90. I opted not to count up my score so I wouldn’t know for sure. I wanted to try and stick to playing each hole as it came, and not get caught up in the overall.

On fifteen, my approach shot came up short, but was right online. I chipped to within four feet and dropped the putt (I failed to mention that they aerated the greens the week before I played, and they were all sandy, slow and uneven. More so than normal). I took a bogey on the par-3 16h, and suddenly had just two holes to play, sitting on what must be a good score.

My drive on #17 was what I visualized, but my alignment was off. I got out of the sandtrap easily enough, but three putted. Then there was #18. I hit three horrible shots before I finally calmed down and hit a good iron to exactly where I was aiming. Too bad that by then I’d lost faith in myself, and wasn’t aiming at the green. Chip on, two putts and that’s a 7 to close out the round.

I got a drink and sat down to count up my score: 46 on the back (I think that’s my best back nine at Lincoln yet) combined with the 47 for my best round ever anywhere, Lincoln or otherwise. There were a lot of bright spots in the round, but surprisingly the number of fairways hit was not one of them. Every time I did hit a fairway, though, I reached the green in regulation.

Relevant stats:

Fairways hit: 3
Greens in Regulation: 3
Ups & Downs: 2
Pars: 4
Putts: 35
Fun Points: 33
Handicap before round: 30.8
Handicap after round: 30.3

Steeling your nerves the Ryder way

Originally posted 9/4/08

The weather in San Francisco has been absolutely stunning for the past couple of weeks. If you don’t live in the city, allow me to explain how incredibly rare this is. Our summers consist of fair mornings that give way to windy and foggy afternoons, usually with an afternoon high in the low-60’s or high-50’s. Ten days in a row of fogless, blue skies makes for amazing, unheard-of San Francisco golf weather.

Provided, of course, that you can actually make time to get out and play some golf. I managed to structure the past week-plus so that I had meetings or commitments every day that left only time to hit the range twice. Both times with my three-year old son, Ryder.

My father-in-law got Ryder a set of clubs for the holidays last year, and ever since I’ve been taking Ryder to the range. Up until recently, I would leave my bag at home and focus solely on having a good time with him. We’d go to the driving cage at the nine-hole in Golden Gate Park, where the astroturf slopes downhill from the tees into a net 50 feet away. I wanted him to have fun, feel successful, and not be intimidated by how far other people can hit the ball.

Just a couple of weeks ago this all changed. I announced that I was heading off to the range to hit some balls, and Ryder dropped what he was doing and came running out of his room exclaiming, “I want to hit balls too, Daddy!” This is the stuff golf dads dream of! I mean, I’m no Earl Woods – I respect the man and what he taught his son – but I do hope that Ryder will want to learn the game and that he and I will have the rest of my lifetime to enjoy rounds of golf together.

I instantly said yes, and we grabbed both of our bags and headed to the Presidio, which was closed (Monday afternoons, FYI), so we wound up at GGP, which he was already familiar with. I told him that since we’d both have our clubs, we’d need to either each pick a stall and hit on our own, or take turns hitting from the same tee in the same stall. He opted to share a stall and take turns.

I hadn’t anticipated how much my expectations would shift as soon as I had my clubs in tow. I kept unconciously shifting from father mode – which is extremely patient, forgiving and understanding of the extreme shifts in focus that come with a pre-schooler – to golf training mode – which is impatient, relentless and lacks compassion. I know, none of that bodes well for my golf game, let alone playing golf with Ryder.

If you have a pre-schooler you know that a child’s level of focus can be amazing and extreme…until their interest wanes. Then it is off to the next thing or things, as the case may be. My son loves to hit balls at the range. He also loves to talk about everything he sees while he’s hitting balls at the range. Which is fine and dandy out at Golden Gate Park, where he’s on par with most of the duffers who are taking up the game, and I feel no pressure about containing his wonderful running monologue.

But a week later, when we were out at Harding Park, another dynamic came into play: caring about what other people around us thought, and worrying about his verbosity angering other players.For whatever reason, at Harding Ryder lost his concentration early. He wanted to play a new game, which involved getting every tee out of my bag and sinking it into the astroturf.

He was happy to run around, “matching” up our clubs, so our drivers could meet, lining all of the tees up in little rows, and when it was his turn to hit, he’d just as soon talk about the ball collector as swing his club. In a sport focused so singularly on results, it is tough to disengage and simply have fun. But it is extremely educational.

At first, when it was my turn to swing and Ryder was talking through my entire swing, I’d tighten up and slice to holy hell. I imagined the guys on either side of me getting fed up with having to listen to this youngster blabber on, and slice even more viciously.  I took a step back and realized that this if this was how I was going to approach it, this wasn’t going to work out: I’d be forever frustrated, and Ryder would have no fun.

So I encouraged him to keep playing whatever games he enjoyed, even showing him a secret stash of tees in another pocket in my bag. Then I chose to find a new level of concentration that would allow me to focus and enter into golf traning mode long enough to make a good swing, before returning to father mode. Instead of worrying about the guys around me, I chose to see it as an opportunity for them to learn to swing with a whole new level of distraction. Truth is, most of them got a kick out of seeing Ryder swing his little clubs, and probably couldn’t care less.

After the bucket of balls, we went over to the chipping area, and this is where I discovered that the key to enjoyment is to find a game both of us can play. Ryder loves chipping, and we had a little two-ball chipping game for another 15 minutes before he completely burned out. At which point, I made the best discovery of all: he loves raking sand traps as much as I love hitting out of ’em. I almost felt guilty, hitting two shots at a time out of the trap and then handing him the rake to hit, but he completely loved it.

The best part is that the next time I went out to actually play, I was able to achieve an incredible new level of focus and concentration. Members of my group talking during my setup or even in my backswing? People on the clubhouse patio murmering while on the first tee? Ha! That’s nothing compared to what my son can do (I look forward to saying that about his golf game someday, too).  If you want to work on your game, we’re available for training sessions for a nominal fee: Ryder likes 2.5″ tees.

No shit, Sherlock

Without doubt, I am no uber-geek, but I know enough to get by at most San Francisco cocktail parties. I do about 95% of my own IT, and run a pretty tight ship when it comes to security on our home network. So when my Internet connection simply disappeared last week, I assumed it was Comcast.

I quickly established that it wasn’t our connection, but my desktop machine had lost all connectivity. In fact, something had hijacked my TCP/IP settings, had an open connection constantly flowing data, and was actively keeping me from logging on to the Internet. Looked like a virus, smelled like a virus, acted like a virus, must be a virus.

I ran through all of the steps that MajorGeeks recommend for sniffing out malware, a process that required over five hours of active scanning with four different programs, and came up empty-handed. I have a friend who used to work for ZoneAlarm, and he ran me through a barrage of tests to sniff the thing out. Nada.

I gave up and took my machine to Cosmic Computer in SF. Good guys, and all they could figure out was that something was burrowed deep in the registry, and had taken over the TCP/IP. They couldn’t ferret it out, so they were going to simply save all my data and re-install Windows. Ouch. This meant I’d be spending a few days re-installing the rest of my programs, resetting passwords, reconfiguring user profiles, etc. Yuck.

But I’d have all my data.

And then my buddy who used to work at ZoneAlarm calls me to tell me that a recent Microsoft Windows update completely disabled ZoneAlarm, and cut off access to the Internet. To top it off, it was a bug he had pointed out to them while he worked there, and they’d left unchecked.

Armed with this knowledge, David at Cosmic simply forcibly re-set my TCP/IP registry, and I was back in business. As soon as I got home and ran ZoneAlarm, this idiotic window popped up:

No shit, Sherlock. It’s the perfect Catch 22: If I really need this notice I’ll never be able to see it. If their firewall wasn’t free I’d want my money back.

Of Puppies and Fairy Dust

Tomorrow marks one year since Tolstoy passed away. I am constantly amazed at how much I still miss the guy. When food hits the ground, I still immediately think, “Oh, Tol is going to love that.” When we get home from a trip, I still hesitate coming up the stairs, wondering how pissed he is going to be that we have been gone.

When he passed away, we had Toli cremated. A few weeks later, a little box arrived bearing his remains. Up until today, that box sat on a shelf in our hall closet. At first, I don’t think either of us had the emotional capacity to deal with actually opening it. Then we were too busy, then it was Christmas. Suddenly, it had been almost a year, and Ryder started asking very pointed questions.

Tolstoy being his normal crazy-ass self with a stick at Crissy Field

Michele had told Ryder that they came and took Tolstoy away, leaving it wide open from there. Ryder was as affected as any of us by Tol’s death, often carrying a picture of Tolstoy to the window and saying, “Come back! Come back!” Lately, he’s been telling us that he wants to fix Toli’s body, and wondering where it was.

We’ve been wanting to spread Tolstoy’s remains at some of his favorite spots: the Presidio, the disc golf course in Golden Gate Park, Chrissy Field, Ocean Beach, Kite Hill… But we didn’t want it to be something we did without Ryder. He obviously needed closure as well.

I floated the dilemma Joel’s way after our last round at Harding together, and his response was brilliant. Tell Ryder that they took Tolstoy’s body away, and sent back a box of fairy dust. And now that we had the fairy dust, we were going to sprinkle it over all of Tolstoy’s favorite places, so he could be there always.

Brilliant! I floated it by Michele, who took a couple of days to think on it, and we decided that it would be perfect. Once we had the chance to casually insert it into a conversation with Ryder, we got his complete buy-in. He wanted to go spread Toli’s fairy dust, of course! 

Toli being ever so patient with Ryder

In fact, Ryder thought we should make sure to save some of Toli’s fairy dust so we could take it up to Tahoe, because Tolstoy loved it so much up there. Again, brilliant!

Now, when Toli died we had been hesitant to do anything radical, like have him stuffed, or bury him in the back yard so that we could dig up his bones later. But we did ask the guy from the crematorium if he could save some bones for us. He said it was difficult because they grind everything up and fire it a couple of times, but he’d see what he could do.

Today was the first time I’d seen Tolstoy since they took him away. “Fairy dust” may have been a bit of a misnomer, given how little actual dust was in that box once we opened it. We all went to the Presidio and took one of the walks Tolstoy did over 1,500 times. Scattering some fairy dust here, some remains of bones there.

Ryder loved it. He had no preconceived notions of what fairy dust would look like, and was thrilled to finally have some of his own to bandy about. We threw it in root holes of trees, dug little shallow holes and sprinkled some in, and left odd bone remnants in weird places to torment other animals. Along the way, we managed to cull out a pretty good collection of whole bones – probably meditarsals. Maybe next year we’ll do an art project of Tol, about Tol.

For now, we’ve lots more fairy dust to spread, and numerous stops to make.