What a weird game.
I've played Valley Ridge twice this year - first time about 10 days ago, second time today. Last time it was a bit windy, today it was quite hot in the sun but the greens were slightly softer.
The last time I played, I felt like I couldn't get anything to go right. I was either short or long on approaches, I missed a couple of drives badly (though no penalty strokes), I didn't make basically any putts and had a couple of dumb 3 putts. The punishing holes on the front inflicted their punishment in just the way that the sadist who designed them intended. I left feeling like I'd played pretty poorly and was a little frustrated that the course got the better of me and I didn't make good strategic decisions.
Today, I felt like I was striking everything quite well. I hit a few fat and a few thin but nothing too bad other than my first tee shot, and I recovered from that immediately. I did have some bad luck - a couple of "5% from being amazing" shots kicking into the water for my only two penalty strokes of the day, and a bunch of really good approaches that just didn't get the rolls on the green. But I left pretty happy and satisfied with my play, because I stuck with it and was proud of myself for battling through, generally solid course management, and grinding out a score... the exact same score as the first round.
Weird game.
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
|
