To Another Bowling Season

I haven't posted much about bowling since the Baton Rouge debacle that almost made me retire.  Not even sure I posted at all about it.  But it's a new season, and I'm off to my best league start (for 6 games) ever. It may be nothing, but after Baton Rouge, I vowed to make some changes in my game.  Namely:

1. Come from behind the ball better, instead of around it
2. Improve timing
3. Increase ball speed by about 1 mph (success in #1 and #2 should make this happen, or at least much more easily)
4. Improve spare shooting: throw a straight ball at the vast majority of my simple spares (went 11-for-11 in week 2)

One way I plan to make such improvements is to work with an old friend who happens to be a local pro.  He's a guy who seems to enjoy talking bowling as much as I do, so I'm looking forward to picking his brain.

Oh, and about that switch to the Del-Ballard-Style I wrote about last year: it didn't last. I can sometimes get success with it, but it limits my already shorter-than-average back swing, and in today's game, that isn't going to cut it.

Ryder Cup

I sure do enjoy the Ryder Cup, although I tend to think along the lines of David Duval, who famously, or infamously, suggested it was just an exhibition several years ago.  Really, that IS all that it is.  How anyone can get super patriotic over the result of a competition in an elitist sport consisting of one dozen very wealthy members of one set of states versus another dozen very wealthy members of another set of states is beyond me.

And yet, I'm one of those who does.  Well, maybe it doesn't make me patriotic, but I do so want the Americans to win every time it's played.  Crazy, ain't it?  I can't wait!

State Mid-Am: Hope I Don't Miss Out This Year

With my back at 100% (and by that, I mean 100% of what I can reasonably expect it to be), I am starting to play a little more golf now - only about as much as I was playing last year, at best.  But my scores haven't quite improved, despite my showing signs of playing better than ever.  The driver is still a little too crooked, although light years from where it had been recently, pre- and post-back issues.  Driver yips is what I had, and have hopefully remedied that, if not straightened it out altogether (yeah, that'll happen).

Because of said issues, not to mention being closer to 50 than 40 in age now, my handicap has reached Rita Coolidge territory (at an "All Time High"). OK, it's at 7.4, and has been higher of course, but not in the last 10 years probably. You can see the chart of my most recent 20 rounds below.

The tragedy in all this, other than a slight ego dip, is that the annual tournament I look forward to, uh, annually, requires it to be no higher than 6.4.  It's the Minnesota Golf Association's Mid-Amateur Championship, hosted every September on two courses.  I missed last year's, which actually was OK because my back was in no shape to be playing with, but I had played in it the previous four years.

This year was going to be really cool, not because I was going to finally make the cut for the third day of play (probably not likely), but because of the host courses this year.  One of them is Midland Hills in Roseville, which was, and I believe still is, the home course to my Alma mater, Roseville Area High School (Alexander Ramsey when I was there, pre-merger with Frank B. Kellogg High School). I haven't played the course in nearly 30 years.

The other is Town and Country Club, of which the V.P. of Sales in my company is a member, and has talked about taking me to sometime. I will then no doubt impress him so much with my character over the next four or so hours, surely the fast track will be mine.  He has offered some insight on the course as well (bring your straight club; leave driver in the bag whenever possible), and it would be nice to get it on the course for a practice round.

So I've got some work to do by the time my entry fee is due (September 4 ).  I'll need to drop my handicap a full stroke; some of which will be accomplished by my recent score of 79 (two combined nines from league play equalling a 6.0 stroke differential). If I were to play the same 18 holes for my next two rounds, scores of 77 and 76 would do it.

I wouldn't have to play quite so well if I can get four full rounds in by the time I register.  The challenge is that the next revision schedules after tomorrow are August 15 and September 1.  So if I don't get my handicap down by August 31, I won't be able to enter.  But if I don't get it down until after August 14, I'll be forced to wait until just a few days before entries close for the tournament before I can enter, and thus risk it being filled up, and I left out.

So my plan is to try to get three full rounds in on or before Aug 14, and hope that at least two of them are really good.  If so, I'll have a chance to come up with excuses-a-plenty as to why I again missed the cut.

If not, my sessions with my old friend and bowling pro instructor might begin a little early this year.

My Awful Golf Swing

My wife and I went on a wonderful trip to the Maine coastline last month. We stayed at The Samoset Resort, known as "The Pebble Beach of the East." The views from the fairways along the coast were phenomenal. Fortunately, the similarities ended there, as Pebble Beach $500 greens fees are a bit to dear for me. The early season rate of $70, including cart, suited me just fine at Samoset. And the lobster....yummy!

During one of our rounds, my wife caught my swing on video with her iPhone. Although the quality isn't exactly ShotLink-calibre, I was able to learn a lot from what she captured. I already knew that I had a problem with a lack of lag in my swing away from the driving range. Almost a yip-like reaction, in fact, when on the course. But what I saw on her phone was horrifying.

So I've decided to make lemonade from my lemon of a swing. I hope you enjoy my analysis, and if you have any thoughts to add, by all means....

I'm OK with this set-up.  The ball isn't as close to the left heel as
is commonly taught, but this angle is a little deceiving,
so it's not quite as much in the center of my stance as it may
appear. I tend to put the ball a little farther back in my
stance than "normal" with all of my clubs.

Still OK with the swing. Not quite to parallel, but I'm fine
with it.  J.B. Holmes, Tom Lehman, and others don't
go to parallel, and they generate ample club head speed.

It's hard to tell without the pictures side-by-side, or better
yet, overlapped, but my downswing starts with a quirky
move where I actually raise the club head a bit. I don't
like it, but it's not the worst part of my swing.

Here is where the worst part of my swing starts to
rear its ugly head. My wrists are already starting to
break down.  Horrible. The forearm/shaft angle should
still be at least 90-degrees here, and it clearly is not.
I also dislike how my legs flare, largely due to the
feet not being square at setup. I'm OK with the left
foot flare, a little at least, but don't like the
right foot.

One frame later, and there is almost no lag left. Absolutely
dreadful. One the absolute most key principles that
separate the pros from amateurs is the lag at about .05
seconds before impact, and I've already lost nearly all
of it here.

Right after impact, it's clear that I had begun my release
far too soon. And why is that right arm not tucked near
the side of my body? I taught myself that move in becoming
a fairly decent power hitter in softball. It's also a
fundamental of a good golf swing, and yet I'm nowhere
near doing it correctly.

This isn't so bad.  You would never know that what
immediately preceded it was so hideous.

Wrists rolling; again, not so bad.

A bit of a weak Reverse C finish, but not all bad.  A little
Nicklaus-like if I do say so myself.

Now for the positives:  Hmmmm. Give me a minute.

OK, that I can still swing at about 110 mph with this swing should mean that I have a serious upside if I can make the right changes. The lag/delayed release is what can generate so much effortless power from the pros. I have the strength to do it; I just need to put in the quality reps to make it habit.

I've already spent good time on the range trying to fix it, and results so far are positive. A nice side effect is that I re-aggravated an old back injury, which has severely limited my playing time, so I have to take it easy when practicing. How is that good? I'm getting to it.

Working on the small muscles to create lag in my swing is a lot easier on my back than trying to get it with a violent hip turn. I've lost no club head speed, despite swinging much easier now.  Once the back is 100% again (should I be so lucky), I would hope I could pick up a few more mph.

I'll keep the blog up-to-date with my progress, and assuming my back continues to get better, I'll do a similar bowling analysis. The debacle that was the USBC Open Championships this year made me do some soul searching.  But again, lemons to lemonade, it allowed me to discover a key thing the pros do that I don't do, and the similarity to my golf swing is striking, no pun intended.

Stay tuned.

Baton Rouge Breakdown

The trip to Baton Rouge a month ago for the USBC Open Championship couldn't have gone much worse, and yet I see nothing but silver linings.

For the tournament, I averaged 60 pins below my league average.  That's ten pins per game worse than I did last year, except last year my average was ten pins higher. (So it's really 20 pins worse per game.)

For the second year in a row, I had thumb swelling issues.  You'd think I would have learned to get the balls re-drilled to be large enough in the thumb holes to avoid this.

Don't get me wrong; I doubt I would have done well regardless.  The thumb hole wasn't sticking for the entire 90 frames, although it sure felt like it in afterthought. And my spare ball wasn't quite as bad, yet I couldn't pick up spares to save my life.

But it wasn't just the bowling that went wrong.  From having to wait around several hours after the flight landed due to some communication mix-ups, to United Airlines losing two of my bowling balls on the return flight (I got them back eventually), it was a comedy of errors. "Comedy" is a good word for it, too, as I am able to have a laugh at it all now, and I even managed to laugh at it while it was all happening.

So I'm looking forward to the things I need to work on already, beyond equipment issues. And I'm looking forward to redemption in Reno next year.

If any team will have me after this year's debacle, that is.

...and to think the Dixie Chicks' careers were ruined

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
- Bertrand Russell

I haven't posted too often about political issues on my blog, although I hope to do more of that in the near future, perhaps even starting separate blog to do so. Part of the reason is that I don't want to alienate friends who may disagree with my points of view. I believe reasonable people can disagree reasonably, but you never know who's going to go unreasonable on you.

This whole Ted Nugent vs. President Obama thing compels me to write at least a little. As might be apparent in my few political posts, I tend to "lean left." The best way I could describe what I mean by that is if you were to take, say, 20 hot-button issues of the day, I would probably be on the "left" on about 13 of them, give or take. Relative to, that is, the general populace, NOT what the Fox News folks would want you to believe.

So while Bill O'Reilly no doubt would call the likes of me "far left" (to help move the perceived center as he is wont to do), the Nuge reminds me of one issue that gets me going sometimes. If you were to believe him and his NRA brethren, you'd believe guys like I want to take everyone's guns away. They even use the fact that Obama has attempted no such thing as an argument that he will do so if reelected.

That people believe this stuff is mind numbing.

It won't help, I'm sure, but I can definitively say that I know many, many people who are left of me politically. My wife, in fact, is a deer-lover. She'd swerve to miss a deer even if it meant putting pedestrians' lives in jeopardy. And yet I can say this with 100% honesty: I know of absolutely no one who wants to take away your or anyone's guns.

Sure, many like myself want reasonable laws to keep up with the times. Did our Forefathers have semi-automatics, or even nuclear weapons in mind when they considered the Second Amendment? So laws like waiting periods seem to make sense. This is no less an attack on the 2nd than saying you can't scream "Fire!" in a crowded theatre is on the 1st.

Put simply, it's a lie that people like the Motor City Madman keep perpetuating.

But if anyone reading this already believes it, I doubt my words have made an iota of difference.

Fenway Park and the Pebble Beach of The East

After checking StubHub nearly daily for over a month, I finally found five tickets that were decent enough, and reasonably priced enough, for the Boston Red Sox vs. Cleveland game May 10 at Fenway Park. Author Harvey Mackay once wrote, "A dream is a bargain at any price." So I could have spent more and justified it, but as I posted last month, I need to mind our budget.

I had a chance to buy a pair of State Street Pavilion Club tickets for $80 (face value is $170), but knew that my wife and I would likely be going to the game with her friend and her friend's kids. It wasn't easy to find five together that worked out price- and location-wise. Fenway Park is a "bucket list" item for me, but I wasn't going to settle for being 500 feet from home plate just to save a buck or two hundred. So for some $66+ per ticket after fees, we got our seats.

In fact, only four of them are together, and one is directly behind the four. I figure I'll take the one, while my wife catches up with her friend and helps with the kids. So that will be fine. I just won't be able to save their lives when a line drive comes their way while I'm watching every pitch, and they're comparing stories of motherhood.

My wife has interesting friends, in a good way. This particular friend happens to be a fairly recent Mrs. New Hampshire winner. Her husband is bass player for the metal band (or whatever genre you call their style) Godsmack, one of the few bands of their ilk that I quite enjoy.

(I don't think they'll mind my bragging about knowing them; I would guess that they pity me enough to offer their support.)

In fact, the idea was to get together when the band wasn't touring so that he could go, too, and when I reached out to her, she didn't think they'd be touring yet in early May. As it turns out, they are, and had I booked the trip for just a week later, their concerts would have been close enough to the Boston/New England area to meet up with the whole family. But I wasn't confident that I'd be able to find an open week to trade my RCI timeshare, as the Samoset Resort, where we're staying in Rockland, Maine, is pretty popular once spring gets going.

I'm pretty pumped for that part of the trip, too, as another "bucket list" item of mine is to play golf at Pebble Beach. Until I decide to take out a home equity loan to pay Pebble's fees (plus mandatory stay at the Lodge at Pebble Beach), Samoset, a.k.a. "The Pebble Beach of the East," will have to do. The sub-$100 greens fees make me smile, too.