Well that was embarrassing...

I give some insight into my golf game and how I use Tangent to evaluate and learn from my play in my journey to better.

Ever since I stepped away from my job in engineering to pursue this golf business, friends and family just assume I get to play a lot of golf. Afterall I do have to test the app right? The reality is that building a business is time consuming. Managing feature updates, bug fixes, customer support, pitches, content creation, etc… A lot of work to be done. But before you think I’m complaining…. I love every bit of it. This has been the most fun year+ of my professional career… It’s just hard to find time to squeeze in golf while balancing work and family is still a challenge even when I’m in the business of golf.

So on those rare times I get to sneak away and play some real distraction-free golf… I want to play well! Particularly on a day like today when I got invited to play with one of my best friends at his country club with a very good player (+4… a solid 5 strokes better than my cap at 1).

So I woke up excited this morning to drive the hour to Denton before the sun came up in time for our early morning tee time. Now full disclosure, I tweaked my lower back last week. Getting back into lifting weights in an attempt to build some speed, I had some trouble with a deadlift and my lower back locked up. That was 10 days ago. My back is still tight and uncomfortable even if it isn’t painful. For those of you that have chronic back issues… I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

My warm up went surprisingly well. I was flushing 7 iron after 7 iron. Nice divots. Feeling pretty good. I moved to driver and though I couldn’t see where a single one of them went hitting into that rising sun from the above picture… They generally felt to be off the center of the club face. However, taking the range to the course is never easy, even for someone building an app to do exactly that.

I stepped up to the first tee shot and took a good rip at it. I hit it right down the middle, however very low on the club face. That was the first sign of what was to come. Sitting in the penthouse, middle of the fairway, I stepped up to an 8 iron and hit it so far on the toe I almost missed the ball. Never scared the fairway grass for a divot. The ball shot off to the right knuckly and weak as it bounded through the wet dew covered grass, over a knoll, and into a lake that never crossed my mind as being in play.

Thats a first hole double. Less than ideal. I’ll spare you the play by play, but it didn’t get much better through the entire front nine. I struggled with thin, toey contact off the tee. Tangent tracked every miserable shot as I struggled to find the center of the club face and continuously found myself in trouble on the left.

I did have some miraculous shots on my way to a front nine 46. I made par after dunking my tee shot in a lake on number 4. I hit a great chip shot to birdie number 9, but with two triples and 3 penalties… It was a struggle. I still managed to get decent distance off the tee with a median distance of 270yds, but there were some bad ones. Some really really bad ones.

The challenge with mishitting so many poor drives is that I didn’t have a chance to hit a lot of greens. It was a lot of punch outs, penalties, and lay ups. In fact, of the 18 greens… I missed 44% (8) of them due to poor drives that put me into trouble.

The beauty of Tangent is that poor drives are removed from the equation when it analyzes approach game, so according to the app, I only had reasonable chances to hit 11 greens after removing poor drives… I typically average around 11 greens…

Not today… I hit 3 greens. I missed primarily left and short. Poor contact. I was doing my best to stay in the shots. Tried moving closer to the ball knowing I was missing on the toe and that just made contact fat. In retrospect, my subconscious was doing everything to protect a sore back. Pulling away and avoiding contact (toey and thin) so that the vibrations would resonate through the body. Funny thing that subconscious as there was no real danger to my body.

But if there is anything I have learned from years of competitive golf, its how to grind… and grind I did. I did not play well on this day, but honestly it could have been a lot worse. I scrambled my tail off to shoot 40 on the back nine. This round had 90+ written all over it and somehow I turned it into an 86. I’m a scratch golfer. It can happen to all of us. Your tendency is going to be to just throw it out as an outlier and move on. However, I like to look at rounds like this and see if there is anything I can take away for when it gets really bad. These are the rounds I want to eliminate. What could I have done differently… and did I do anything well?

Looking at Strokes Gained in the Tangent round summary… I lost a total of almost 12 strokes to my 0 Handicap target. Thats even more amazing when you consider that I gained over 3 strokes closer to the green. Clearly I struggled with the full swings. I almost always lose strokes relative to a 0 Handicap with Approach, but driving is typically a strength. Sometimes it’s nice to put a round truly in context and the Strokes Gained variability chart that unlocks after you’ve played 5 or more rounds is always good to see how you stacked up.

The green bands are where I typically live for a given skillset, while the gray bands are the limits of where most of my golf lives… The yellow line is where I performed on this day… Not seeing the takeaway? I drove the ball OFF THE CHARTS bad. I typically live in the -3 to +1 range for driving… I was -9! While my approach game was not good either, it was within my normal volatility of day to day. My short game and putting were in the top half of how I normally perform. My poor performance was really dominated by driving.

So I will typically give a little more thought to why that is and when I take a look at my driving dispersions in the Tangent Golf round summary… it’s pretty obvious that I was left biased. Every single shot, regardless of club was left of target.

When I digest that, it’s pretty obvious why. My back was super tight from the deadlift injury. I struggled to get a turn in the backswing. I know I did, so I was coming though quick and with a closed clubface… recipe for a case of the lefts. Thats useful information. Next time, I would hope to recognize this sooner and focus on stretching and getting that big turn until I miss one to the right. You have to over do it sometimes to recalibrate.

So why is this embarrassing? In building this golf community, I’ve put my golf out there. I record a lot of it and put it on The Good Miss on YouTube. You can follow my golf life by adding me as a friend in the Community section of the app, which apparently several hundred people have. It is amazing to me the community that is building in the app, but that gave me the cold realization that from now on every time I tee off, hundreds of people are going to get notifications that I am on the golf course to follow me live. In fact, this next update I added a cool feature that lets you know how many of your friends have checked in on your round:

We all go into rounds of golf with expectations. It’s hard not to… and when we don’t live up to those expectations it can be hard not to beat ourselves up. It’s important to separate your mood and attitude from the outcome of a silly game and thats an area that I’ve had to practice over the years. I’m privileged to get to play. This game certainly has given me more than it has taken. It's just golf afterall. I am positive that I thought more about how badly I was playing than anybody else in my group. We laughed, we joked, we had fun.

Golf can sneak up and bite you anytime. It certainly bit me today with the harsh reminder that GOLF IS HARD. I can’t wait to do it again.