As we bid farewell to 2021 and another year in our golf lives, maybe we should all look back at our year of playing and see what we might learn from our successes and failures with our games, our ball-striking, and our scoring. The goal should be to learn about ourselves and our golf games.

For me, it was a year of highs and lows on the course, starting out with some sloppy ball-striking and playing, peaking to a period of being in a total groove on the course, feeling like I owned it, and shooting my career round twice — then digressing to a current rut where it just doesn’t feel right.

But then, I think that’s golf. It’s a game of ruts and grooves, so to speak. You get “in the groove” for a while where you feel like you own it, and the next thing you know, you’ve fallen into an abyss of bad shots, which leads to self-doubt, which leads to more bad shots. Sheesh.

When I was a kid, my Dad had two sayings he shared with me on many occasions.

One was, “There’s nothing wrong with your game another 5,000 practice balls won’t fix.” Being a practice grinder, always experimenting and learning, that was not intimidating at all. In fact, it was kind of a challenge. I would spend hours and hours with my shag bag, hitting balls up the 9th fairway of our little 9-hole municipal course (there was no driving range), picking them up and doing it again. And you know what? That advice had a way of feeding my learning curve, not only allowing me to fix what was wrong but learning more about the golf swing in the process.

The other advice he often gave was this: “One bad round – forget it. Two bad rounds – go practice. Three bad rounds – get a lesson.”

I’ve believed in that advice ever since. No matter whether you are a tour professional or a 20-plus handicapper, bad rounds are going to happen. Shake them off. They can be caused by lots of things, usually some disturbance in “your Force” — something on your mind that kept you from being your best. Maybe a slight ailment, which can do the same thing. Unless there was one particular issue that contributed more to the bad round than anything else, let it go.

But if that one bad round turns into a rut, head to the range and fix it. Only you can decide whether you know enough about your swing to rely on yourself to do that or whether you should engage a golf professional to offer a set of skilled eyes to help you pinpoint the issue. But here is my advice on where to start

1. Check your grip. Your hold on the club is your only connection to the clubface, and it is easy to get sloppy there. Pay particular attention to this basic fundamental of golf and make sure it is solid.
2. Posture, ball position, and alignment. Tour professionals are constantly working on these basics on the range. In fact, very few of those guys are working on swing changes, but rather they are working on these very controllable variables that have a huge impact on the quality of your shotmaking. Use alignment sticks – ALWAYS – when you are hitting balls on the range, even with your pre-round warm-up; that way you are always practicing set up and alignment, plus ball position.

For me, I know when I get in a groove of great ball-striking, I tend to allow the ball to slightly creep forward in my set up and then that causes me to allow my alignment to creep to the right. Together, those two flaws drop me into a spiral of poor contact and ball flight, which is where I find myself right now.

So, as we still enjoy South Texas weather (at least for now), I’m going to spend more time on the range chipping away at those “5,000 practice balls” my Dad used to prescribe. Shooting those career rounds was very enjoyable – I want more of them in 2022.

Happy New Year to you all. Please send me an email if you have a question or topic you’d like me to address as we head into the spring. And watch for a surprise or two on this page in the coming weeks.

Thank you all for your support, readership, and comments.

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