Maybe I was too jetlagged from flying halfway around the world the night before. Maybe I spent too much time fiddling with my swing on the driving range. Maybe I put too much pressure on myself to do well – in front of my brother, his friend and his colleague. Or maybe the course, in its current state, set up for this month’s US Open, is meant to do this – beat the club sandwiches out of golfers of any caliber.
Whatever the reason for my monumental collapse at Olympic Club last month, it happened.
Three weeks on, it continues to gnaw at me like an over-caffeinated rat. I don't know whether to give up the game for a while, go back to the drawing board or just accept it for what it was – 18 head-scratching holes.
Golf is a cruel sport. Especially when it's got a kung-fu grip on you, and you experience “one of those days.”
Going into the round, I thought my chances of breaking 90 were, well, decent. After all, I'd recently managed to whittle my USGA index down to an all-time low of 5.4. And just two years earlier at Pebble Beach, another course the USGA was prepping for “the toughest test in golf,” I’d carded an 81 — a score that came before I received my first set of proper lessons, before I had an understanding of correct mechanics, before I trusted what I was doing.
So there was hope. A lot of hope, in fact. But almost immediately on that fateful Monday, I got a case of the Mondays.
We started on hole 14, a gentle dogleg left par four. I smacked a drive up the right side of the fairway, but the shot stayed straighter than Charles Howell III's personality. It sailed through the dogleg and landed in the rough. Not ideal, but not unfamiliar territory, either.
Still 185 yards from the front edge, I pulled a hybrid and tried to punch my approach toward the throat, hopeful I could get it to run up between the greenside bunkers. Only the rough strangled my club like a boa constrictor. The ball dribbled about 20 yards.
