I recently learned that East Potomac, one of DC’s public golf venues, offers holes “for rent”. One hour of a small hole (about 110 yards) and some beat-up range balls retails for $16. If you return your shag bag of range ball (which you need to do – they hold your ID hostage), you also …
Author Archives: michaelgolfs
Smash factor
It’s a travel day, so I’m doing some reading on smash factor. This number is basically the ratio of ball speed to clubhead speed, so it’s a key indicator of how well you translate power into distance. My average is around 1.38, with the ideal for a driver being just under 1.5 First lesson: “The …
Practice: Swing speed and pitches
Despite nagging pain in both hands from yesterday, I went to the range today for an extended practice session, hitting 200+ balls. Hitting this many balls in an hour and a half will either kill me or increase my endurance on the course, which is lacking. Hoping it does the latter. Most of my practice …
A painful 98
Ouch. Today I played 18 in four hours and 24 minutes, thanks to a backup in front of us. Starting on 7 my left elbow started hurting, and it only got worse. I finished the front in 48 strokes, but the easier back nine took 50. Most of my struggles derived from my tee shots. …
Jackie Burke: Putt slow
I saw an interesting tip from (1956!) Masters Champion Jackie Burke today: Putt slow. The 96-year-old legend then goes on to sink several putts to demonstrate, using a wood-shafted putter no less! There’s no reason the putting stroke needs to be fast, and speed can only lead to inconsistency. I’ll give it a try, Jackie. …
Ready for launch (monitoring)
As a nerd and a golfer I’ve wanted a launch monitor for a while now. Ideally, I’d buy a Trackman, but I don’t have $20,000 lying around for toys. Instead, after months of research, I bought the $450 flightscope mevo. I paid for it using my winnings from a Masters pool this year #AlwaysPickTiger. I’m …
2019-2020 season goals
Justin Thomas went semi-viral this week for publicly sharing his goals. This is his list: I don’t have quite the same goals. I do love the idea of a list with some achievable and stretch goals to measure my year by. So, I’m going to set some goals for September 1 2020. At least one …
Rory Explains His Sand Game
I just came across a cool video of Rory explaining how he hits sand shots to Justin Timberlake, then hitting a beauty. I might just have to give this a try… Even Justin Timberlake wants to learn from the new FedEx Cup Champion. 👀pic.twitter.com/nw091aqYJF — Golf Digest (@GolfDigest) August 27, 2019
Tree cheers for golf
It was a great day for golf today. The weather was warm but not hot, the course was lush but not wet, and after ten days away I was ready to see whether my new and improved swing had abandoned me. Thankfully, despite some left-hand pain, it hadn’t (for the most part). I was a …
Hello World
In 1996, Tiger Woods starred in an ad titled “Hello World”, announcing his entry onto the golf stage. That same year, I too said hello to the world, much less dramatically. (You can watch the ad below). If you stumbled on this post and wondered why you should care that I was born, you shouldn’t. …
Michael Golfs 