Hi Everyone,
And a soggy New Year to you all! Unfortunately, very few golfers in our locale or the UK come to that, have struck a ball in anger in 2014. The forecast is for the rain to clear, somewhere around May. I think the likelihood of play for most of us will be towards the end of next week. We will be able to try out any new ideas / kit we have received over the festive season.
On a technical point, I think especially this time of year when our golf is fairly intermittent; do take care with your warm up routine. It is very easy to get out of our warm car into a pleasant warm clubhouse (great job in the Mid Herts Clubhouse, by the way!) have a relax and a hot drink. Then with a minute to go before your tea time, suddenly bolt out into the cold, hurtle up to the first tee and look incredulously as our ball fails to find the fairway and then utter our first, doh! of the day. Prior to play give yourself 10 minutes to loosen up, ideally I would suggest that at least 25 full swings (without a ball is fine) will warm the muscles up properly. Roll a few putts, especially some 25 – 30 foot ones as this is likely to be our opening distance of putt in the first few holes. Finish off with a few short ones, as sadly the rules of many competitions require this holing out thing and of course hard hearted opponents will want to see it too. Armed with a better preparation, I am convinced you will start quicker and this warm up will be kinder on your joints in the long run.
We did our Christmas Pro Shop Draw and the lucky winners are:-
1st Motocaddy S3 Lithium Electric Trolley Mike Frisby
2nd Bushnell Tour Z6 Range Finder Kevin Turbidy
3rd Pro Quip Tour 360 Suit Richard Keeley
4th Ping Scottsdale Putter John Gatehouse
5th Sun Mountain 3.5 Stand Bag Richard Howland
6th Glenbrae Lined Sweater Mark Maginnis
7th Mid Herts Logo Sweater John Saunders
8th Drum Belt Terry Newcombe
Well done to the winners and better luck to the others next time.
Although the festive period is golf free in terms of TV time there is plenty of other sport available. The football matches come thick and fast and Boxing Day provided me with the great present of a rousing 4-0 victory for Watford. Mrs Puttick has sadly edited my rather splendid 5,000 word synopsis of the game! Of course, the cricket has been abysmal, with the England players wanting to get back home and crawl under the duvet until April, by which time the press will be berating someone else. The other “sport” that caught my eye was the World Darts Championship. One of the finalists a gentleman from Scotland, Peter Wright, who isn't going to see 40 again, took to wearing John Daly type clothing, topped off with multi-coloured Mohican and a tattoo of a snake on the side of his head. I was glad to find this wasn’t a permanent feature and that the hair was a wig. Still as a runner up he banked a cool £100k, so maybe a coloured Mohican is the way forward? I noticed that although for the modern golfer “core stability” is the goal and players work hard to achieve the six pack effect. Clearly the only six pack effect for Dart’s professionals is the one they drink prior to going on stage. There were a lot of relaxed cores from what I could make out!
Keep dry over the next few days and hopefully later next week we can get out and look for our first birdies of the New Year.