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After an enthralling Open Championship there have been a number of highs and a few lows.
With that in mind I’ve created my own Mind Map of the proceedings.
(Click on the image to enlarge)

I hope you agree with my assessment, whether you do or don’t please leave a comment.

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This is going to be short and sweet as only one of the golfers I was interested did anything of note; step up Mr David Duval (round of applause!!!)

Wasn’t it great to see Duval perform well? Two great opening rounds in atrocious weather conditions put him into contention and raised my hope considerably. Unfortunately his 3rd round was a disappointment which saw him plummet quickly down the leaderboard.

To Duval’s credit a good final round of 71 steadied the ship and he finished in a very encouraging T39 spot.

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I’ve selected a few players I am interested to see play at Royal Birkdale in
The Open Championship this week.

Reinier Saxton the current British Amateur champion who is playing with Vijay Singh. It will be interested to see how he gets on.
David Duval. I just like Duval, his recent travails have been well chronicled but we Brits remember his dignified performance and speech when he won The Open at Royal Lytham and his dignity at the 2002 Ryder Cup. Besides he shot probably the best ever competitive round of golf with his 59 at the Bob Hope Classic.
Rohan Blizard a young Australian who pre qualified with 2 fine rounds at Hillside. He’s also got the coolest name “The Blizzard” a marketing & PR dream!
Brandt Snedeker. I was so impressed with his game and overall attitude at The Masters this year, a breath of fresh air.
Ryundi Imada. I’m not familiar with him but he apparently left Japan for the US at age 14 to attend golf academy and now plays on the PGA Tour winning the AT&T Classic this year so it will be fascinating to see how he gets on.

Other than Duval these golfers haven’t played in The Open before so I’m keen to see how they cope with the conditions and links golf.

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I’d like to draw an analogy here to hopefully give a slightly different perspective on Kenny Perry’s decision to miss both the US Open and Open Championship in favour of collecting Ryder Cup qualifying points at lesser tournaments.

We as golfers are advised to plan our ways around the golf course, to play within ourselves and come to the first tee with a strategy and to stick with that plan regardless of whether we are playing badly or well. That way we have the best chance of posting the best score we can with our game on a given day.

Well, isn’t that exactly what Kenny Perry has done? His goal was/is to qualify for the Ryder Cup, at the beginning of the season his tournament schedule was the strategy by which he felt he had the best chance of getting into the team.

The fact that he is now playing so well is irrelevant.

Imagine standing on the 17th tee at Qualifying School needing only 2 bogeys to gain your card. The last two holes are fraught with danger, long Par 4s, OOB down the right, water down the left and bunker surrounded undulating greens.
What do you do? Blaze away with your driver and risk doubles and not gaining your card? Or, do you play sensibly and make sure you qualify come what may?

You know the answer to that don’t you?

Perry has made the smart play.

I will qualify this by saying that Kenny Perry has increased the future pressure on himself and only time will tell if he can withstand the pressure when it really counts. The singles on the Sunday of the Ryder Cup will be very interesting.

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The quitter count finally topped 65.
That’s sixty five professional and elite amateur golfers teed their ball up to qualify for the oldest major championship in world golf and gave up because they weren’t playing well enough.
Now I’m quite prepared to accept that there were some genuine illnesses and emergencies in that total but that still leaves an awful lot of spineless golfers.
What will these players reply when their families, sponsors and attached golf clubs ask how they got on? I know if I my company sponsored a pro golfer I would expect him to at least have the guts and professional pride to finish the round and to get into the clubhouse with the best score he could on that day.
If it’s a bad round, that happens, that’s golf and it’s excusable but to simply give up is not.

Compare and contract that with Jean Van de Velde who will always be remembered for his meltdown in the 1999 Open at Carnoustie. Last year he suffered an illness that has taken year to recover from. He needed to prequalify, knuckled down to the job and did so in style. More details here.

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Much has been made of the unfortunate John Spreadborough’s attempt to qualify for The Open when he parred the last 3 holes to just break a hundred eventually carding a 99 at the regional qualifying round at Musselburgh, read more here and this evoked memories of the legendary Maurice Flitcroft’s attempts to qualify.

But let me ask you this; Who is more worthy of ridicule John Spreadborough or the FORTY FOUR golfers who no returned NR in their rounds?
At least Mr Spreadborough finished the course, added up his score, signed his card and with his head held high submitted his scorecard to the organisers, unlike the 44 spineless quitters who slunk away from the golf course and proved that when the going gets tough they just give in.

Original Post

Two years ago I met a man who completely changed my attitude to golf and improved my game as a result.

I met him at the bar of a cricket club and conversation got around to the various social events he organised for his club including a golf day. As you can imagine my ears pricked up at this and we discussed some of the courses he had visited and the great deals that were around for societies.
As I also arrange golf society days for our cricket club we explored the possibility of a joint day out and swapped phone numbers.

My thoughts were already moving along the lines of a Ryder Cup style challenge and asked him what handicaps his group played off. “We don’t have handicaps”, he said. “Fine, no problem we can sort something out”, I replied. “We don’t even keep score”, he continued.

Well this threw me completely, how can you play golf without keeping score?
It turns out 20+ golfers go on this trip, enjoy a game of golf, have a laugh, a few drinks and a meal with their pals and don’t even bother with who shot what score and who won.

I couldn’t believe it and neither could other golfers that I have told the story to but the more I thought about it the more I realised it is a great attitude to have because unless you are a pro playing for your livelihood; IT DOESN’T MATTER what you score or who won.

This has been a total revelation to me, I’ve always been very competitive in my golf and keen to improve but as all the mental game gurus are telling us you can try too hard and it can have a negative impact on your game. So, my new attitude is to “smell the flowers” as Walter Hagen said and just add up my score at the end of the round.

It works too, my all round game has improved recently, handicap has reduced and I enjoy my game so much more.

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