Okay, okay, maybe not “the next stop”. There might be a few (million) stops along the way before I become a professional golfer, but today I took the very first step in that challenge. For a little back story, my golf “career” got started a little later than I would have like. My dad’s stance of golf was always something along the lines of “why hit a white ball, go chase it, just to hit it again and chase it again”. Due to this stance I did not think golf was for me and the first round I ever played was when I was 16.
Since that fateful day I have been a self-taught golfer, which I’m fairly certain is synonymous with bad golfer. Now I haven’t been very consistent in my efforts, but I’ve gotten to a point where I can not completely embarrass myself on a course and probably hit 10 or 12 shots each time out that make me feel like I can actually play this game. The other 90+ I just pretend like they never happened. Since Jes and I are putting in so much effort to be better at cooking and photography and running and pretty much everything else we get into, it made no sense to me to not apply that to golf.
With that in mind, I had my first professional golf lesson yesterday. This picture was taken by Jes right before I left.
That smile that you see on my face before the lessons was greatly expanded afterwards. To nobody’s surprise, there were countless things that I was doing wrong with my self-taught golf swing. To my surprise, most of them were easily correctable and by the end of the lesson I was hitting any club I picked up straight and true. Now that’s not to say I am the best golfer ever, it will take a long time to retrain my muscle memory, but at least this lesson has proven that it’s possible.
I plan to get to the range 2 or 3 times per week and continue the lessons on the weekend for the foreseeable future. My goal at the start of the golf season was the be able to consistently break 100, and I can see that being easily reachable in the near future. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I might be revising my goal to occasionally breaking 90 while averaging in the low 90s, but time will tell on that.