GougeTastic Golf

I was playing golf with my buddy Travis last weekend and he realized that he was out of golf balls so he picked up a sleeve of the new Titleist Velocity two piece distance balls. He really liked them as much as I liked the Callaway Hex Blacks I reviewed in my prior post. By the seventh hole I tossed him a Callaway and he tossed me a Titleist. I didnt get to try it out until our weekly league, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. The ball is soft and it really flys off the club face. What you would expect from a ball named Velocity is distance, but what you get is distance and pretty nice feel around the greens.

My favorite shot was a 6 iron into about a 10 mile per hour headwind and it held its line, didnt balloon and I ended up on the back apron 170 yards away. Yup they are long!

They do launch high and you wont win any backspin contests, but they are not rocks. If you like easy distance and a nice soft feel off your wedges at a reasonable price, the Titleist Velocity is a great choice.

I remember a time just a few years back when I was not a fan of Callaway golf balls. They were crispy, is how i often described them to friends. They felt hard and made pop sound when you really struck one true. When compared to a ProV1 with its buttery feel and spin for days, I just wasnt a fan of Phils brand.

All that changed last year with the introduction of the iS and iZ golf balls. The iS was as soft and bit greens as well as Titelist. The iZ was a rocket on a warm day and really held its line in the wind.

This year Callaway pulled off a Hoodini-like trick by combining the properties of the iS and the iZ. Well that is what the ads all say and so I had to try for myself.

I picked up a dozen just as they hit the shelves this spring and I have played half a dozen rounds with them and I really do like these golf balls. They are a little harder than the iS in cooler weather 50s and 60s but they feel as soft as the ProV1x from 11.

The first thing I was struck by is the way this ball carries. When it reaches its apex and begins to fall out of the sky, it seems to hang a little longer and carry further than any ball I have played. The dimple pattern is noticeably different than last years ball and whatever they did, it really improve the flight characteristics of the ball. This week I played my regular league night and it was in the 80s and boy did this ball shine, fast long, soft and a great feel off the putter. As the ball softened with temperature I finally understood that this really is the best of last years balls.

It is really rare when you find that the hype is not hype at all and that is the case with the Hex Black golf ball. I will be playing these all year.

OK, this is one of the most bizarre headlines I have ever published on a golf blog but hang in there with me and I will explain. Like most golfers I am a bit superstitious but not to obsession. Sure I like to mark my ball with a gold dollar with President Buchanan on it but I don’t panic if it is in my other pants, and yes I read my horoscope for fun, but my level of superstition is just to respect a streak. So if you have a great round going, don’t change golf balls or ball markers, stuff like that.

So how does this relate to the Niners? Well, this season I have not watched any of the games except for one, and they lost to the Ravens. So last week when the Niners where set to play the Saints, I decided to not mess with the streak and go play golf at Jack Tone in Ripon, CA. So I waited until just before the kickoff and headed out. Well, I became a quick believer in my jinx status when I checked my iPhone for the score on the first tee. At that moment the Saints where on the 49er 4 yard line ready to score, I quickly turned off my iPhone and did not look again.

I finished my round, and headed home. When I got home I asked my wife to turn on the game to see how it was going, I found out alright as I got to watch the Saints scored for the final time and make the two point conversion too. Noo! I thought I just ruined the season and headed off to take a shower, convinced it was all over and kicking myself for looking. Well, imagine my surprise and relief when my wife opened the bathroom door a bit later to tell me the 49ers won the game and she recorded it, did I mention she is awesome!?

So there you go, when I watched bad things happened and when I didn’t good things happened. So I don’t care who you are you don’t mess with a streak like that. So yes I will be golfing this Sunday when the 49ers play the Giants, go Niners!

As the calendar on the wall says, it is the end of the 2011 season so it is time to wrap up the year with a series of equipment reviews starting with golf balls.

In 2011 I primarily played 4 different balls, Titleist Pro V1, Callaway i(S) and Callaway i(Z), and Taylormade Pentas. The Pro V1s, as always, are outstanding golf balls and still the name to beat. The 2011 Pro V1s are soft, more durable than I remember and have that satisfying feel when you hit a good shot with them. They bite well but were not the highest spin of the balls I played this year. All in all they are still awesome and anyone who finds them under their tree will not need to take them back.

The second and third balls I used were the Callaway i(S) and the Callaway i(Z) balls. This is a first for me, because in the past I have not been a fan of Callaway balls but the i(S) changed that for me. In the past Callaway balls felt for want of a better term crispy. They felt pretty hard and I just never warmed up to them, but the i(S) is a ball that really does compare well to the Pro V1. Soft but with zip. The Callaway i(S) is as soft as a Pro V1 but it really launches off the driver. It also spins for days, I have backed this ball up more this year than any ball I have ever played. I was so impressed with the i(S) that I bought a box of the i(Z) balls and wow, even their distance ball felt buttery. The i(Z) is not as soft as the i(S) but has some impressive distance. The i(Z) rockets of the driver and mid-irons but it is still soft enough to stick and stop on the green. Both balls have a urethane cover with the unique Callaway hex dimple design. I found both balls to have very predictable and consistent flight characteristics. They both play well in windy conditions and hold their line well without ballooning in head winds. The i(Z) is definitely a warm weather ball though, as it has become colder it is much crisper than in the heat of summer. The i(Z) will be in the bag again next year and probably another dozen i(Z)s in mid-summer.

The last ball I played this year was the Taylormade Penta TP and this too is a great pro ball. It was medium soft with a very fast feel off the driver and long irons with pretty good feel around the greens. They spin about as well as the Pro V1 and were almost as long as the i(Z) but they didn’t seem to fly as far on off-center hits. Maybe it is the 5 piece construction, but I didn’t feel that the Penta was as forgiving as the other high-end pro balls.

So that is the first round-up of the season, happy holidays!

Last weekend I managed to talk my 12 year-old daughter to play golf with Dad. Of course the bribe of letting her drive the golf cart tipped the balance in my favor. It doesn’t hurt that she is 5’8” and looks like she is old enough to drive already. We had a great time and we will definitely play more often. We used to hit balls on the range together when she was younger but now she is a swimmer and quite a good one too so we have not done that in about a year. She had basic lessons when she was 6 so she know the basics of grip, setup and has a good idea of what to do with a golf club.

Though a bit rusty she surprised herself with a few choice shots, you know the two or three memorable shots that keep you coming back for more. The first one came on the 3rd hole at Jack Tone in Ripon. She hit her mom’s Adams 6 hybrid on the green to within 8 feet from the flag, a great shot. Well, she was hooked. Later, she hit drives with my Taylormade R9 155 and 160 yards. Oh yah, I think I will be able to talk her into it a little easier from now on./p pIt was a great day, lots of smiles and lots of good memories, I highly recommend taking your kid out, ditching the scorecard, let them drive if they are old enough and show them how fun the sport is.

Hi and welcome to my new domain, GougeTastic.com. This is the new home for a blog I have been writing for a while as The Tao of Golf. I hope you like the new site as much as I do, as always stay tuned.

Richard

Just like most weekend warriors I have suffered for my putting for quite some time. It was not that I had the yips or anything like that, I was just lost. I knew the basics of how to strike the ball and the basics of reading a green, but my pace and consistency was shot. I was just as likely to leave it 5 feet short as I was to send it 5 feet by the hole.

My new Odyssey putter helped, but if you are inconsistent even that putter that Rodney Dangerfield had in Caddie Shack will not save you. It was a tip from Dave Stockton on a Golf Channel show with his sons that turned the tide in my putting and has made this year much improved over the past few. The best part is that it is easy to do. First imagine that there is a golf tee pushed down into the ground about an inch in front of your ball along the line that you intend to hit it. Then you just practice hitting the ball over that mark and keeping the face of the putter square to my line until the putter head passes the mark as well.

For me this has been a new life saver. By keeping the face square and watching the ball roll over that mark it took aim out of the equation and allowed me to focus on pace and nothing but pace. If you don’t have to worry about your alignment you are free to only focus on how far.

For how far I started focusing on the same thing I try to do with my driver, let the shoulder turn control the pace. As long as I keep my hands relaxed but not soft enough to engage my wrists and focus on making a solid shoulder turn it I seem to be able to consistently roll the ball this year. I don’t know that make any more 12 footers but I do seem to have more 2-3 footers on my second put and I’ll take that all day.

Try it out and I hope it works for you!

Richard

Golf is an amazing sport, it is so difficult and the number of things that can go wrong in a swing are endless. However, when you overcome one of those flaws and feel yourself evolve as a golfer it can bring a great deal of joy. Imagine my surprise when I was out golfing with my brother-in-law Mark and as usual I was coaching and Mark’s big swing flaw was a noticeable sway. As any golfer will tell you weight shift is key but sway can be a killer. Well, a light went off in my head and I thought through what I was suffering from, a more than occasional push with my driver.

So the next time I was out on the range, I put that idea together with a tip I read in Golf Digest to move the ball forward with modern drivers, my R9 is longer than my old 44 inch driver. I focussed on staying behind the ball, and not let my body slide forward on the through swing. Well, boom that so did the trick. I hit it way long with a nice power fade, sweet. I took it out to the course at Dryden in Modesto and the first measured drive was 247 yards and through the course of the round I had two drives that I measured by GPS at 265 and 267 yards respectively. This from a guy who usually measures good drives at 220 to at best 230 yards.

So try this and see if it helps you out. If you have a new driver and suffer from pushes and pull hooks, try moving the ball forward in your stance by one ball at a time until you start ripping it. Remember to not let your chin pass the ball and make sure you are really rotating and not sliding.

Well, it is vacation time again and this year we decided to take a trip to South Carolina to help my father-in-law celebrate his 75th birthday. I did something that I haven’t done since our vacation to Kuai in 2009, I took my golf clubs.

So the plan is to sneak off every chance I get and try out some local golf spots around Sumter, SC. Stay tuned I will be blogging this trip as much as I can. Oh ya, did I mention that there is a heat wave on the east coast too? I will have lots of tips on surviving heat and humidity. LOL, good thing I have my all weather glove!

Well it had to happen some time, I finally had a par score for a round, OK 9 holes, but that is all I could play after work.

It happened at one of my favorite courses near home, Jack Tone golf. I had a rare day of light traffic and managed to make it out on the course by 5:30 pm. With no warm up I teed it up on the first hole with my R9 and hit it right down the middle into a 15 mph breeze. My second shot was an A wedge and it too was good to within 6 ft, I sank the putt and carded a birdie. I hit a perfect 9 iron on the par 3 2nd, and again another birdie. Of course I had to bogie the next two holes, so I was even through 4. I only carded one more bogie on a bad tee ball at 8. I went into 9 one over needing a birdie. Again I had a nice drive and found myself 140 out. I hit a nice easy 7 and placed it pin high to 7 feet. I must have looked at that putt from about every angle I could, took a deep breath, relaxed my jaw and hit a perfect putt right into the middle of the cup.

So, wow that is how it feels to shoot par from the blues.

Must have hit a streak because the next time I went out in Escalon I shot +1 through 9 and the in the Wednesday night league I play in I shot 30 on a par 27 with 2 doubles. So I had a streak of 27 holes with a combined +4, pretty cool.

I kind of feel like I did as a kid trying to shoot over 200 in bowling, it seemed to take forever to do it but then it seemed easier after I had done it once.