Trigger warning. This is a golf post.

I’ve been frustrated the last few weeks (really the last 52) with making progress. So I spent a half-hour with my pro tonight. Two minor changes to my set-up. Reduce the tilt of my shoulders a bit and bring lead shoulder fully over hip and knee. From there he just worked me with a three-quarter swing, just about as slow as I could make it.Shot after shot was crisp and clean, or close to it.

“See? Not much needed to change. I know it feels like you’re not hardly swinging, but look at what you’re doing. Right on the money, great distance (~140 yards), and this is all you need to swing an 8-iron.”

“Actually, it’s the 9.”

“Even better!  This is all the swing you need for a short iron.”

So, two little changes in setup and less backswing. I’ll work on it.

Sometimes it seems that this all that is really needed. A couple of minor changes in how you start and things get better. This has also been the story since starting golf lessons. At the beginning, we worked on some bigger changes set-up followed by reinforcing the good points of my swing. Each lesson after the first two were about the little changes needed. I can look back at the progression and see that.

This is not much different than how I try to teach programming or “coding” as the cool kids and non-programmers call it. We start with a basic model that replicates the most important aspect of what the student (generally a staff member) needs to be able to do and gradually expand on that. Along the way I try to offer tweaks in terms of structure and style that I hope will also increase understanding.

The difference between teaching coding and golf is that teaching is a lot less frustrating.

(Fyi, this text is identical to what I use in my project management presentation on the slide entitled, “Completing the Project.”

I get it. In order to get your way you will hold your nose and roll around in the mud with the pigs. You’ve decided to sell your honor and any semblance of commitment to your alleged faith with hopes of getting the SCOTUS appointment you desperately want.

Stephen King wrote about this just about 40 years ago in the short story “Nona.” You embraced Drumpf like the I-guy in this story embraces a monster:

In the dream I see her walking toward me. She is wearing a white gown, almost transparent, and her expression is one of mingled desire and triumph. She comes to me across a dark room with a stone floor and I smell dry October roses. Her arms are held open and to her with mine out to enfold her.

I feel dread, revulsion, unutterable longing. Dread and revulsion because what this place is, longing because I love her.

This is you and he. The revulsion is real enough, but the desire for the control of others is pathological in its intensity, combined with your blind hatred his opponent, overcomes the revulsion. As it overcomes your professed alleged values.

I went to Nona. I went to my life.

Her arms reached around my neck and I pulled her against me. That was when she began to change, to ripple and run like wax. The great dark eyes became small and beady. The hair coarsened, went brown. The nose shortened, the nostrils dilated. Her body lumped and hunched against me. 

I was being embraced by a rat.

“Do you love?” it squealed. “Do you love, do you love?”

Remember: If you kiss monster, it may eat you.

You chose this. Embrace it.

You tend to imagine. Often wrongly.

My father’s college students had a hard accepting/imagining him coming home each today to put his feet up and watch reruns of the Beverly Hillbillies while drinking a Dr. Pepper and eating a Snickers bar (a combo he learned from his mother). They, and most everyone else I encountered, had a different image of him than the reality. They assumed his intellectualism never stopped. Nor did they know that his working of crossword puzzles was not only about the pleasure of the challenge, but to always help him with finding and remembering words that substitute for words with an “r” in them.

Of course, this is true for all of us – our home lives are often secret lives, save specific examples like the Jenni.cam in the 1990s.

But actually I want to talk about golf.

So I learned something the other day. I had heard and read (forum posts and blog posts) that a player would normally shoot his handicap about 40% of the time. I learned this is wrong. The answer is closer to 20-25% of the time and that is when adjusted for course difficulty.

A player’s handicap is calculated thusly:

1. Calculate the score differential of the last 20 rounds. This is (Score – Course Rating)*113/Course Slope. (A 92 at my regular course translates to (92-71.7)/134=17.12)
2. Use the 10 lowest differentials. If you have fewer than 20 rounds, the USGA has table telling you how many scores to use.
3. Take the average )mean) of the lowest differentials and multiply that by 0.96 and this is your handicap.

So, what does it supposed to mean? What is it supposed to tell you and others?

Basically, on a good day, you will shoot your “target score” or perhaps a bit lower. The Handicap Index is simply a way compare your potential to that of the potential of other golfers, and is normalized to each course. That’s what the target score is – your handicap adjusted to the difficulty of the course you are playing.

The Course Handicap = Handicap Index * (Slope Rating of Tee on Course / 113)  or, in my case, from the white tees at my course, 17.2*134/113=20.4, rounded to 20.

Add the course handicap to the course rating and round, (71.7+20)= 91.7=92. And so on a good day, I should a 92 or bit better, maybe 20-25% of the time according to the USGA. Most of the rest time, the USGA says I should shoot about 2-4 strokes higher. Key word is “most”. Normal distributions suggest on occasion I will shoot even higher especially since my worst scores, half of my most recent 20 aren’t included.

So, if you think about it as a data problem, and its associated math, it’s quite easy to understand that your likelihood of playing to your handicap or hitting your target score is going to have a lot to do (mathematically at least) with the dispersion of your scores. Someone with a great deal of consistency, with scores that vary within a range of  maybe four strokes, will almost always play close to their handicap. For someone like me who has a current range between 88 and 112 (ouch! bad day at a tournament) a really good day is between 88 and 92, a regular day, about 50% of the time 92-96 or so does seem to be realistic. And it comports with my reality. A quarter of the time I do worse.

So, I really should give myself more of a break than I do. Much more of a break. I’ve been thinking all along that I should be playing much better than I do. Of course, I keep trying to, but I should probably try harder to just enjoy.

Much of my life seems to be about from failure to failure, punctuated with a few periods of less obvious failures that most people see as success. It is kind of a harsh view, but I am a tough critic of myself.The simple fact is that I fail a lot. With a little luck, a lot of practice, and when I can muscle up the courage, a lot of self-honesty, I find opportunities to learn in failure.

Today was one of those on the golf course. Of course, it doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, but I tend to assume anything I learn has potential value.

This weekend is men’s club tournament between our club in Powhatan and one of the clubs in Montpelier. It is two-man best-ball match play event, one day each course. Today, I failed to break a 100 due to an occasional inability to get off the tee or general sloppiness. The key was that I did not let it get to me and I just focused on not doing stupid stuff to a better degree than my competitors (as we were pretty evenly matched). This strategy worked well as we were able to win our round.

More importantly, I was able to learn a bit more about my swing and solving problems on the course. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow if I have learned enough.

And this is the way I do things. Sometimes I fail on purpose to see what I can learn. (Of course, one might read this as “I sometimes purposefully do stupid stuff to see what happens and see if I can get out of trouble.”)  In other words I am more interested in learning and enhancing my problem-solving skills than facts and such. That’s not to be dismissive of facts – I use and quote such all the time to the annoyance of people around me.

I like problem-solving.So, generally once I can get out of the moment of unhappiness about failure, I can celebrate it and take a learning from it. Now, some may just say, “Who, your real goal was to win, not a break 100, your score doesn’t matter.” True, really just half-true as my goal is to always shoot as low as I can, consistent with my handicap index or lower. In fact, one of our competitors challenged me on my handicap. Not surprising, I have beautiful swing and adequate distance to be a much better player, I am just wildly inconsistent.

Wildly inconsistent.

(You may have noticed such inconsistency on this blog.)

I seriously do.

I never know who is going to show up. Or rather, whose swing is going to show up.

Sometimes I feel convinced that I have a beautiful swing. It is on a perfect plane with 3:1 tempo and strikes through the ball cleanly and crisply. Unfortunately, most often the ball seems to disagree. Personally, I would like to believe that the great majority of balls I hit are defective. Maybe bipolar. Probably.

• Since Christmas 2015, I have hit approximately 12,000 golf balls at driving ranges.
• I have had eight (maybe nine) hour-plus lessons with an excellent pro.
• I have played over 60 18-hole rounds of golf:
  • 47 of these have been tracked and posted with Game Golf so far.
  • All eligible scores have been posted for my handicap.
• I have hit uncounted chips and flop shots in the backyard.
• I have read a lot. I mean a lot. Half a dozen books, 100s of pages of forum discussions on golf issues.

And I still suck. Sure, I am officially a “bogey golfer” shooting in the 90s. I’ve broken 90 exactly once, and on a really bad day have shot as high as 112 (in a tournament, no less) but after licking my wounds and spending two hours at the range, turned in a 92 the next day. My handicap has dropped from 25.1 to 17.1 , but since the handicap index is even more artificial than an FTE, and only representative of your best 40% or so of your recent rounds, it is hard for me to get too excited. Especially since most days I don’t seem to play close to that. (Nor should I, really, but that’s not the way the male mind works, is it?)

What is it about this silly, pointless, game of chasing a little white ball around a great big meadow that gets under my skin?

Maybe I need new clubs.

While possible, I don’t actually think it is my clubs. Or the balls I use. I think it is a damnably hard game, one that is harder still for someone with only balance nerve intact, anger issues, and a general lack of coordination. I am also rhythm-deaf and have a horrible sense of tempo and timing. (Except in humor. My timing is perfect there, except when it is off by a few years since I am often ahead of my time.)

Golf is hard.

After 27 disappointing holes on Saturday, I played in a scramble at Quantico Marine Corps Base in a fundraiser for the Young Marine Foundation. Since it was team effort where  we would each play from the result of last best shot, individual score wasn’t kept, and all I had to do was contribute. No stress. And my swing really did feel perfect much of the day – and the results very often matched.

Maybe the difficulties are in my head. I need to better manage the expectations I have for myself and just enjoy the experience. The problem is that I find it hard to enjoy not being awesome. Or good. Or even adequate.I really need to learn

This most excellent post by Lee Skallerup Bessette (@readywriting) touches on a key aspect my life.

I can (I believe) learn anything to solve a problem that matters to me, or that I really, really want to solve. When I bought my first PC in 1980, I knew it was important to learn….but I didn’t have a problem to solve. Plus given a mere 8k of RAM, and 8K of ROM with Microsoft BASIC loaded, the available solutions for interesting problems were kind of narrow. Again, in 1984 when I bought an Apple IIc, things weren’t much different. Much better tools and software, but still only a narrow scope of problems to solve…and even narrower were those that fit my current life in the infantry.

In graduate school, things changed. The concept of using databases to manage museum collections was a fascination. Desktop publishing was also of interest. Remember Ventura Publisher? A desktop publisher that used SGML tags – the progenitor of HTML.

The act of formatting and printing my thesis prepared me, completely unsuspecting, for a life on the web. And it made me an early standout in building dynamic web reports for institutional research in 1994.

Moving away from computers, the same thing has applied. If I have a problem to solve, I can learn it. The question is just one of how well I can learn it. I’m pretty good with with woodworking, middling with metal and welding. Electricity and plumbing are not difficult. Cars, I don’t mess with anymore as my they have gotten too complex (read: expensive) and I have had some spectacular failures along the way to success. I learned how to paint well enough to earn a degree, despite no prior evidence of ability. THe same with jewelry-making and pottery. They were problems to be solved – how to represent, how to make?

But, to just learn something to learn something, if it requires more than just reading, I am afraid it won’t happen. This used to be primarily a lack of direction and motivation. Now I can at least blame it on recognizing the time is the most precious resource I have.

Despite that, I waste a lot of time and money trying to solve the problem of golf. Or rather the near-total lack of ability to play well.

Lee’s post strikes a nerve. I’ve always admired her writing since I came across it, but this essay really is familiar to me. I appreciate it a great deal as I am thinking through a new set of challenges that have come my way since they may involve trading a short-term success and completion for a greater success in the long run if I have to bite the bullet and learn something new.

Or even just choosing to learn something new. For fifteen years I have tried to encourage my team to feel free to spend time to learn and try new things. Kind of tough in a bureaucracy with too much work and too few staff, but learning new things has multiple benefits, particularly in opening and expanding the way one thinks.

Emil Faber said it best, “Knowledge is Good.”

At least some people think so. From what I can tell, at age 54 I am still in only the oldest 40% of users. I guess that worsens next year to the oldest 25%. But still, I am not sure why that makes me old.

Perhaps it is my witty comments that are a natural for Twitter. I have always been described as pithy, so Twitter is a natural fit. Perhaps it just seems that I have been on Twitter for so very long that of course I am old.

Maybe not.

It is probably just my memory and enjoyment of music and movies across the decades (except of course the 90s, pretty much a lost decade).

It’s just that growing up through the seventies and being a college student, soldier, college student, and grad student through the eighties gives me lot to remember. All the questions in life can be answered through either broadway musicals or classic rock. Most all the questions are in American Folk.

Dear America, I’m sorry, but we forgot.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,”

When we invite the tired, and the poor, they are likely to come. When we invite them to our home, they deserve to be welcomed.

Dear America, I’m sorry, but we forgot.

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

The huddled masses come from everywhere. They don’t always look like us. They don’t eat the same foods as we. They don’t always pray as we. Just as we were different upon the shores of America, so often are they.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Dear America, I’m sorry, but we forgot. We were once homeless and tempest-tossed and longing for a place to call home. We came as strangers, acting like conquerors, barely able to survive. Those who struggle through the storm know only that the chaos of storm cares little for who is in its path. Not rank, nor wealth, skin color, or faith; all are subject to the death and indignities of storm.

Dear America, don’t be a stranger – to our past or to our future.