My first exposure to Tracy came in 1984. I was new to California and parked a car there for a week or so. Hot and dusty are what I remember. The car had a dust covering when I got back to it.
The TCC is just through the hills that block the east bay area of San Francisco from the central valley. The central valley is where a lot of California's produce is produced. Well, one might more accurately say a lot of produce is grown there and it feeds a lot more than just California.
Of course we have droughts and during the recent one a "solution" was to restrict water to the farms in the valley. If you drive down I5 towards LA you will see signs "Growing food is not wasting water." But what do farmers know about water usage that politicians don't? Bow to our masters and remain hungry!
The drought was going to "last forever" per our omniscient Governor Brown, so it was no real surprise that in 6 months it was declared over and there were then different issues with dams overflowing. Of course the funds for the dam maintenance were used for something else. And so it goes...
I5 runs through the course. There is a tunnel that allows access to the holes on the east side of the freeway.
The course looks like the driving range in Tin Cup -- lots of sparse grass and some of the driest bunkers I've ever seen. The sand is brown, very fine and what I saw when I played it, not very thick.
Sonny is playing in a scratch tournament. He's thinking that a couple under will be needed to get into the money. There is reasonable money for 1st through 3rd. I'm not sure you'll make your entry fee back if you do worse than that.
There is not a lot of trouble on the course. There are some trees that get in the way. The fairways are reasonably wide and the rough resembles the fairways -- wispy grasses and very little thickness.
The greens are interesting. They are very small compared to my home course. They are also quite fast and there are breaks. If they set up the pins in difficult positions, then it will be challenging.
Sonny does not want to "plan" where his birdies are likely to come. He tried that once and when he got ahead of the plan, got too excited and probably got hit with some low blood sugar and a couple of tough holes until he got back in form.
My thoughts are to pick out holes where one should be aggressive. Then also decide on the holes to be conservative and play for pars. If there is a long shot into a green, be careful about aim points. Greediness can be a killer. However, keeping the driver in the fairway might easily turn the hard holes into easy ones.
The big unknown is what the wind might be doing. It can blow out there. We are having some interesting weather, where in the east bay it's 60 and just over the hills, it's 80. With a temperature differential like that, I would expect wind flows.
Sonny and I are meeting tomorrow at 9 for the drive to the course. He has a 10:30 tee time, so we have about an hour to loosen up and get ready.
Questions: Will there be swag? Water? Watercress sandwiches? Tomorrow will tell.
Tomorrow:
I met Sonny at 9 and we wandered out to the golf course, getting there about 9:30.
There were iron warm ups (the range is still short! See prior posts.) and then we were off.
The format was a foursome. Two of the guys knew each other and Sonny knew the fourth guy.
I could run through each hole and give out all the details, but if you were not there and not excited about those kind of details, there isn't much point in it.
The conditions were benign -- not hot, not much wind, and the sun was not a problem.
When the smoke cleared we (the royal we, and I believe this is proper for caddie - player relationships) shot 81. To get in the money we needed to shave about 12 strokes off of that.
The first 6 or so, we might have taken off today as we "left some shots out there."
Like many things in life, the emotions get in the way of top performance. Sonny has a great chipping game, but there were a number of chunks in this department today. Frequently when the lies were "too" good. Nothing was bladed - the mark of a really nervous golfer, but a number of times the chips were hitting and sticking short. Sonny described felt he was trying to be too perfect and not letting the club do the job.
The greens are tough here, with strange breaks and lots of curves, so if you were not getting close, they were not dropping.
Sonny, in the post mortem, mentioned that he felt pretty comfortable playing. I think this is his second or third tournament with this organization.
And I think this was apparent. But there was still some nervousness there.
The good players will pay to their potential when they are nervous and the great players will play better.
Easy to say, very hard to do. I'm quoting others here, but the line is that if you enjoy the feeling of doing something for the first time and playing better than you ever have, then you are a very tough guy to beat. But it's rare. All the greats get nervous and if you are up to it, can use it to play better.
So to sum all that up, we could have played better, but we didn't play badly.
The other guys in the group were interesting. Lance and Chris, the guys who knew each other, play together a lot. They are gamblers. They had side bets of a couple of hundred on their score and I think they had another $200 on the last hole.
Golf swings can be quite different. You may not notice this if you watch all your golf on TV, but Lance and Chris probably taught themselves to play. The grips and swings were non-classical, but they found a way to play pretty well.
I've run into other self taught players who could play well. I associate this phenomenon with gamblers. They get good at and have no self conscious feeling about what they are or can do. I understand Lee Trevino was like this. He came out on the tour doing it his way and was not interested in how anyone else played the game. I can't argue with this view. They found what works and became very good at execution. As a contrast to listening to everyone and continual change, I'm not convinced they are wrong at all.
It looked like Lance and Chris probably played to their usual game. Sonny and Peter were playing worse. Chris had never played the course before, but was very good around the greens.
Oh, I was to be the caddie and one might ask how did that go. Basically it was pretty easy. I think I only stepped in someone's line once. I got to ride in the cart, so no walking and no carrying the bag! I washed balls and pulled the odd flag.
I took a lot of notes. When I pulled out the notebook to create a form to make it easier to keep track of each hole, I found some golf notes to myself from 2006. Guess what was in them? Yeah, driver problems! It did sound much more serious back then. It seems I've been fighting this same issue for over a decade.
Sonny and I discussed some strategy and some putting lines, but otherwise I was providing Sonny with company, told him some jokes.
I might have saved him two strokes as he was about to tee off in front of the tee line! Emergency Abort! Start over!
So that was about it. We had a nice dinner afterwards. Went over the holes and what went right and the odd bobbles.
It didn't bother me to not play. I was happy to watch and think about what was happening.
Now the final question is what can I take away from this? I realized that my short game is a match for everything I saw. But they were longer than I. Sonny had a lot of 170 yard shots today. That's at the hairy edge of my comfort zone. And Sonny was hitting it 250 to 270 off the tee all day long. To get to where these guys are, I need another 30 yards from my tee shots.
If I'm really paying attention, I'll decide to play like Chris and just hammer away at being consistent. He was not tentative about any shots. He topped a couple of them in the early holes, but didn't let it bother him. Just kept his foot down and kept playing.
So thanks go to Sonny for putting up with me. (There is a rumor he will be reading this, so comments to him may be answered!)
And back to golf tomorrow morning! I've got a new wedge to replace the TaylorMade one that has decided to flake its chrome. It's a Mizuno forged with Boron! So that will should help.
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