Full Disclosure

All right, before you start reading this blog let's make a few things clear.  I am not an expert nor am I a golf pro.  If you have come here looking for textbook tips and tricks or how to play golf the "right" way, you've come to the wrong place - please leave now and forever hold your peace.

This blog is about a regular guy with a day job, wife, and kids, who has come to grow to love golf.  I started this blog to share my golf story and my experiences as I go through learning the game.

Right now, I suck at the game.  I'm pretty bad.  I have been playing for a little over a year (maybe twice or thrice a month).  While I acknowledge going to the driving range is important to improve your game, I have to tell you I'm not a big fan of the range.  I prefer the fairway.  As soon as I figured out how to hit a golf ball with a club (note that by "hit" I mean the ball usually violently sliced to the right), I headed straight to the fairway. This probably explains why I have broken 100 only a couple of times and if I'm really honest about it (meaning count the mulligan/s), I probably have never legitimately broken 100.  For the newbies out there - "breaking 100" means scoring (or taking) below 100 strokes to finish 18 holes. Right now, I score in the high 120s give or take a few strokes.  Most of the time its so bad I don't even count or take the scorecard!

But I have grown to love this game.  It's hard to explain.  Round after round I come back for more heartbreak and frustration.  Once in awhile, you hit that shot where the ball hits the club on its sweet spot, and you hear that elusive "swoosh" the ball makes when the flight is just perfect, and it lands 6 feet from the hole from 160 yards away.  Man, that feels good!  It's an amazing feeling.  In fact it's so good you forget that you 2-putt it from 6 feet away.  It doesn't matter.  That one shot in a round of 18 makes it all worth it, it makes you come back.

I like to think that my love affair with golf is similar to what most regular guys go through.

I struggle with the right grip, the right back swing, the right swing plane, etc. etc.

I struggle with hitting the ball straight, the driver, getting out of bunkers, etc. etc.

I struggle with the practicality of golf - the cost of green fees, memberships, equipment, caddies, and shoes; having enough time to play; etc. etc.

But I digress and I'm getting ahead of myself.  I'd like to share with you how it all started, why I picked up the game, and what drives me to stick with a game that tortures me so much.  Let's start from the beginning...