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Improving your Golf Confidence

The easy path to increasing your confidence is to decrease the competition. Instead of playing with guys who shoot in the 80s, I invited two co-workers who struggle to break bread, much less triple digits.

It took some coaxing to get Hack A. Way (his true name must be protected, for reasons that soon will become obvious) to tee it up at Mentel Memorial (the former Bolton Field). But he’s an intern, so he really had no choice. Hack and his game proved the perfect antidote for my foundering confidence.

At No. 12, a 161-yard par 3, Hack pulled driver. ’Nuff said. By the end of the first nine holes, Hack had inherited a new nickname, East, which describes his typical ball flight. After 18 holes, his game resembled Einstein’s theory — E=mc2, otherwise known as East=my confidence doubled.

And his scorecard was marked with more p.u.’s (picked ups) than at a Pepe Le Pew charity scramble.

The irony of the day was when I began teaching Hack how to hit the ball; kind of like Mo showing Curly how to toss cream pies.

The second playing partner, Bud Weiser, was another coworker who claimed to break 100 as often as he broke open beers. Considering he made the turn with a 53 in one hand and a six-pack in the other, it’s no wonder his game and vocabulary resulted in a back-nine brew ha-ha.

"(Bleep) the Little Red Book," was all he had to say about Harvey Penick’s golf instructional classic.

With Hack hitting it sideways — "It defies the law of physics," he moaned — and Bud belching his way around the track, my confidence soared. --Rob Oller, Columbus Dispatch