As I always say, the scorecard doesn’t lie.

51 + 61 = 112. As it will always be.

If you had told me going into my round at The Crossings at Carlsbad in beautiful Carlsbad, California – one of the loveliest tracks I’ve ever played – that I’d go 1 over on the par 3s, hit nine fairways, and play eight holes at bogey or less including two pars, I’d tell you I’d shot somewhere between 95 and 99. But you throw in among the two pars and a bogey on the back nine two 8s, two 9s and a ten, and make a whopping 42 putts and you know there’s still trouble in River City.

Clearly, something had to change, and the first thing was my putting stance, which got thrown out the window forever after three-putting for the third time of the round – you simply can’t be banging your head against a wall over and over again expecting something different to happen. The next thing getting tossed is the putter itself – Tracey was the one making that suggestion after seeing how the blade isn’t level to the ground when I putt.

What’s truly sad is the fact I’ve never hit my irons better, and I’m still going backwards. The last three rounds I’ve played at 107, 112, and 112 is simply unacceptable for the amount of work I’ve put in. This weekend it will be back to basics and lots of hours put in putting with a as-yet-to-be-determined putter to start finding a way to play solidly from tee to green.

Newport, Rhode Island, that is – that’s what the marina at San Diego’s Shelter Island is. More boats – lots, actually, more money, more scenery, better weather all year round. The Best Western Island Palms is definitely the place to be if you Phoenix-area folks want to park your heat-weary bones during Arizona summer.

And money? Hooo – there’s lots of it here. We shared a couple of cocktails last night with Brian, a home builder in the Phoenix area. He’s got a boat – actually, a very large one – and he comes here once a month to work on it and just veg out. Does he drive? No. Does he take commercial flights? Ix-nay on that. He has his own Gulfstream that he shares ownership with along with a few other guys.

You want to talk upper 1%? That’s him, baby. And a very nice at that, a real “renaissance man” and a true gentleman. Although his politics – he’s Dick Cheney / Halliburton conspiracy theorist of the first order, sitting on our perch overlooking a marina with a gazillion thousand boats wasn’t hard to enjoy.

This is a great place to stay – lots of photo opportunities – and Brian snapped a nreally nice one of Tracey and me that’s bound to find its way to my parents’ place in a few weeks time. They’ll really like it.

Woke up at 3 AM with a start last night and realized a fix in my swing set-up and downswing that will fix my recent driving woes. Practiced it for twenty minutes with a rolled-up towel in the bathroom before going back to bed and sleeping like a baby.

Being this far out west, it’s amazing how light it stays – didnt get truly dark until after 8:30 PM. Very cool.

One thing that makes one focus when typing a blog post is that the hotel’s computer gives you only 15 minutes of free Internet time. I’m typing my butt off and putting whatever comes into my mind.

This part of San Diego is a real paradise setting. More updates to come. Ciao!

The five days I spent as a bachelor are over, as the twins are back from Florida and Tracey and I are off to San Diego for a few days of true rest and relaxation. But what a five days it was – it was almost like I was immersed in a lifestyle that I could get used to very easily. If I wasn’t doing my prep for Goodboys Invitational weekend – for example, it was Septenmber or October – the life I lived would be quite different, but the months of May, June, and July ar typically focused on getting my golf game in shape, so my bachelor pad was all about golf and relaxation. Every day started and ended pretty much the same:

Mornings:
* Get up around 7 AM, feed the rabbits, get the coffee on.
* Turn on Golf Channel to get myself focused for the work of the day.
* Head out back for a relaxing early-morning swim.
* Do some work, e-mails, client calls, etc.
* Drink lots of water

Afternoons:
* Have a light lunch.
* Get lubed up with suntan lotion.
* Head out to Superstition Springs or Kokopelli, bang 1/2 bucket of balls.
* Head over the chipping area and work on short game for minimum 1 hour.
* Head over to putting green and putt for 1/2 hour.
* Finish hitting bucket of balls.

Note: when playing golf on Friday and Sunday, replace above with a round of golf.

* Return home, take a nice leisurely swim.

Evenings:
* Make dinner, enjoy glass or Pinot Grigio or a Sam Summer out on the patio.
* Work and e-mails until around 9 PM.
* Take care of the rabbits and bird, shut down the house.
* Turn on pineapple lights and put on some patio music (tropical or surf).
* Pour another glass of wine or crack open a Sam Summer, light up an Arturo Fuente.
* Watch the moon come up over the queen palms, contemplate what part of my game I want to focus on tomorrow.

I’ll admit, it’s not a lifestyle I’d want to do every day, 365 days a year, but for five days it was sure fun!

Today we’re off to San Diego for the rest of the week. Check in for updates, as the Best Western Island Palms and Marina business office allows.

Enjoy the rest of your Memorial Day weekend, everyone – I know we will!

Here are some links to commemorate this special weekend:

Sorry about the type being so small (you may need to increase your Internet Explorer View Zoom to 115% or more to read it more clearly, but it’s worth it), a story about World War II heroism and the impact one man had on so many lives. Kinda reminds me of Saving Private Ryan…

Here’s a link to a devastating story about the epidemic of suicides amongst our fighting men and women.

Many veterans who commit suicide are over the age of 50, however, the hundreds of thousands of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have trouble adjusting to civilian life due to the mental and physical toll of war. Couple that with a relentlessly high unemployment rate and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Sadly, some veterans commit suicide before they even return home. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta labeled active military suicides an epidemic after 349 soldiers took their lives in 2012 — a record high.

Not sure how you can explain it: there’s little doubt those who fought in the two World Wars, or Korea, or Vietnam had to have experienced the same kind of physical and psychological challenges those who have fought in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan did, but there’s something going on here that’s somehow different. One thing I’m sure of: this country needs to be far more cautious about the kind of conflicts we lead our brave men and women into. It’s one thing to offer one’s life for your country, it’s a whole ‘nutha thing to offer it up for another country simply for the sake of socio-political gain.

A story of bravery during World War I. Fascinating.

On this Memorial Day I honor all those who have fought and died for the cause of freedom over the years. May your sacrifice never be forgotten, and may we always remember not just those who fought and died, but their families who lived and died with them as well. May God hold you in His everlasting and ever-loving care.

“Golf is hard.” – Dr. Jim Suttie

“Tempo is everything.” – Hazur Rai Saligram Bahadur

“You sure know how to throw away strokes…” – Michel the Canadian

One of these days I’ll be able to replicate the same game from driving range to golf course, and from one golf course to another. At least I hope that will be the case, because right now if my golf game feels like a tube of toothpaste with a bunch of little pin-pricks where, if you squeeze one area it would leak one way, if you squeezed another it would leak in an entirely different place altogether.

Take yesterday, for example. I’m back at Trilogy Golf Club at Power Ranch, just three weeks after that horrendous round where I shot a 111 while playing with three sticks. There I was losing balls off the tee left and right, blading chips off the green, and taking multiple strokes to get out of sand traps all day. Yesterday, I’m hitting the ball good enough off the tee and never failed to get out of the sand once all day and what do I shoot? Only a four-stroke better 55 + 52 = 107. So what happened, you ask?

Well first of all, let’s look at the scorecard, because the scorecard doesn’t lie. I had my highest number of putts of the year – a ghastly 40 (!), including a whopping seven three-putt holes. But I can’t blame “old Mr. Three-Wiggle” completely – fact is, I chipped the ball defensively all day, leaving myself too many long, extremely difficult putts well above or well below the hole – something you simply can’t do on Trilogy’s swaley, rocket-fast greens. Second of all, following the best warm-up session I’d had all year where I didn’t miss-hit one freakin’ ball – I mean, I was en fuego – the great tempo I had somehow went bye-bye during the short three-minute walk to the first tee. Thereafter, I struggled with over-swinging all day long and simply couldn’t trust my swing and just play the damned game.

It was after three-putting on nine for the fourth consecutive hole that Michel, my Canadian playing partner (a dead-ringer for Graeme McDowell, BTW) made his remark about me throwing away strokes so easily. We were playing alongside these two twenty-somethings seemingly intent on matching beers for every ball they’d lose off the tee (one had a wicked banana slice, the other a wicked high hook, making it virtually impossible for them to play together all day long) and were comparing scores – Michel had a two-over 37, The banana slicer a 47, Dr. Hook a 48, and I a loathsome 55. Michel was angry at me because, as a good player, he hated seeing someone making chicken sh*t out of a round that should have been chicken salad. “Why are you losing to these two drunks? You seem to have a death wish for playing yourself out of holes, my friend”, he says in his buttery-smooth French accent.

“I know”, I say, feeling like a high-schooler being chastised for yet another pathetic dog-ate-my-homework excuse. “I’ll do better, I promise.”

While I didn’t tear up the back nine by any means, I did take Michel’s words to heart, at one stretch bogeying five straight holes. I also hit fairways on four of the last five holes, and if it weren’t for a chunked 4-hybrid that found the pond after a picture-perfect drive on 18 that left me with a drop at the worst possible angle to the green (I’ll bet Tiger would have somehow found a better place to drop than I had to) I would have broken 50 on the back. But that’s not much consolation at this point – if I can’t trust my swing playing alongside beer-swilling yahoos, how on earth will I be able to function at Goodboys Invitational weekend?

What did me in today was being too passive when I needed to be more aggressive (my short game) and being too aggressive when I simply needed to trust my swing and concentrate on good tempo and lag to make good contact (my approach shots). I’d like to think one day I’ll be able to put it all together, but the only way that’s going to happen is more range work so I learn to repeat more easily and naturally what I do there where it doesn’t count out on the course where it does.

Memorial Day weekend is upon us, and it seems fitting that on the very same day my wife and her twin sister are in Florida for Tam’s daughter’s high school graduation that I spent the better part of a hot, breezy afternoon at the Kokopelli Golf Club driving range graduating from my own kind of “Tour School” – that self-appointed day I had marked on my internal calendar the better part of two months ago when I would complete the transition to my new swing (courtesy of Alex Black) and new approach to golf (courtesy of Dr. Bob Winters, via Tom Coyne’s Paper Tiger.

I’m not afraid to boast that over the past eight weeks I’ve worked harder than any other Goodboy on my game, spending anywhere from one to three full afternoons a week at the range hitting buckets and working on my short game – and that doesn’t include the times I’ve actually played a round of golf during that time. As someone who once both hated and feared the driving range I’m now a fully-certified (if not certifiable) range rat on first-name basis with the pro shop guys at Superstition Springs and Kokopelli. I mean, who would have ever thunk it? And while I plan on keeping up the same schedule right up until Goodboys Invitational weekend in July, from here on out I’m no longer in “school”, no longer using the golf course as a laboratory for my latest tweaks and visualization practice. From here on, as the saying goes, the games count.

I hadn’t actually planned on hitting the Kokopelli range today, but while I hit the ball OK at Superstition Springs yesterday I felt I was over-swinging and thus negating the advantage the lag in Alex Black’s “power move” provides in terms of contact and consistency that I know I need to emphasize if I’m going to achieve my goal of minimum bogey-and-a-half (i.e., 96 or less) golf. As Dr. Jim Suttie, one of the great golf instructors of our time, tells Tom Coyne in Paper Tiger:

Lag is power. Lag builds contact and consistency. That’s what you’ve got to get.

Whereas before all this started had I hit the ball like I did yesterday at Superstition Springs I would have been thrilled to death, but I’m at the point where I can recognize what I am doing wrong and know exactly what I need to do to correct. Roy McAvoy might have once said about the golf swing that “perfection is unattainable”, but I know I don’t have to be perfect, just more consistent and not fall into bad habits.

So there I was today at the Kokopelli range with a bucket and my driver, 3-wood and 5-wood, taking easy but aggressive swings and splitting my make-believe fairway one ball after another. Almost like being on auto-pilot, but with a four-step process always in mind: pick out a target, set up slightly open with the clubface slightly open as well, one final square of the shoulders and swing away, taking the wrists completely out and finishing up at one o’clock (remember, I’m a lefty).

Oh sure, there was the occasional power draw or soft fade, but every time I was able to correct immediately and rain my shots down around the 200-yard marker. I’m not greedy when it comes to distance – I know if I can hit the fairway I can get home (or at least close to) with the way I’m hitting my irons.

I celebrated my graduation with some veal cutlets and a chilled bottle of Pino Grigio before retiring out back for a swim, an Arturo Fuente and a Sam Summer under happy pineapple lights and the sounds of Cachao and other classic Cuban artists played in the background. As I marveled at how it couldn’t possibly get better than this, I thought about all the hard work I’ve put in these past two months, totally transforming myself from someone who just played golf into a golfer. Perhaps not a great golfer, but a golfer nevertheless.

From here on out I’ll be focusing on new ways of measuring my progress – ways that, if I continue to improve will undoubtedly show up in lower scores:

1. Fairways hit – would like to see them somewhere around 8-10 a round.

2. Greens in regulation – this is how you know you’re really playing golf; I’d like to see that somewhere around 3-4 a round. I can scramble the rest.

3. Holes at bogey or less – need to get that in the low double-digits.

4. Putts – would like to see that somewhere in the 30-33 range.

5. Balls lost – would like that to be a great big goose egg, but 1 or 2 a round would be OK – after all, I am The Great White Shank.

Let the games begin!

Note to Sergio Garcia: as much as you’ve always been known as a cry-baby and a whiner most still considered you a likeable cry-baby and whiner, but by going into Fuzzy Zoeller territory by making a comment involving Tiger Woods with a racial connotation your career – no matter which direction it takes from here – will always be defined by that remark. You can question someone’s integrity and sense of fair play and get away with it, but racial comments are never forgotten, no matter how much or how often you apologize. Just ask Fuzzy how one’s career gets defined in just a few short seconds. Tim Dahlberg of Yahoo! Sports nails it:

The petulant child taking on the arrogant superstar. If nothing else, it was something to fill time while waiting to see if Woods was ever going to win another major championship.

Then Garcia upped the ante by making it real personal and really ugly. Regrets, sure he has some now, but the line in England about his dinner plans with Woods didn’t come out of nowhere.

Black people and fried chicken, get it? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

My initial thought was that this could only happen in golf, an insular sport that has never been terribly welcoming to minorities. Turns out, though, that there are soccer fields across Europe where people actually laugh at this kind of racist drivel.

But for it to happen twice in golf means the lessons of the past simply haven’t been learned. And for it to come from Garcia, who has spent his career unsuccessfully chasing Woods, shows both a stunning lack of maturity and a complete ignorance of how racial stereotypes can cause real pain.

To give Garcia some credit, he said he was sick to his stomach when he realized what came out of his mouth. Indeed, this was more stupid than it was racial, a juvenile attempt to upstage Woods for his continuing smugness about beating Garcia earlier this month when Garcia self-destructed in the Players Championship.

That doesn’t make it right, but it does put it in context. This wasn’t Zoeller, who understood stereotypes well, and this isn’t 1997, when even fewer blacks played golf than play today and the PGA Tour was a lily-white affair. There still aren’t any black players other than Woods competing at the highest level, but the tour is arguably more diversified with an infusion of Asian players since that time.

I were you, Sergio, I’d stay away from play in the US for a while and maybe make some big donation to the folks in Oklahoma as a way to start making amends, because, like or respect Tiger Woods or not, no one deserves that kind of remark. You’ve actually got people feeling sorry for Tiger Woods – I never thought that was possible.

Way to go, Sergio – I always liked you and enjoyed watching you play, now you’re dead to me. And life on the golf course just got a million times more difficult for you.

————–

I think the USGA and R & A made the right decision in outlawing the anchoring of the long putter against one’s body. I know the Webb Simpsons and Keegan Bradleys of the PGA Tour are all pissed off and even considering legal action against the USGA (yeah, that’ll work!) but I think the PGA Tour ought to be very careful about how they proceed from here and not take their own unilateral action against the USGA and R & A by allowing the anchoring of long putters on their tour. For one thing, the image of the PGA Tour would take a real hit as folks would see it as just a bunch of elitist, country-club, pretty boy millionaires having a tantrum over something that’s not that consequential. Secondly, it would create all kinds of chaos and confusion, not to mention driving a wedge between the US and European tours – something I’m sure the sport doesn’t want to see happen as golf grows in popularity and participation in Asia and Africa.

Bottom line is: no one is saying you have to toss that belly putter into the dust-bin, you just can’t anchor it against your body! Even someone supposedly as intelligent as Tim Clark ought to be able to understand that.

If the Obama administration thought last week was a difficult one in its continued efforts to deny, deflect, and obfuscate to keep the growing scandals involving the IRS, the Department of Justice surveillance of Associated Press reporters phones, the cover-up involving the Benghazi massacre (and soon-to-be gun-running scandal), and HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius shaking down private industry for donations to help implement Obamacare, this week is already starting out to be even worse.

Not that I didn’t tell y’all this would happen.

It’s not that there are – at least for now – new scandals on the horizon, but the broadening and deepening of each of these the scandals is presenting a greater challenge for the administration to contain than I’m betting even they ever thought possible. In just the past 48 hours we’ve learned not only that the IRS has been targeting Christian churches in Wyomning, even asking for lists of church members, something that smacks of Nazism’s deepest and darkest days, but you have the first IRS higher-up going before Congrees to plead the fifth rather than give sworn testimony. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out when people start pleading the fifth, you’re talking cover-up and prosecutions somewhere not too far down the line.

In the terms of the AP scandal, we now find that it wasn’t just AP reporters whose phones were targeted for surveillance by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (something he claims to know nothing about, of course) it was the phone numbers of Fox News reporter James Rosen and other Fox News phones, even Rosen’s own parents line. Again, it doesn’t take a degree in rocket science to figure out that if the government were doing this to AP reporters and Fox News, the practice was pretty widespread, perhaps including CBS News reporter Sheryl Attkisson, whose reporting has helped keep the Obama administration’s cover-up of the Fast and Furious scandal alive.

The problem for the Obama administration on all these fronts at this point is two-fold: 1) the responses of Attorney General Eric Holder and White House spokesman Jay Carney denying knowledge of anything to do with these scandals in any way has even their most loyal supporters questioning their honesty and potential direct involvement (if not their overwhelming incompetence), and 2) scandals such as these tend to take on a life of their own as as people begin to come forward and spill their guts rather than face prison, and journalists invoke their inner Woodward and Bernstein when they sense blood in the water and great story to help break open. Just as the Nixon administration’s efforts to cover-up the Watergate break-in soon became an all-consuming effort that paralyzed the administration and ultimately led to its downfall, the Obama administration risks finding itself in a similar situation if it can’t find a way to rid itself of the stench surrounding itself so early in its second term.

What’s becoming readily apparent is that this administration, in its zeal to further its aggressive left-wing agenda, sought to stifle dissenting views, suppress the activities of conservative groups, and inhibit the ability of opposition forces to support the elections of Republicans in 2010 and 2012 by employing various agencies of the federal government to threaten, harass, and intimidate. It wasn’t just the actions of rogue low-level operatives, it was systemic and originating out of Washington. Whether or not those directions came directly from the White House is still something that will need to be determined, but if it is – and you can say you heard it here first that it did – as Charles Krauthammer says we could be talking about events that are fatal to this administration in every sense of the word.

What the Obama administration is slowly being shown to have been involved in – almost from its inception – will ultimately be shown to make Richard Nixon look like a brash amateur.

It’s stories like this that just tear your heart apart. There’s not much one can say and you can’t rationalize it in any way – bad things happen and good people are victimized through no fault of their own. It’s just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What really bothers me about tragedies like this is that people with their own agendas will use them to further their own arguments, as if that makes any difference. You get that idiot senator from Rhode Island using it as an argument for man-made global warming, reinforcing my belief that most, if not all, politicians are as dumb as a bag of rocks. And, you inevitably get athiests asking believers where their God was during this event (as if they themselves think they know anything about the God they profess to not believe in). And you get faithful believers who will say stuff like, “there but for the grace of God go I”, as if God preference was with them but somehow not with the victims. Even worse, there are Christians who will say this kind of thing is God’s punishment for things we have done as a nation and a culture, as if senselessly killing children and innocents is God’s unique form of retribution.

I despise anyone who uses this kind of thing for any kind of political or religious messaging because it just shows how ignorant people can be.

The fact of the matter is that none of us know God’s will, but I firmly believe God has a bigger scope and bigger things in mind than re-directing a tornado so it hits, say, an empty 7-11 store instead of an elementary school full of children. We only hear about these kinds of tragedies because it takes place in a country and culture where media is omnipresent; for idiots who think today’s Moore tornado was the worst in history ought to do at least a little homework in order to see that tornado outbreaks in the middle of the U.S. are heardly unusual and it all comes down to technology (and the lack thereof) and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t mean to make light of the victims of the Moore tornado – far from it, but the fact is death is all around us, even more so if you live in Tornado Alley during the late winter and spring months when killer tornadoes are hardly a rare occurrence. And by its very nature – after all, human beings are instilled with an innate preference of life over death – death is something most people encounter without a lot of anticipation and joy. And while we mourn the deaths of those in Moore and pray for God’s comforting and healing presence on the surviving families and loved ones because of Monday’s tornado, when you get right down to it there’s no difference between their deaths and anyone else’s thousands of miles away as a result of war, disease, religious intolerance and even abortion. Death is death, it’s not a question of if but when and how, who you are, how much you are loved and by whom, and how and by whom you will be remembered in this life. For the believer and non-believer, unplanned death remains the great equalizer – the comfort for us believers comes in the faith that a loving God will surely take care of things in the next.

As a Christian I believe there is a better place beyond this and God has a way or sorting things out in the end. Of course, if the joke is on me and I’m wrong and the atheists are right, then it doesn’t really mattrer, does it? But it doesn’t stop me from saying my prayers tonight for the victims and survivors of that tornado in Moore, OK yesterday. The folks there need our prayers and our support, and as lovers of life itself, how can we not offer anything less to those so much in need of our help. And here’s how you can help.

To those not interested in helping out in any way and or using this tragedy to showcase your own ignorance, keep your opinions and stupid beliefs to yourselves and try not to live up to my expectations. I really have no patience or tolerance for the likes of you.

First, a subject nod to my favorite U2 song. Very grungy!

Want to know how small a 1,752 square foot can get? Just have your sister-in-law and her three rabbits and one love bird take possession of said premises. The rabbits, of course, we’ve had before – they’re the Beastie Boys with Butterscotch, who shacked up with the Beasties following the passing of her first mate Geronimo. They get the guest bedroom along with my sister-in-law Tam, and are, as rabbits tend to be, pretty quiet during the day. They might be mischevous at night, but that’s Tam’s problem and she’s used to their nightly shenanigans.

The lovebird, however, is a different matter entirely. The bird doesn’t really have a name, although Tam calls it or he or she or whatever it is “Big Bird” but that’s – to be brutally frank – not much of a bird name and a cop out, actually. I mean, why not call your rabbit “Bunny” or your cat “Kitty Cat” or your dog “Pain In The Ass”?

(Ed. note: I can hear dog lovers now writing me and saying, why not call your golf game “Incompetent”, but I’ll just ignore their protestations…)

At any rate, this bird is quite the squawker and talker, from the moment the blanket over his/hers/its cage at 7 AM through the time he/she/it is covered again around 8 at night. And because the bird squwaks because he/she/it wants attention, guess where the bird’s residence is? A room typically occupied by people during the day, especially one where there are all sorts of interesting sounds, like – oh I don’t know – the sound of typing, phone calls, and happy phone buttons being pushed.

You guessed right, my office.

Here’s the beast, perched on our roll-top desk just to the right of me. A pretty bird to be sure, but I got over birds a long time ago after our last parakeet died. Oh, and those few days back in our Dracut condo where we found a lost cockatoo on our front lawn and find her owner in the want ads. Now THAT was one cool bird – she’s was fun, entertaining, and extremely intelligent – although one might question just how intelligent the bird was if it got loose in the first place.

But I digress.

With the twins heading off to Florida on Wednesday for my sister-in-law’s daughter’s graduation, I’ve got the brood until Sunday. Judging from how today is going, it’s going to be a long week…