Played a round at Cinnabar Hills yesterday to celebrate a buddy's birthday. Ended up losing 9 balls. Most balls I've lost in a long time. These days I tend to lose about 1-4 per round (one or two in a hazard, another one or two in some tall fescue/tree), but 9 is unaccepted. It's one thing to not score well (bad putting day, don't have the short game touch, irons not dialed in, etc.) but to lose 9 balls means you're out of control with your swing, which at this point in my golf career is completely, absolutely unacceptable.
Those 9 lost balls were eating at me all night. I knew that unless I did something about it before the weekend ended the frustration would linger and build and I would have a very very bad week. So I went and played Wente as a single walk-on for some redemption. Wente is currently my favourite course in Northern California, a Greg Norman design with great views of the Wente vineyards. Highly recommend it.
Got put with some European guys. Very nice, even bought me a polish dog. A couple of pars, a shit load of bogeys and two blow-up holes. Nothing to write home about. But here's my redemption: not a single lost ball. I played the entire round, start to finish, with the same ball, a Callaway i(z). From purely a cost perspective this was great, because a dozen i(z) balls with California's crazy tax is $50. I normally don't play the i(z) but they just came out and I wanted to give them a try. They're spinnier than the Sxiron Trispeeds I normally use but I can't justify $4/ball on a regular basis.
I'm pretty sure this is the first round I didn't lost a single ball. Even those few rounds when I broke 90 and played well I'm fairly certain I lost one or two in a hazard. Today, there was only one shot where I thought to myself, shit, there goes $4. Wente is a lot more forgiving than Cinnabar Hills, but there's still a number of creeks, lakes and tall fescue to lose your balls in. Plus there's those vineyards along the fairways.
