{ personal }

Designer Water, Too Much Thinking and Left Eye Dominance

The grocery store near my place has a large selection of what I call "designer" water: ridiculously priced, vitamin infused, flavored water in fancy bottles.  I bought some HINT and ICIO to try.  Not bad tasting but I don't think I'm hipster enough to spend $4 on water.  Rather drink some tap and spend the $4 on real fruits to get my vitamins.  It's not like apples and bananas are hard to find that you need to drink designer water to get your potassium.

My golf game has gone to shit.  For 5, 6 holes I'd find every fairway, then for the next 6 holes I can't get rid of this pull hook.  I'm starting to think it's because I have so many swing thoughts in my head.  Between the Golf Digest tips, the late night Golf Academies on the Golf Channel, the swing books, I'm too overloaded.  So as soon as something goes slightly wrong I lose my confidence and start trying to recall all the crap I've read.   All this does is make things worse.  I need to get to a point where I'm not really thinking about my swing.  The only thinking should be course management.

But speaking of pull hooks I'm wondering if it's just an alignment problem.  I did an experiment today using my alignment stick.  I would quickly place my alignment stick on the wrong pointing toward the target.  Then I'd step back and check if the alignment stick was actually pointing at the target.  The alignment stick, upon double checking, was aimed incorrectly--too far left.  Every time.  Maybe it has to do with my left eye dominance from to my anisometropic myopia. 

Odds of Ray Romano Breaking 80

Golf Channel has this show called The Haney Project Ray Romano featuring Tiger Woods' swing coach Hank Haney and comedian Ray Romano of Everybody Loves Raymond fame.  Haney is confident he can help Romano achieve his goal of breaking 80 before the season ends.  I told my golf buddy today this ain't going to happen, and here's the math behind it.

Romano claims to be a 15-18 handicapper.  The odds of 15-18 scoring 79 ranges from 1 in 1,138 to 1 in 37,000.  On a typical course (say 71 rating/125 slope) Romano would need a net differential of 8-10 to score 79.  Base on this USGA chart the odds of that happening are not good.

I think the biggest misconception about the golf handicap index is it represents some kind of average or typical score.  But you only shoot to your index 20% of the time.  So if Romano's index is 15 he scores 87 only 20% of the time.  If Romano averaged 87 then breaking 80 wouldn't be that big of a deal.  But when he only scores 87 20% of the time taking 8 strokes off (even for just a single round) becomes very unlikely.