Keeping Score – One Shot at a Time

If you have played for any length of time,  chances are, you have experienced “getting ahead of yourself” i.e.  counting your score before you finished the round,  then all of a sudden something happens to derail what could / should have been.  You are not alone.  Golf journals are full of stories of touring pros momentary lost of focus and  losing the lead or worst the tournament.

Conventional wisdom indicates that staying in the moment improves the chances of playing our best. But, how do you develop a ONE SHOT AT A TIME  mindset?

When I first started getting serious about beating “Old Man Par”, the way I was taught to monitor my game was a system of “+, and – “ marks, and never write a score for a hole down until the round was over. Sounds nuts, how would one know what you shot, right? The goal was to train you to focus on the shot at hand and not where you were related to par.

The process goes like this:

• In the players area write F/W for fairways, GIR for greens in regulation, U/D for up & downs for par, Putts.
• Then under each hole, add a “+” for fairway hit or “-” is you missed. And, I sometimes incorporated a “|” on either the right or left of the minus sign to indicate a pattern of misses, “|-” miss left, “-|” missed right, for those rounds were the ball striking wasn’t the best.
• On each hole you would have either a GIR or an U/D. If it was a GIR then a “+” was marked or if you missed the green then a “+” was marked in the U/D line or if you were unsuccessful in saving par from off the green, a “-” was added, or if it took more than one shot to get on the green, additional “-” were stacked on top of each other to indicated how many it took to reach the green after the normal “GIR” strokes for a hole.
• Then, the number of putts for that hole.
• The focus was on fairways and greens, so any additional stokes, such as OBs, were noted in the U/D area.

I adopted this method over fifty years ago and still use it today to track my game. The mindset is “if it’s fairways and greens”, the score will happen and chances of beating “Old Man Par” improves greatly.

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