THE SWING REPORT

A 40 gross and a net 33 — the low card of the season to date. What was different?

Nothing I did on purpose. I want to establish that up front, because there's going to be a temptation to treat this like a breakthrough and I've been around long enough to know what it actually was: nine holes where none of my usual mistakes happened to be available.

I hit the ball the same as always. Same swing, same miss, same everything. The difference is that today the miss kept ending up in short grass, and once you're in short grass this course is a completely different golf course. Everybody knows that. Nobody can do it on command.

A 40 is a nice round number and I'm going to enjoy it, and by Tuesday I'll have talked myself into thinking it's repeatable, which is how the next bad Thursday gets built.

You were four shots clear of a field averaging 40.6.

Four shots in this league is enormous and I don't want to be modest about it. Most weeks the top five are separated by a stroke and a half and it comes down to who three-putted last. Four clear means nobody was close, and I'd like that sentence read aloud at the next round.

That said, it's a nine-hole Thursday league in August. I'm aware of the scale of the achievement. I'm choosing to ignore the scale of the achievement.

An 8 on the 1st hole, a par 4. That is a rough way to open a round.

The first hole. Not the third, not the seventh — the first. I had been on the golf course for approximately six minutes and my round was already mathematically finished. There's no version of an 8 on the 1st that you play your way out of.

What makes it worse is that everybody's standing right there. Full field on the tee, nobody warmed up, nothing else to look at. If you're going to make an 8, make it on the 6th when the groups are spread out and people have lost interest in each other.

I want to be honest about the sequence. It was not one bad shot. It was one bad shot followed by a decision I'd characterize as optimistic, followed by two more that were essentially administrative.

You played the rest of it at a reasonable clip.

Eight holes of perfectly respectable golf, and I'd like somebody to look at those eight holes in isolation, and I know nobody will, because the 8 is sitting at the front of the card where the eye lands first.

I spent the whole round doing arithmetic on what I'd have shot without it. That's a bad way to play golf and I did it anyway, on every tee, for ninety minutes.