The only thing worse than losing a golf ball is sometimes finding it.  The other day, after looking for my ball for over four minutes, I found it.  I could identify it as mine.  I just couldn’t retrieve it.  No, it wasn’t in water.  It was a cruel thicket.  Thorns and poison ivy.  I declared the ball not only unplayable, but unrecoverable.  It still lays there as a monument to bad luck.

I am one of those unusual golfers who acknowledges that what went wrong was probably my fault.  Whenever the ball is in a bad spot, I just say to myself, “hell, you hit it there.”  I am convinced most golfers are trained never to acknowledge a mistake.  “I never should have swung with that butterfly sitting on my ball.”  “Did you hear that noise at the top of my backswing?”  Or, on the green: “Did you see that ball jump?  “It must have hit something.”  “Something bit me.”  You have to give them “A” for inventiveness.  When I got home from my bad round, I found a good size rock wedged between the spikes on my right heel.  It probably affected my balance.

Is this a head game or what?  Tiger at Firestone is a classic.  Woods had won on Firestone seven times.  The course was made for Tiger’s game.  So what does he do this year?  He shot four rounds over par with a 78 on Sunday.  It’s time to borrow Tin Cup’s psychologist.  On second thought, never mind.

I had a good round going a while back.  Everything was in sync.  Good contact, good direction, and chips rolling close to the hole.  Then, I missed an 18-inch putt.  It must have hit something, because the ball darted off to the left.  Well, regardless of fault, that was the end of my good game.  Bad contact, bad direction and chips just dribbling onto the green.

All the books say, forget about the bad shot.  Move forward.  Concentrate on the next hole.  Blah, blah, blah.  I decided what I had done wrong (it was me) and what I needed to do on the next short putt.  Unfortunately, my next short putt was for a double bogey.

I’m 130 yards from the green and there is a sand bunker right in front of the green.  I hit a crisp iron and the ball lands on the fringe between the bunker and the green.  It trickles forward and rolls down toward the pin.  What a great shot!  But the same crisp shot could have landed six inches shorter in the same fringe and rolled back into the bunker, finally settling in a foot print where some jerk had failed to rake the bunker.  I guess that’s a bad shot.  And that six inches may be the difference between feeling good or bad about yourself.  I think the really good players have figured this out.  I’m still working at it.

After I got home, I found out that Mike Thomas, editor of www.DCguide.com is picking up my blogs and publishing them on their web site.  That made me feel good and anyway, I think I know what I did wrong on that 18-inch putt.