When your body refuses to listen to your mind

I have to warn you upfront...this is a golf specific rant! Read on at your own peril!

Sunday promised to be a nice day for golf. The weather in Bangalore has been near perfect for a round of golf with temperatures in the low 20s and cloudy days to ensure that you don't burn your skin walking around the course. To make the most of the weather, my golfing buddies and I had planned to hit the Eagleton golf course very early in the morning to ensure that we finished quickly and had most of our Sunday to ourselves. Little did I know that this was going to be torture on a scale of comparison to Torquemada!

We started off from the back nine with me making three double bogeys in the first three holes. Now that's not so alarming as I could attribute some of it to bad luck. And I had always bounced back from a bad start. But that was not to be the case today. Today was only promising to go from bad to worse...only I did not know that then.

To avoid adding insult to serious injury, I will spare you the description of the front nine and will only say this. Seven double bogey, a bogey and a par made sure that I finished nine holes with a score higher than my handicap! My partner and I were already two down by then (thanx to some stellar play by my partner) and had already lost the front nine.

The back nine is when I tried really hard to focus and get my game right. And I was completely focussed. Only, this time around, my body refused to cooperate with what I was intending in my mind to do. Nothing worked. Absolutely nothing. Even a birdie on the 17th hole did not stop me from coming in with 8 over on the back nine to make it an infamous 23 over for the round. I don't remember playing this badly in a loooooooooooooooooong time! In fact, I don't remember posting such a bad score in a few years.

Usually when I play a bad round, there are a few good take aways from the round to make me want to go back. A good shot here, a good chip there, a nice putt to save the hole. This round was different. All the 95 strokes I played on the course were forgettable. Every single one of them.

I think I have lost my swing somewhere. If someone finds it, please let me know. In the absence of that, I am going to go back to my old coach Mr Vijay Divecha to see if he can track down my swing for me. Until then, it's a sabbatical from the golf game on the course and my attempts to not make a fool of myself swinging a golf club like a circus trained monkey.