Aug 31, 2022 3 min read

Last Friday night marked a momentous occasion in my amateur sporting life: It was the first time I ever shot below 50 for nine holes on the golf course. My final score was 47 and – what’s amazing – is that 47 was my real score with no “gimmes” or lying on the scorecard. I really did shoot below 50 for the first time in my life. I was thrilled!

It’s taken me years to improve by that many shots, as my usual score for nine holes is normally between 54 and 60. I’ll start out OK, make a few good drives and even a few very good putts, but then I tend to lose focus or momentum or all sense of coordination about three-fourths of the way through the round. This time, I played well on almost every hole and very well on a few of them, even managing to achieve one par and two bogies.

One of the reasons I’m so proud of myself is that I didn’t start golfing until around eight years ago. I always thought golf looked like it would be a lot of fun, but I didn’t really know any girls who played. All of the male golfers I knew would brag so much about their game that I thought I would never be able to keep up with them and didn’t want to try golfing with them and hold them up since I would be soooooo much worse. Ha! Once I got up enough courage to just go play on my own and take some lessons, I quickly learned that hardly anyone is as good of a golfer as they say they are. Granted, most everyone you meet can drive the ball a lot farther than I can. The difference is that my drives may only go 100 yards or so, but they’ll be straight down the middle every single time. I seldom lose a golf ball, go in the water or end up in the sand trap. Most of my guy friends (and my husband) will hit the ball 220 yards and watch it sail off to the right or left into oblivion.

I’ve been trying to get more power into my drives and have been winding up more before each shot. That actually helped me get a bit more distance last Friday on each hole. However, when I woke up Saturday morning, I could hardly move! My back was so sore and tight on one side that I actually had spasms and couldn’t sit up straight. I guess I needed to spend more time stretching out before and after my golf round.

While I’ll never know how professional golfers like Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy feel when they hit the ball a country mile, I sure do empathize with them now when I hear they have back pain!

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.