Back on the road – 2017!

This may sound like a crazy thing to say, but sometimes missing a cut can be a good thing, or perhaps just a blessing in disguise…

After a solid start to the season in South Africa, the following week in Hong Kong could of course have gone better, and if it had, for example, and I’d cruised through to the weekend and picked up a nice cheque, I may well have come home for winter and rested on my laurels, felt everything was tip top and just ticked over waiting for the SA Open to start!!

So, missing the cut, and missing it comfortably, gave me the kick up the a**e I needed to work harder than ever over the Christmas period and also make sure I’ve improved as a player for 2017!!

On returning from Hong Kong I got stuck straight back into my fitness training and let the clubs take the back seat for a few days so that I could enjoy some much-needed family time…and then the next step before I got practising again was to sit down with my coach Mark!

We had a great season de-brief, planned out the next four weeks and set some targets for this period of development time.

So, to get me back into it, the first test of my game and the ‘biggest’ game of the year, was the Woodsome Hall Christmas Texas Scramble! John Eyre had asked me to team up with him and Adam from the shop months back, and what I thought was going to be a leisurely stroll round, ended up being a super-competitive 9-hole competition where our team had the support from 20 members walking round hoping to enjoy some good golf!!

It was a great day out, really good fun and was followed up with some great banter, many Christmas pints, and a few hours chatting golf with lots of the fantastic members!!

As a team, we posted -7 for nine holes, and somehow I felt we got pretty lucky with the handicap system and only had to give back +0.4 shots to the field…but that cost us and we were taken down by the three bandits in the picture below – well played guys!!

Maybe next year!!

Quite a bit of my time in these four weeks has been taken up with some very thorough club testing. I’ve felt for a while that I wanted to try a new shaft and even a new head combination in my irons, and really wanted to find a set up that launch higher and fly stronger.

I can safely say I found that – I have really settled well into my new Srixon irons and cannot wait to get them into competition. You can check them out in John’s shop at Woodsome too, he stocks the same set!

I decided to go for the combo set where they go from a forged cavity to a slightly bigger forged cavity from 6 iron up to 4 iron, and then into a driving club in the 3 iron. The irons really do look great; they feel like a soft forged blade and with the new shaft option they perform great!!

MY IRON SPECS

Shaft: KBS C-TAPER X LITE

Grips: GOLF PRIDE, TOUR VELVET ROUND, 3 LAYERS TAPE

Irons: FORGED Z 765 (PW-7 iron) FORGED Z 565 (6-4 iron) Z U65 3/2 iron)

Some of you may wonder where and how can I do so much thorough club testing in the UK at this time of year, as the weather is so poor and ground conditions are not ideal for testing either.

But it’s a pretty simple answer – I head across to Wigan to my good friends Nick and Nicola Hibbs at TOUR X, and to put it simply they are the best in the business and they offer what no one else can with regards to club fitting, club building and giving everybody the same Tour player service regardless of handicap!

With two Trackman fitting bays, a putting studio, two Tour approved workshops over 15,000 different club variations in demo heads and shafts, you can’t possibly leave with the wrong set of clubs suited to you!!

I promise you will be blown away as you walk through the door into Nick’s golfing playground, and I know my pictures won’t do it justice, you just have to take a visit yourself if you’re serious about your golf!

As you know, as well as practising at Woodsome, when home I do try to spend a day each week at Oulton with my swing coach Mark Pearson and fitness coach Rachael Tibbs, so to get four visits in with both of them over the Christmas period was great; we made some huge steps with my game and it’s great to see the improvements in both the technical and physical aspects we have been aiming for!!

I was also fortunate enough whilst over there one day to spend some time with the elite players of their junior FUEL GOLF programme; they run an unbelievable training programme for the kids and it was fantastic to answer some questions and hit some shots for the next Rory or Chris Hansons of the game!!