Practicing How to Battle — A Cold 43 at North Park
I got to North Park after the work day was already over, which is another way of saying I showed up with more than golf on my mind. I felt fine. Calm, even. But my head wasn’t really on golf, and I knew it walking to the first tee. I came anyway, because North Park is usually where I go to get out of my own head for a couple of hours. Tonight my head came with me.
There’s no real way to warm up here. There’s technically a range, but nobody uses it and there’s no chipping area, so the routine is a few swings, a few putts, and then you’re standing over a shot that counts. You go in cold. What I have going for me is familiarity. I’ve played North Park more than anywhere else, so even on a cold start I know where to aim, and a bad swing still leaves me somewhere I can play from. It’s course knowledge filling in for a swing that hasn’t shown up yet.
No warm-up, no buffer. Just the walk from the lot to a shot that counts.
Going Through the Motions
The front five were exactly what you’d expect from a guy out there to get a round in and not much else. Bogey on 1. Double on 2. Double on 3. Bogey on 4, and that was the one green I hit all stretch, which I promptly three-putted. Bogey on 5. That’s +7 through five, and none of it felt like golf. I wasn’t committed to a single shot, just moving a body around while my head stayed back at the office.
After the first couple of bad shots I knew I’d be battling all day. This wasn’t going to be easy, and that’s fine, not much is. So somewhere around the double on 3 I gave myself a different job: use the round as practice for grinding out a score in a tough spot. The score didn’t matter anymore, that was already gone. Just hang in there, stay present, hit the next shot. Bad shots happen. Acknowledge them and move on. I kept telling myself that the rest of the way in.
The Wake-Up Call
Then somebody yelled at me, and I woke up.
I’d pushed my drive on 7 over toward the 1st fairway. The group playing the 1st was still out there, within range, so rather than fire into them I played my shot and walked off toward the 7th green. Meanwhile a guy back on the 1st tee started shouting at me to hurry up so he could hit. What he couldn’t see from where he stood was that if he’d played when he wanted to, he’d have driven straight into the same group I was being careful about. He figured it out eventually. I was already gone.
That’s a muni for you. You never know what you’re going to get out there, and most of the time that’s the charm, not the problem.
But it snapped me into the present. The annoyance and the adrenaline did in one moment what no warm-up had. I stopped drifting and started playing.
Par-Par-Par-Par
The first real strike of the day came on 8. I pounded the tee shot up the right side, pin on the front, a genuine look at a good number, and made the par. Then on 9 I hit it even better, the longest drive I’ve ever hit on that hole. I chunked the second, but the difference between hole 9 and hole 3 was that I didn’t let it bother me. I went back to work, pitched on, and rolled it in for par.
Four pars to close, 6 through 9, and I hit every green over that stretch. The same guy who couldn’t find a green to save his life on the front five suddenly couldn’t miss one. Nothing mechanical fixed itself in twenty minutes. My head just finally showed up to the round.
Once I woke up I couldn’t miss one. Four greens in a row to close.
43 isn’t a score I’m going to frame, but the shape of it says something. The one green I hit on the front five was a par-3 I three-putted, and then I hit four in a row coming home once I woke up. The round splits clean down the middle: the half I sleepwalked and the half I played. Same swing, same tired legs. What changed was that I decided to show up for the back half.
Why I Want Rounds Like This
I can’t count on a stranger yelling at me from the wrong tee to wake me up every round. That was luck. What I can practice is the part underneath it: choosing to keep playing the next shot when the round’s already gone. That’s the job I gave myself on hole 3, and it held all the way to 9.
The 5 by 50 project won’t be won on the days I show up fresh and everything clicks. Those days don’t ask much of me. It gets won on days like this one, when I have to fight my way into the round one hole at a time. Nobody who reads the scorecard later sees how little I had in the tank at the start. They just see the number. The work is making the number hold up anyway.
And that part travels. The WPGA Net Championship and the Muni World Championship are coming this summer, and not every round will start clean. Some days I’ll have a full tank and a warm swing. Some will go like tonight: running on course knowledge and stubbornness, getting yelled at by a stranger on the wrong tee. It’s the second kind I worry about, and the only way to be ready for them is to have already fought through a few. North Park handed me one tonight, the way it usually does.
And by the time I signed the card, whatever I’d carried to the first tee had gone quiet. That’s the other reason I come out here.
Cold 43 and all, I’ll take it.
North Park Golf Course. May 19, 2026 — Front nine — Middle Right tees — 34.9 / 124 — 43 (+7), 19 putts. More on the performance page.
