Saturday, August 4
The feeling of anticipation of a major tournament is a very cool thing, it's almost palpable, almost like you can feel it or touch it. The anticipation affects everybody, but differently depending on your state of mind. This is my 4th day here, and I have played all the courses at least twice.
People who have been here a few days are much calmer about all of this. Everyday you see people pulling in and saying 'Hey I just got off the plane,' and they have this overwhelming urge to get out there and play every course as fast as possible to see what they have to do and prepare as best they can. The people who have been here a while are much calmer. It's cool, you can look at someone as they get out of their car and tell if they've been here a while or not.
This morning I was playing a round with one of my travel partners, John Finnegan. John is one of those rare commodities in disc golf, being a first year pro. There aren't many people who are turning pro these days, seems the same old names are in Open, and very few people are joining the top ranks.
At any rate, we had a course to play. I believe you should always play the best possible game for the current circumstance that you're dealing with. We had played this course once, but wanted to get a better feel for the driving and upshots. We didn't really need to work on putting, I mean hey: a 30 foot putt is a 30 putt. Most holes give you a reasonably open putt, and you don't necessarily need to play a hole to practice a straddle putt.
It was far more important to play the course.
We decided to play a game called Trumps, an excellent game for this situation. It's a non-carryover skins game, so you want to shoot better than your opponent on any given hole and win a skin. If you push four holes in a row it's only worth one skin. Both players drive twice, but they're only going to complete one and they get their choice. And the key to this game is that worst drive trumps best drive. Let me explain.
Each player has a choice to shoot either drive, but there are consequences to the choice. Your opponent gets to declare one of your drives to be the worst, and one to be the best. A skin is a skin. If you choose your worst drive and deuce and your opponent chooses his best drive and deuces, ahh!, worst drive trumps best drive, and worst drive gets the skin. If either player skins outright, that is scores one less stroke on the hole, a skin is a skin regardless of the drive choice.
It's a cool strategy game which lets you drive twice, so you really learn what happens on different drives and can figure out different landing zone options. You might throw one air shot and one roller, but only play one so you get twice as much driving with half the walking.
Talking about walking. Oh my goodness. These courses are fabulous! Chuck Kennedy and Team Minnesota have done a fabulous job. Really gorgeous, nice, difficult, tough, long, tight and nasty they are. One warm up day we shot, then took a break for lunch at the Mall of America. This place is roughly the size of a small city all under one roof. It's so darn big that the center of the mall is an amusement park, with roller coasters, ferris wheels and that sort of nonsense. Absolutely huge. We were looking for a variety of sporting good stuff, and walked from one end to the other several times before finishing the day by playing a second course.
I must have walked 30 miles in one day. That certainly will kick your butt and laugh at you.
One of the things we're experiencing here in Minnesota is substantial humidity. It's around 90-98% humidity every day, and temperatures anywhere from 85-95, a combo that is just ridiculously miserable. If you wear a cotton shirt, you're soaked with sweat after three holes, and of course you're weighted down more now because it is soaked with sweat. Because of that I bought this new a polyester garment, Dryfit, which is basically a very thin polyester knit micro fiber. It's better than anything else because it doesn't stick to you, and doesn't weigh you down even when you're sweating to a remarkable degree.
Gotta go. I'm outside at the moment, and am now in search of some AC.
