Road to 100: You Don’t Need Pars to Break 100 | The Denver Driver
Before I started chasing 85, I had to learn how to break 100. The biggest lesson: you don’t need pars—you need fewer blow-up holes.
Before I started chasing 85, I had to learn how to break 100. There was a time when I was consistently shooting somewhere around 100 to 115—and I am not even sure I was keeping score correctly every round. My real measurement was golf balls. Sometimes success meant coming home with the same number of balls I started with. When golf was really bad, I was thrilled if I found enough during the round to finish with more than I brought. I chunked shots constantly. I would hit the ground, try to correct, get back on my heels and sometimes nearly miss the ball. Eventually I stopped playing. I was embarrassed. I had been successful in a lot of parts of my life, and golf made me feel publicly incompetent. Why I came back Years later, retirement changed what I wanted from the game. I needed something active that I could do for the rest of my life. I wanted another activity Trista and I could potentially share when we travel. I wanted a reason to spend more time with friends outside the relationships that had been built around work. Golf also gave me something intellectually difficult to work on. It became less about proving I was good at something and more about having something worth learning. Here is the math that changed how I think about 100 On a par-72 course, eighteen bogeys equals 90. Nine bogeys plus nine double bogeys equals 99. You can make nine double bogeys, zero pars, zero birdies—and still break 100. That realization changes the assignment completely. A golfer trying to break 100 does not need to learn par golf. The biggest opportunity is often to stop the handful of holes where one bad shot becomes four. What actually helped me improve There was no single breakthrough. Early lessons at GolfTEC helped because I could finally see what my body and club were doing instead of trying to fix everything by feel. A fitting led me toward clubs that matched me better and reduced some of the ugly contact. More recently, putting work helped me understand that repeated three-, four- and even five-putts were not something I just had to accept. Testing putters and finding one that fit my stroke made the game immediately more manageable. Work with Shakes also changed how I understood my misses. A right miss I had casually called a slice was often a push. Short-game work changed my thinking from ‘hit it toward the pin’ to choosing a landing spot, understanding rollout and using the bounce of the wedge. Those technical improvements mattered. But they were not the biggest change. The biggest change was how I defined a bad hole I used to treat one ugly shot as evidence that the whole round was falling apart. Then I would try to win the stroke back immediately. That usually made the hole worse. Look at the two or three holes where one bad shot became four. That is the part of breaking 100 I wish more golfers understood. The target is not eighteen beautiful holes. The target is limiting the damage when golf gets ugly. Eat less cake The analogy I keep coming back to is weight loss. You can be doing well, go to a party, have a few drinks, eat a piece of cake and suddenly feel like you gave back a week of progress. Golf can feel the same way. At this stage, finding three new strokes can feel nearly impossible. But sometimes the strokes are already sitting inside two or three blow-up holes. We just need to eat less cake on those bad holes. I am not trying to give swing advice I am not a golf instructor, and I do not want to preach to somebody who is trying to break 100. I remember how scary it can feel to struggle in front of other people. Telling someone to ‘just relax’ only minimizes something that feels very real when you are standing over the ball. What I would rather say is this: you are probably closer than you think. If you can identify the holes where one mistake becomes several, get the ball back into play more often, reduce the giant putting numbers and choose tees that fit your game, you do not have to become a completely different golfer. You just need fewer holes that get away from you. The road from 100 to 85 That lesson did not disappear when I started chasing 85. It became the foundation of the whole project. The number changes. The basic problem does not. A few holes can make us believe we are much farther from our goal than we really are. You are closer than you think. A few holes got away from you; they do not prove you do not belong. Showing up again is already part of the progress.
Home · Published articles
Enable JavaScript to use signup forms and interactive features.