Round Two: What a 99 at Fox Hollow Taught Me | The Denver Driver
A 99 at Fox Hollow looked like a step backward. The round felt very different—and the final six holes showed exactly what I need to fix.
Round Two of the Road to 85 ended with a 99 at Fox Hollow. If you only look at the score, that sounds like I went backward. That is not how the round felt. I played Canyon and Meadows with Pat Vacanti, and for a good part of the day I was playing the kind of golf I am trying to build: the ball was in play, I was giving myself chances, and I was not spending every hole trying to rescue myself from the previous swing. Then the final six holes happened. A score can hide two completely different rounds This is one of the reasons I wanted to document every round instead of just posting a number. A 99 can mean eighteen holes of bad golf. It can also mean a lot of competent golf followed by one stretch where the round gets away from you. Mine was the second kind. The early part of the round made me feel closer to 85 than the final score suggests. The closing stretch reminded me how quickly this game can punish a loss of focus, a bad recovery decision or a couple of poor putts. Forty-four putts changes the math The number I cannot talk around is 44 putts. You can make a lot of good swings and still make breaking 85 almost impossible when it takes 44 strokes to get the ball into the hole after reaching the greens. That does not mean my putting stroke suddenly became the only problem. Some first putts were too far away because of poor approaches. Some greens were difficult. Some holes were already in trouble before the putter came out. But 44 is 44. If I want the score to move, lag putting and three-putt prevention have to become boringly reliable. The last six holes exposed the real skill I need Round One at Broken Tee taught me that bad shots travel in packs. Fox Hollow taught me the same lesson at a larger scale: bad holes can travel in packs too. Once the closing stretch started sliding, I did not consistently stop it. A mistake created pressure. Pressure changed the next decision. The next decision made the next shot harder. Suddenly I was no longer playing the course in front of me; I was playing the score I was afraid of making. That is a course-management problem and a head-game problem as much as it is a swing problem. Three things I’m carrying forward Putting has to become a scoring strength. I do not need to make everything, but 44 putts gives away too many strokes before I even look at the rest of the round. Recovery is a skill. After a bad shot, the next goal is to restore a normal hole—not immediately win the lost stroke back. The round is eighteen holes long. A strong start does not earn anything if I mentally drag the previous mistake into the next tee box. Why I’m not discouraged by 99 I do not like shooting 99. The point of this series is not to pretend every bad score contains a secret victory. But I learned something useful: I can already produce stretches of golf that look much closer to the player I want to become. The gap is not eighteen holes wide. At Broken Tee, seven holes did most of the damage. At Fox Hollow, the final six holes did. That is starting to look like a pattern. The Road to 85 is becoming less about finding a new golf swing and more about learning how to keep an ordinary round from turning into an expensive one. Round Two: 99. It counts. On to the next one.
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