I don’t think one score can necessarily show me how well I’m playing, but I didn’t shoot any 75s last season and did this season…
My whole point in this thread is to question what we are chasing and how we are chasing it… Are you trying to make your off days less off or be better on your best days. A number of the skills for the two correlate, but there are some places where you can work on one without impacting the other.
Strategy out of the trees is a great example… You can lower your big numbers by getting back into the fairway, but on your “best” days, this might not be a choice you have to make…
I don’t think scores or handicap indicate how good a golfer is as much as they indicate their overall potential for a round.
One of the things I’ve dedicated this season to is finding areas where I can improve and grinding that improvement (and it’s a slow and methodical process)… I’ve come to realize that ANY positive change in golf takes months, if not years to be realized… I’m starting to slowly see the work I’ve put into putting pay off, and I really got in gear back in January.
I agree with you it’s important go reflect on the decision making of the day, and see where you had bad breaks, good luck or simply didn’t make a good decision or commit to a swing… but it has to be tied to some sort of real metric…
It’s alot like working on a new recipe… you can keep trying a dish and getting different elements right, but at the end of the day if you can’t put it all together into one meal where everything just WORKS, then what’s the point… and like cooking, what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for me, and that’s OK.
We can measure success differently, and that doesn’t make anyone wrong or right. My best round had a ton of mistakes I wish I had back, and the next days 82 had a bunch of good shots and some bad bounces… Variance will always happen.
Honestly, I think the biggest challenge with golf is finding the tangible ways to measure improvement, as every round is so different. Even strokes gained can be misleading on one round trends, as one shot can skew the data (the aggregate data is much more useful)
Tiger was the GOAT because he understood what his goals were and where he needed to perform. He consistenly avoided big mistakes on the course. He also had the benefit of competition, and knew exactly where he stood…
Going into 18 with a good round are most of us willing to take a look at birdie off the table if it means we won’t make worse than bogey? If the score doesn’t matter to anyone but you, and you are one over headed into 18, does it make sense to try to shoot even par for the first time ever? or do you shoot for the part putt and walk away happy with a 73? Does it matter to anyone but you? I’d argue you can defend either choice very easily. That’s the fun of recreational golf… we all have our own goals and metrics. It’s also the biggest challenge. If we want to get BETTER we have to first figure out what BETTER is.