What's the plan for 2022?
Gettin those reps in...
The breadth of moving parts that need to be considered and pieced together to pull Hazard’s Ascent off is pretty astounding. Between basic game improvement, competition, fitness, finances, work, and family life (not necessarily in that order by the way) … there is no shortage of detail to be figured out. I have a basic roadmap in my head for how to solve for each of those elements, but I’m realistic enough to know that the path forward will include a lot of twists and turns … and I’m doing everything in my power to prepare for when obstacles inevitably appear.
Given the above and my inherent realism (y’all are probably laughing at my choice of the word realism now knowing what I’m trying to pull off), I lay out my 2022 plan here knowing full well that the plan may not be 100% solidified, but the blueprints have certainly by signed off on by the town planning committee.
Game Improvement
Foundational to this whole “playing professionally” thing is being really darn good at golf. I’m fairly certain I don’t need to explain this to anyone, but the difference between a very good club golfer and a touring professional is equivalent to the difference between a Toyota Camry and a Ferrari Testarossa. They may technically drive on the same streets, and you may even see them stopped at the same intersection together, but when the light turns green and it’s time to put the pedal to floor … well, you know where I’m going with this.
To be successful in this journey, I’ll need to make dramatic gains across the entirety of my game. I’ll go into detail on the different aspects of my game in a future post, but the best context I can provide on my current ability is in reference to my handicap (a concept I fundamentally dislike but thats a separate conversation).
Over the past couple of years, I’ve hovered around a +2 to +2.5, which is the result of largely shooting around par or a bit better in a lot of rounds at my home clubs. I’d argue this overstates my ability a bit given the amount of golf I played on familiar courses in that time frame, THOUGH both clubs I’ve belonged to since 2019 are really stern tests. If you looked at that handicap in relation to performance in tournaments, it’s obvious I have underperformed in competition relative to that traditional handicap metric.
While hopefully that simple number can help provide context as to where I am, it is just about the last thing on my mind as I start my journey. In fact, I’m not overly concerned with scores, period, at the moment. I’m mostly concerned with improving consistency across my game. I have range sessions where I pure 90% of my shots and feel on top of the world … and then follow those up a day later with misses left and right and I go home frustrated. Same thing goes for putting and chipping. The skew towards the “good” sessions has gotten better over the past year for sure, but the level of consistency needs to be improved in practice before I can expect it to get better on the course.
In addition to the consistency, there are also just things that an average pro can do that I simply can’t. Put Tiger behind one of those trees to the right of the landing zone on the eleventh at Augusta and tell him he needs to hit low cut under a branch that stays low but then climbs enough to carry the mounding in front of the green and he’ll think he has a birdie opportunity. Ask me to do it and I’m hitting a punch cut that is ending up in the pond to the left of the green because it got two feet off the ground and just followed the terrain down to the water OR I’m dead in the right bunker. I can get 75% of the way there, but that last 25% is what separates the pros from someone like me.
In 2022, I am taking a highly organized approach to both improving that consistency and working with Dom to figure out HOW to hit those other shots that I don’t yet have in my bag. Both of those will take time (especially the latter), but making progress here will pay dividends in competition …
Competition
The name of the game this year is “reps”. I am playing as many competitive rounds as possible this year, both amateur events (I’m still technically an amateur … for the moment) and professional events (playing as an amateur). At the moment, I have twelve guaranteed competitive rounds on the calendar spread across ten events. Most are one-day qualifiers for the championship propers. Depending on how well I play in those qualifiers, I could play somewhere between fifteen to thirty MORE rounds on top of that (the high end would have me making it pretty far in some big events). None of these numbers include club competition, which I tend to play a little less of outside of the Club Championship or any four-ball events with friends.
The goal in playing as much tournament golf as possible is to build a game that can hold up under pressure, when it matters. You can try and simulate tournament conditions all you want in a Saturday afternoon practice round, but it’s really difficult to get yourself into that “hands-are-trembling-on-the-first-tee” mode when the round doesn’t really count for anything.
I’ve also struggled to get through qualifying rounds into the championship propers in recent years. I tend to put more pressure on myself than I need to for these one day events, and have often got off to very slow starts. Much of professional golf at the mini-tour levels is about playing well in these shorter events, so gaining additional experience in these types of qualifiers and approaching them with the right mindset now will be valuable down the line.
In 2022, I plan to maintain my amateur status through most of the year because it opens the door to the highest volume of tournaments and therefore competitive rounds (and therefore experience). The downside is not being able to cash checks from any of the professional events I play, but I’m betting on the experience gained from playing over the potential for small financial payouts from good finishes in something like the New Hampshire Open. Later in the year, after the US Mid-Am, I’ll revisit when and where my first event as a true professional will be.
The last thing on this … IF this year happens to go really well and I make the progress I am dreaming of, I will consider entering one of the Q-School’s that take place later in the year. There are a number of options that I’ll outline in another post, but this is very much on the radar (however distant it is right now).
Fitness
The next element of my ascent in 2022 is working on my fitness. Those of you who have met me will know that I am a tall, skinny thing with very little muscle to speak of. At 6’3, 175 pound, I’m Wilco Nienaber with 30 mph LESS ball speed. I’ve been a cardio guy my whole life … running, cycling, playing basketball … that sort of thing. I’m borderline allergic to lifting weights and most of my gym membership money while living in NYC went towards me using the padded mats on the top floor to stretch and do core work (my wife married me for the 2015 version of my abs).
All jokes aside, I’m not strong … and I’ve lost a bit of flexibility over the past five or six years … but overall I’m in pretty decent shape. I’m making a renewed effort this year to focus on my pliability (shoutout to the GOAT) and I’ve made stretching every day (often 2x per day) a core priority. The plan is also to build up more strength in my core and legs this year. I’m never going to be built like Rory or Tiger, but any gains I can make that will keep me healthy and give me a bit more stretchiness and power can only help my game. I don’t hit the ball a mile, and in today’s game that’s clearly a disadvantage. The good thing is I have a great build for golf and as technique improves in addition to a bit of muscle in the right places, I should be able to hit it plenty far to compete.
Work & Finances
If there is a single item on this list that worries me the most, its this one. As I wrote about in the prologue, my family and I have been incredibly fortunate on the finance front for a long time now. Stability has been the name of the game and we’ve done a great job of always saving more than we’ve spent.
Obviously golf is not a cheap sport … and playing professionally assumes some kind of income from performing well in tournaments. Knowing it will take some time before I’m consistently cashing checks from golf, I’ve been working on back up plans for 2022 and beyond to ensure there is some kind of cash flow coming in from my side to add to my wife’s income.
Today, I’m still fully employed … but in order to properly dedicate myself and my time to professional golf, I don’t believe that will be the status quo for too much longer. I have a very unique set of skills that are in high demand pretty much everywhere at the moment, so the goal will be to use those in a part-time capacity where I can choose my own schedule and how much I ultimately want to work.
My tentative plan here is doing about fifteen to twenty hours per week of consulting work which will certainly help pay the bills. Add in any financial contributions from my dear readers who have signed up for the paid version of this newsletter, and we should be in decent shape. I’m also hoping to generate interest from potential sponsors who would like to partner with me on this journey and provide some help with the basics. Add all of those things up and it should do enough to reduce the stress of leaving a once-stable, lucrative career for a much less stable, potentially VERY lucrative (potentially far LESS lucrative!) … but more importantly, lovable … career.
Am I scared about taking the leap and either leaving my original chosen career path or putting it on long-term pause? Absolutely, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. But as I mentioned in some of my previous posts, I truly believe not trying to follow this dream would be worse for my well-being in the long term.
I’m really good at the corporate game, but I really dislike how playing that game makes me feel. I’m forced to be a person I don’t really like when I go to my day-job, do work I dislike (not all of it! mainly just the parts where I have to deal with people who don’t respect the complexities of what my teams do), and worst of all, I have to look longingly at the window thinking of the things I’d rather be doing. By maintaining a connection to the parts of my job I like through consulting, and getting to write more (which I adore … probably why my posts are so long), I aim to extract the best of three different worlds and make my life far more fulfilling, even if a bit less stable.
Family
I mentioned this list was not in any particular order … and that bears repeating here, because my family and their well-being is my number one priority.
Being truthful, I am aware there is a part of me that is being a little selfish trying to get this dream off the ground. I’m attempting to evolve my life to a place where a HUGE chunk of my time is dedicated to a pretty solitary game that doesn’t directly involve my wife and son. And one could choose to read this and say, “well dude, you’re trying to play a GAME to make money … that is inherently selfish while so many other folks are out their toiling away working a JOB to make ends meet”. I can’t argue with that pushback. It’s absolutely a valid perspective on what I’m doing.
What I would say in response though takes a more gentle and inclusive perspective. Yes, I’m doing this in part for me … but I’m also doing this because I'm a better person, husband, and father when I’m happy and working towards something I care about. Only a handful of times in my life have I truly cared about the outcome of a project at work. You show up, do the job (well … always well), and you move on. Rarely in my line of work is there is a direct one to one correlation between the work I manifest and the results for my company. Contrast that with what I’m doing with Hazard’s Ascent, building my OWN golf career and my OWN brand that will live or die the effort I put into it, and you can see how the energy I’m putting into this is far more positive than what I’ve done the last decade or so. That energy can only be good for the people around me.
There is also the argument to be made that if I achieve the goals I have set out to achieve (playing golf at the highest level), there is a path to a financial lifestyle that far exceeds what we have today. It would give us an opportunity as a family to live however we’d like and set Jack (and future children) up financially for a long time going forward. We’d be able to give back to those who helped us along the way and to those in need who haven’t had the same opportunities as us.
Putting all of the above aside, if there is any reason to do it for my family, it’s this … I would do anything to make my family proud of me. My wife is one of those most supportive people on the planet. She only wants and cares about what is best for me and our son, and she can see the passion I have for playing golf competitively.
We’ll watch PGA Tour events pretty frequently on Sunday afternoons, and she will mostly do her own thing around the house while it’s playing in the background. As soon as the winner makes the final putt though, and their girlfriend or wife or kid is running onto the green to give the player a big hug, her attention gravitates to the TV. Sure, she likes to see to the outfit the wife is wearing or comment on how cute the kid(s) is, but I will go to the grave believing that moment grabs her attention so forcefully because she adores the act of that player’s partner celebrating a moment that their family worked so hard, together, to get to in their career.
That’s the moment I’m most excited for in this journey … the day I win an event and my wife and son come running up to me to tell me how proud they are of me. That’s the moment I think of when I’m tired and I don’t want to hit another ball or write another paragraph. THAT is why I want to take on this crazy journey …