Three Graphs on Golf

As the golf season gets into full swing (this weekend is the first major, The Masters), I decided to take a few minutes to examine my own golf game. (And, now, to subject you to this analysis. But, you have no one to blame but yourself -- you clicked here, probably expecting some half-baked idea of mine, or a link to a video of something odd or interesting or amusing, or a rant about the state of civil life in this country. Instead you get to step into my obsession for a few paragraphs.)

After I really started playing golf seriously, in 2004, I signed up with an online handicap service. I enter my scores, it maintains a USGA handicap for me. And, because I enter not a total score, but a hole-by-hole score, and keep track of three key statistics (fairways hit, greens in regulation and number of putts), I can monitor my progress (or plodding, as the case may be) as a golfer.

Here's how my overall handicap has gone over the past three years:


Not as steep a decline (lower is better in a golf handicap) as I would like, and though the trend was down in 2004 and 2005, it bubbled back up in 2006 before starting back down again.

But if you look at the percentage of fairways hit...

And greens in regulation...

...you'll see there is almost no improvement. (Ignore the first few months, as there were too few rounds to make the statistics relevant.) In fact, I'm making fewer greens in regulation now than I was two years ago.

So where is the improvement in my handicap coming from? Here...

I've gone from taking an average of more than two putts per hole to taking 1.8. That's between 32 and 33 strokes per round. The best putter on the PGA Tour this season is averaging 1.68 putts per hole. The worst putter is averaging about 1.9. So I'm probably not going to get significantly better in this aspect of the game. If I could improve my putting to 1.7 per hole I could go from a 17 index to a 16 index.

But...if I can learn to strike the ball better, hit more fairways and (more important) make more greens in regulation, I could have more chances to be putting for birdies and my index could plummet. At least, that's the idea. Now I just have to figure out how to do that.