How to Settle the Round After One Bad Hole
One bad hole can stay with you much longer than it deserves.
You walk off the green annoyed.
Maybe there was one poor shot.
Maybe there were three.
Maybe you did something you knew was a bad idea before you even did it.
By the time you reach the next tee, the hole is finished.
Unfortunately, you may not be.
That is often the bigger problem.
The walk to the next tee matters
There is normally a little bit of time between one hole ending and the next one beginning.
It is easy to waste it replaying everything that just happened.
The tee shot.
The recovery.
The three-putt.
The club you wish you had never taken out of the bag.
None of it is changing now.
The walk to the next tee is probably better used letting the hole become old news.
You do not have to be happy about it.
Just finished with it.
Annoyance has a habit of following you
The trouble with a bad hole is that it can change the way the next one feels.
A perfectly ordinary tee shot suddenly looks important.
You feel as though you need something good to happen.
You want to get back whatever you have just lost.
That is when the last hole starts making decisions on the new one.
It has already had enough of your scorecard.
There is no need to give it another hole as well.
The next hole does not owe you anything
This is where golf can be irritating.
You make a double and think a par on the next will put things right.
The next hole has no interest in that arrangement.
It is just another hole.
Trying to force a good one because the previous one was poor usually makes the job feel bigger than it is.
Sometimes the best way back into the round is simply to play the next hole as though nothing needs repaying.
Get back to ordinary golf
After a messy hole, ordinary can be very useful.
A ball somewhere playable.
A next shot you recognise.
A green reached without another adventure.
Nothing that makes anyone in the group particularly interested.
That can be exactly what the round needs.
You do not always need a brilliant hole to settle things down.
Quite often, you just need one without much nonsense.
Do not investigate the whole game
A bad hole can make golfers very analytical very quickly.
Suddenly you are wondering whether something has gone wrong with the entire day.
Perhaps every drive has been poor.
Maybe the putting has disappeared.
Maybe you should change something.
Usually this is happening because of about seven bad minutes.
It is probably a little early for an inquiry.
Let the round continue before deciding what sort of round it is.
Your playing partners have probably moved on
This is another useful reminder.
The people you are playing with are usually far less interested in your bad hole than you are.
They have their own card.
Their own missed putt.
Their own strange decision from two holes ago.
By the next tee, most of them have moved on.
You may as well join them.
One quiet hole can change the mood again
Golf changes surprisingly quickly.
A bad hole feels enormous while you are walking off it.
Then you hit an ordinary tee shot.
Find the fairway.
Make a decent bogey or par.
Have a laugh about something.
And ten minutes later, the round feels different again.
That is worth remembering when one hole starts feeling as though it has spoiled the day.
It probably has not.
It is just the most recent thing that happened.
Let the bad hole stay where it happened
You do not need a special routine.
You do not need to pretend you were not annoyed.
You certainly do not need to convince yourself the score did not matter.
Just let that hole finish.
Walk to the next one.
Look at what is in front of you.
And start again from there.
If the problem is a poor shot rather than a completed bad hole, The Next Shot After Finding Trouble deals with that moment before the hole gets away from you.
One bad hole can hurt the card.
It does not have to change the rest of the round.