A Needed Jolt

I swore I'd never do it, but I did it. I played a round using a laser rangefinder. I'd always been a non-techy kind of golfer, a "feel" player, someone who relied on eyesight and spatial sense to get around on the course. Or at least I always liked to think so. Hubby had long wanted to get a laser rangefinder, and I finally bought him one last Christmas, in a surgical strike shopping trip to Golf Galaxy when a coupon plus a rebate scored me the lowest possible price on the Bushnell Tour v3 Slope Edition with PinSeeker and JOLT technology. Since then, hubby played with it a few times. But I had never bothered with the thing till yesterday.

I've seen rangefinders you can wear as a watch or slip into your pocket. But this one is about the size of a juice box and has its own carrying case that you can clip onto your golf bag. It was pretty easy for me to whip it out before every shot without wasting time unnecessarily, especially when I was otherwise just waiting for someone else to take a shot.

I was playing with the Defectress from the ladies league, and we'd been joined by two 20-something guys, who I called "the future of the game," especially when the Defectress scoffed at their poor play and worse etiquette. "If that guy asks me one more time if he needs to mark his ball..." she complained. To which I replied, "I try to be nice to the beginners. After all, they're the future of the game." Also, I was happy not to be the worst of a foursome. It takes the pressure off.

I had noticed that the Defectress also uses a laser rangefinder, and her approach shots are eerily accurate, typically within feet, and sometimes inches, of the hole. She said she practices at a junky range where they have old tires set up to pitch into. Seri also uses a rangefinder, the GPS kind that she clips to her belt. Maybe subconsciously I knew that better players use rangefinders, since it's the next best thing to a caddy reading off calculated distances from a book of field notes.

I liked that the Bushnell Tour v3 Slope has an audible little jolt when you lock into a target. Also, it supposedly takes into account slope, so if you're aiming uphill or downhill, you'll get an accurate distance without needing the Pythagorean theorem.

Knowing distances with more accuracy definitely helped me in several instances on the course yesterday. Though I still had to execute the shot correctly (which I didn't always do), knowing the distance at least gave me an extra bit of confidence about my club selection.

The only thing the laser rangefinder can't do is spot blind targets. For instance, it would have been extremely useful to know that a certain fairway bunker was exactly at a distance where I typically land a 3-wood, had I actually been able to see the bunker.

Maybe the next thing the golf industry needs to invent is a laser rangefinder with X-ray technology.