This week on the Japan Tour sees us return for the Tour Championships to the very tough and demanding Shishido Hills north east of Tokyo by a little over an hour. It is one of the toughest courses of the year, largely due to long rough and very tight fairways.
This week however is quite a different challenge than last week. Although the tough was long last week being a links course it was wide open and your bad drives could sometimes end up pretty good, on an adjacent hole or with a grat angle to the green. This week the course is tree or water lined and no two holes really run side by side. This week your poor shots will most likely be penalised and it will be all about precision golf.
It is a long course too which means driver needs to be used a lot so it is certainly a week to be near the top of the driving accuracy stats. Despite the difficulties of this course and the course dominating me over the years I find myself calmly relaxed about my week ahead. I am playing well and really feel as though my game is continuing to improve and get stronger and stronger. My right to left ball flight keeps improving each week and the hours and hours of short game work also continues to show signs of serious improvement.
It's the night before round one and I am really looking forward to tomorrow. It will be challenging, it will be tough but most importantly it will be fun. It's young Jack Wrights second week on the bag and he is improving every day. He is such a great young kid who is willing to learn and improve himself too. This trip has opened his eyes to the world of professional golf and only inspired him to go home and work harder and harder on his game so that one day he can make it into pro golf. He has star gazed a little at times seeing guys he has watch on tv, which for a 17 yr old in another country far from Yamba, I reckon is fair enough!! I hope he has another great week ahead of him and he is once again exhausted come Sunday night!!!