Ras-Al Khaimah Championship

It was nice to get back into tournament golf after a few weeks spent back home enjoying the summer. As most of you know I’ve employed local golfing talent Travis Stewart to carry my bag for the next 3 weeks and we departed Auckland airport on the 20th of Jan heading to Dubai on a small 17 hour flight.

Once we touched down in Dubai it was a quick 45min taxi drive to our accomodation which greeted Travis with no hot water and no working power points, a good start to the week. We arrived at around 6am to our accomodation which made it difficult for us to try and stay awake for the entire day to get over the jet lag as quickly as possible. We got out and about, took a look around the area and hit some golf balls to try and drag out the day, we did a pretty decent job and managed to stay awake for most of the day.

We played around 30 holes over the next 3 days scoping the course out and hitting the range. In true Sam fashion I was hitting it everywhere and struggling with my game (I wouldn’t say I play very good golf in practice rounds). Travis handed me the putter cover instead of the putter only 20 times and we slowly worked out how to dance around each other when trying to calculate distances. Things were on the improve.

Thursday and Friday were great days. Nothing really went wrong, I did bogey my first hole of the day both times and really rallied back, only making 1 more bogey after those opening bogeys followed with 13 birdies. I was hitting the ball nice and rolling some putts in. 66 and 68 the first 2 rounds to be sitting in T7th.

The weekend was difficult for me again being in contention. I wouldn’t say my game was feeling that good in the first 2 days I just kind of worked it out and got the ball in the hole. Again, I got off to a slow start both days, making a bogey before a birdie always puts you behind early and I was struggling to get it going on the Saturday, a late double bogey on number 17 put me in a difficult position come Sunday on a day where everyone was going low.

I was really disappointed with how I let Sunday get away from me, I need to try and focus more and grind out a decent score when things aren’t going my way but I really struggled on the greens and just never got my driver going, I was behind all day. 73 and 77 on the weekend left me at -4 total and T68, not ideal but another Saturday in the top 10 is great learning for me and I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before a decent finish comes.

This week we are in Bahrain and the course is looking nice, thick rough and wind in the forecast will be a good challenge, I’m looking forward to it.

Thanks for the support team, Sam.