I check out of pro golf every year after the PGA is over. The Ryder Cup, Presidents Cup, Solheim Cup, those events don’t do much for me. After the PGA is finished in August, all the men’s and women’s majors have been played and it’s time for college football anyway.

So every year it takes me a little while to get used to how good the pro golfers are. I watched the third round of the Sony Open yesterday, and I’ll watch the finish today because 18 guys are within four shots of the lead on a course where low scores will be plentiful.

What I had forgotten:
1. How hard they and fast they swing, such as the current co-leader, Matt Every.
2. How dead straight they are. Nick Faldo showed us the 8-yard-wide opening to the 18th green that players have to navigate from about 250 yards away. I lost count of how many golfers bounced the ball onto the green right through that gap from that distance.
3. How important every putt is. The moment I tuned in I saw a guy miss a three-footer and a few minutes later saw someone else miss a putt of the same length.
4. How much I want to go to Hawaii this time of year.

For the past several years the official opening of my golf season has been to watch Bubba Watson jump out of his shoes cutting the corner with his drive on 18, but he’s not in the tournament this year, so I guess we won’t get to see that.

The group I would follow today if I were there is the Corey Pavin and Chris DiMarco duo. I would learn a lot about how to play golf, and there wouldn’t be that many people in their gallery, so I would get to see everything.

One thing about pro golf that I hadn’t forgotten, and that I saw plenty of yesterday, is that to shoot a score you have to keep the ball in play and make some putts. My son, who is 35 and learning to play, calls me after every round. We go over which shots didn’t work out in order that he might learn better ways of getting the ball around the course. Right now my thing is for him not to tee off with any club longer than a 4-iron. He’s doing that, and finding out how different golf is when you hit second shots from the fairway.

Anyway, I advise him that next time he should try this shot, or this strategy, and you know what? He takes notes! Not that I know anything, but he writes it down! For all you readers who have teenagers in the house who think you are sooooo stupid, there’s hope. A time will come when they listen to you. Actually, they’re listening now, but they just don’t want to admit it. I’m hearing both our sons say to me, “You know when you always used to tell us X? Well, . . . “

But, back to golf. There’s snow and ice on the ground in the Pacific NW today (see #4, above), which means putting practice indoors and the Sony Open at 4 this afternoon. Life is good.