Nipomo High School freshman Raymond Navis is one of two local golfers who made CIF playoffs this year. He’ll golf May 24 at Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena and said he wants to golf in the final at Pebble Beach.
Navis told the Sun that he enjoys the sense of concentration he gets when he plays golf.
“I really like golfing because in school and stuff I have trouble focusing,” he said. “On the golf course I can really focus, it’s really cool. It’s kind of weird. It really only happens in golf, on the golf course. I have to have it in a competitive atmosphere to have that focus.”
Kurt Lindgren, the golf coach at Nipomo, said that the level Navis plays at requires a huge amount of skill and luck.
“It takes a combination of athletic ability and talent and really focusing on that being your main sport with an objective to be as good as it can,” he said. “Private lessons, professional coaching is pretty much necessary. He’s an excellent student of the game.”
At the Las Posas golf course in Camarillo, Navis shot a 74, two over par, during the first round of CIF.
“Twenty out of a hundred golfers made the cut,” Lindgren said on May 22. “At a course yesterday, Mission Lakes in Desert Hot Springs, he shot a 79 in steady 30 mile per hour winds.”
Navis’ father, a big golfer, started teaching him to golf when he was 8 years old.
“He taught me how to chip and putt, and we went from there,” Navis said. At 10, he played in his first tournament—a nine-hole event—in Alabama, where he lived at the time. He won and was hooked.
That was four years ago. Now, Navis golfs for the varsity team and practices every day.
“I’m mostly trying to improve my putting and my iron-play,” he said. “Hitting the low shots, the draws, all of that.”
The hardest part of golf, he said, is putting.
“You have to put everything you have into it and see what you get out,” he said. “It’s really a combination of things.”
Distance putting, called “lag putting,” is key—being able to putt 40 or 50 feet can make a big difference on the green.
“If I have a round where my lag putting is really good, I can go low,” he said.
Navis likes golf, he said, because it gives him beautiful, varied scenery. He’s golfed all over, but some of his favorite courses are in Palm Springs.
“In football, you’re in a stadium or on a field or something. You don’t get those vista views. That’s unique to golf,” he said.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 4, 2015.