First person: John Smoltz

Honestly, this is just a gauge for me. I want to see what it’s like to try to make the U.S. Open. It really is the cruelest test in all of professional sports. The greatest golfers play, and some participants can’t break 80.

On qualifying day, I imagine there will be a good slew of people trying to have that magical round. They’ll go for everything, and if that doesn’t work out, they’ll walk off the course. I want to see what kind of round I can play and post a number.

If it’s good enough to go to the next round [sectional qualifying in early June], that would be incredible. If not, it will be incredible either way.

The U.S. Open winners are some of the straightest of hitters, not the longest. I have to make a decision: Do I want to use the driver that I kill and not control as much, or the driver that I don’t hit as far but have more control over? That is one interesting part of golf -- the feel of it, and how quickly you can lose it. It’s the most intriguing sport out there.

My caddie will be a friend who has played that course for a long time, Josh Arieh, who is on the World Poker Tour. He reads greens well. I need to be able to trust his knowledge.

I played with [PGA Tour pro] Heath Slocum before the Masters. For the most part, I stay up with the longest pro hitters. What separates me is their control of clubs. That’s one thing I’d like to get to, to know the ball tendency and how far a shot like a knockdown is going to go for me.

At Pebble [Beach, the Open site in June], I played the AT&T Championship and a lot of other rounds. Back when we played Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco three times a year, we would driven down there for an off day.

My dream scenario came true when we drove down after a game, played Cypress Point and Spyglass in the same day, then Pebble the next morning, then drove to the game that night. Those 54 holes were one of my top off days ever, and I played some of my best golf on those three courses.

Pebble gets so much play it gets beat up a bit. When you get the wind, the rough tightened in, small greens -- Pebble is a brutal test of golf. A little 120-yard par-3 suddenly plays 200 yards. It’s so fun to go down that stretch of the last three or four holes. That 18th is pretty much all risk-reward.

I’ve had moments where I thought I could put an incredible number together. But my best score has been 70 or 71, from the tips.

In golf, some shots expose you for who you are. I always liked to know my tendencies in baseball, to avoid my bad ones while focusing on the good ones. Some tendencies in golf cause me to miss on one side of the course. That’s the kind of stuff I am working on try to get the same level of confidence I have in baseball.

What I’ve learned from baseball that I take into golf is you can’t focus on the negative. If you say, “Don’t hang the slider,” or “Don’t hit it left,” your mind does not process the negative. It only hears, “Hang the slider,” and “Hit it left.”

This summer, I’m looking at entering some state tournaments, but I don’t have a lot of gaps in my TV schedule. I will play in the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship at Lake Tahoe in July, and I'm looking forward to really putting all my energy into that.

I’ve always said I wanted to be my game together for the Senior [Champions] Tour, in a little under seven years. If I can stay together physically, I will enjoy testing that theory.

-- As told to Michelle Hiskey for the AJC