I love sports. And, considering there isn’t an athletic gene in my entire family, I manage to do pretty well at anything I decide to try – except golf.
Looking back, I’m not really sure why I took up golf in the first place. It’s the one sport that, the harder I tried, the worse I got. I was in high school at the time and started hanging around a tough bunch of thugs. Well, not really thugs as you know them. We weren’t covered with tattoos, didn’t wear smelly leather jackets, take drugs or hang around street corners fleecing old ladies of their social security checks. None of us had motorcycles, so there wasn’t any point in planning a bank robbery with a high speed getaway. But we did terrorize golfers at our local pitch and putt.
One of the first things that drew me to golf was all of the cool stuff you needed in order to play the game. There were the clubs, the golf club bags with all of the zippers and handles, the spiked shoes, tees, balls (that came in a nice cellophane-wrapped box), gloves, clothes and hats. Then, there were all of the accessories: rangefinders, golf ball retrievers, knitted golf club head covers, golf towels, umbrellas, watches, carts, stands and training accessories. I also liked golf because you could drink beer and smoke while playing the game – pretty tough to do with other sports like pole vaulting or running steeplechase. My parents were very supportive of my getting involved with golf. They thought it was great that I hung around the clubhouse and driving range everyday after school – at least until they discovered what I was really up to.
Tom, Ted and I were the Three Musketeers of golf. We started out by sharing one set of women’s clubs between the three of us and headed for the driving range. For those of you who have never played golf, a driving range is a place where you stand side by side, next to your fellow golfers, humiliating yourself while trying to look cool. For a few bucks, you can buy a small basket of “range balls.” These are balls that someone paid $50 for yesterday and have since been rescued from the bottom of a scummy pond, sand trap or extricated from a chain link fence. They’re easily identifiable by their moss-green color, nicks and gouges from being run over by the lawn mowers.
Golf is all about looking cool and there are a lot of ways to accomplish this. First, cool golfers never run anywhere – they lumber. If someone threw burning napalm on them, a serious golfer would still lumber to the waiting ambulance. Staying up on the latest fashions is another great way to look cool. Because we hadn’t as yet landed our first professional sponsor, we started out wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes and T-shirts, but quickly liberated our first golf knickers, plaid vests and beanies from the men’s locker room. After all, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can at least look like you do.
So, we lumbered out to the driving range in our new outfits, still missing golf spikes. Golf spikes are shoes with sharp nails protruding from the bottoms, so you want to make sure you don’t wear them onto your mother’s linoleum kitchen floor. The idea behind the spikes is to help you maintain traction on the grass during your swing. In my case, I could have worn hip waders – nothing would have made much difference. But, while you’re on the driving range, golf spikes make you look like you know what you’re doing until the first time you trip over your own feet. Since golf spikes are essentially really expensive shoes, our first pair came out of the lost and found. I found empty bag of Scott’s Turf Builder and stuffed it into the toes until I could afford a pair that fit right.
To look cool on the driving range, I discovered how to bend over at the waist, balancing over my right leg, with my hand on the end of the golf club as I “teed up” my ball. That’s golf talk for balancing a small round object on the top of an even tinier, little wooden stick. To make it a little more exciting, we skipped the tees and took turns lying down, balancing the ball on our pursed lips. The guy with the best aim got to drive the rest of us to the Emergency Room.
One of the first things we learned about actually playing the game is the importance of etiquette. Not only are there hundreds of rules that pertain to course play, there are dozens of unclassified faux pas both on and off the course. This is where we began to run afoul with the golf course marshals. For us, all of those rules made the game stuffy and were meant to be broken. Take the first tee, for example.
During traditional play, the player teeing up for their shot is extended absolute silence until they’ve completed their stroke. We decided it would be more challenging and a lot more fun if we were allowed to jump up and down, wave our arms and yell, trying to break each other’s concentration. Boom boxes, whoopee cushions, compressed air horns and igniting M-80s were all perfectly legal. Anything went as long as you didn’t physically contact the player teeing off – yet.
Once we all successfully teed off, we began the “full contact” aspect of the game. While Tom was sauntering down the fairway trying to find his ball, Ted ran up from behind and cross-body blocked him behind his knees, sending his clubs across the fairway. While Ted’s attention was tied up on Tom, I hurried over to his ball and ground it three inches into the turf like an old cigarette butt. After relocating his knee, Tom brushed himself off and was able to continue limping along by tying his golf sweater around his knee, as a makeshift brace. But, Ted had problems locating his ball. After an hour had passed, he ceded and we let him go with a 50 stroke penalty.
While we were sorting things out, a thick layer of fog rolled onto the second fairway, making the green impossible to see. So, after pulling the short straw, Tom “volunteered” to stand out in the middle of the fairway with a joint and a beer – completely engulfed in fog. Since we couldn’t begin to estimate where the green lie, we told him to keep singing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” so we’d know in which direction to hit. We coined this “Fog Golf,” and have only run into two other people dumb enough to play it.
The official golf rule book states, “Play the ball as it lies, play the course as you find it, and if you cannot do either, do what is fair.” We instituted a “no maximum number of strokes” rule that usually led to some pretty high scoring games. On one occasion, Ted drove the ball over a chain link fence, onto the neighbor’s roof. By the time he returned his ball into play, he was already up 45 strokes – and it was only the third hole.
It had rained on the course the night before, so the fairways were lined with 3-foot deep puddles that added to the challenge of the sand traps. I managed to lob my ball into the center of one of these puddles and had to take off my shoes, socks and pants before wading into the water. If you’ve ever tried to hit a golf ball that is resting at the bottom of a three foot puddle, you’re in for a treat. My first 14 or 15 strokes looked like Moses parting the Red Sea – 6 foot walls of water arched toward the sky, while my ball lay contently on the bottom of the ditch. After 30 minutes, I had driven so much water out of the trench that I was finally able to advance my ball several inches toward the green.
Over the next few months, we added running and tackling our opponents in between holes as a way to add more sport to the game. As soon as the last of the party teed off, we were off and running. Tackling, body blocking, tripping and pushing your opponents were all legal play. At the end of the round, we’d tally up not only the number of strokes, but also deduct points for the shortest time it took to get from the first tee to the final putt.
By the time we got back to the clubhouse, it was well after dark, so luckily none of the people on the driving range saw the blood, Tom’s bandaged leg or my sopping wet clothes. After we settled up at with clubhouse for the damage to the trees and broken windows, we headed for home, noticing that there were three police cars in the parking lot. Apparently, someone had stolen some expensive golf outfits from the men’s locker room.
