For Links, I’ll Stick With Sausage
One of the hazards of visiting with my family (as I did last weekend) in temperate climes is that I will be asked to play golf. And this weekend was no exception. We went to a par-3 course to play 9 holes of fairly low-key golf. This favored me, as my tee shots are pretty anemic, while my brothers can hit some stuff that NASA’s telemetry might not be able to follow. I should, absent a backdrop of macho fraternal mindfuck, be hitting from the white (women’s) tees. You see, golf is something I have done ONLY when visiting parents or brothers. Living as geographically disparate as we do, this means I only participate in this patrician pastime once or twice a year.
Still, there’s an undeniable allure to the game. Unless you play on some type “A” course that requires you to use carts and has course monitors urging you to play faster, it’s a decent afternoon’s walking exercise. Especially if you hit like I usually do, and it becomes something of a wilderness experience. And it’s a great way to change the paradigm of a family gathering from an indoor, “when’s the next meal” kind of thing.
The downside for me is that I always put together 2 or 3 decent shot combinations, and I find myself enticed to engage the game a little, try to go home and improve and maybe be competitive. But that way madness lies. There are something like 15 clubs in a fully stocked bag, and probably 5 ways to hit with each club, and “improving” while faced with this array of ways to screw up would, for me, result in some sort of breakdown like Mickey had in Disney’s cartoon version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Nah, I’ll stay with being the ingenue, and take compliments for the occasional inexplicably adroit hit, and carry TechNu to ward off the effects of the inevitable poison oak encounters when my drives transport me to the less manicured thickets and wetlands adjacent to, and sometimes well removed from, our nation’s golf courses.
