The Golf

I had heard of this game before. The way I heard it, it was the sport of middle-aged tools with bad rugs and ugly shoes. Since I am exactly one of those, I decided to take up the Golf as a leisure activity.

I promptly contacted the middle aged Boys from Engineering with bad rugs and ugly shoes and announced The Plan:

Our first adventure in the Golf ended with an ambulance ride and a broken leg.

I kid you not.

Well sir, winter came and winter went and all our wounds, osteopathic and psychic, were healed. Summer returned and with it the promise of The Golf.

Mark Twain famously called The Golf a "good walk spoiled". The Golf responded to this harsh but truthful criticism with the invention of the golfing-car. A golfing-car is a little car you can follow your ball around in.

No more walking.

Mark Twain is probably smiling down from heaven right now.

So the Boys from Engineering and I piled our selves and our golfing-sticks into a very small car, drove to a lovely golfing-course and inquired about a tee time. Then we piled our golfing-sticks and our selves into an even smaller car and drove out to the Blue Nine.

The Tee is where you first whack the ball. It's also the thing upon which you set the ball while first whacking it. There's a lot of pomp and ceremony at the Tee (where you first etc), and a lot of pomp and ceremony at the Tee (upon which you etc).

Between the first Tee and the first Cup (the hole into which you herd the golfing-ball) on the Blue Nine is a large body of water. Apparently, you're supposed to whack the ball over the lake.

I know for a fact that golfing-balls don't float. This data was gathered empirically.

We applied our considerable engineering skill to the problem and derived an efficient solution; we got in our little car and drove it to the other side of the lake.

Of the three golfing-parties queued up behind us, I think it was the first who drove their cart up around the lake to ask us if we could please try to hurry up. I'm not exactly sure what the other two parties were doing at this point, but I have my suspicions.

We asked them if they would just prefer to play through.

At this point in the narrative I should probably explain what a Mulligan is. What a Mulligan is is this: if your tee-shot goes off into the woods or the lake, you may invoke the name of Mr. Mulligan and a new ball magically appears on the tee.

It was less than PC of us to assume that anyone named Mulligan would come from a very large family indeed, and that may be the reason the Starter finally came rolling down in his extra-special little car to talk to us as we wandered leisurely through the woods, looking for any of the half dozen balls we had hit in this direction.

The talk we had with the Starter was brief and heated. I'll skip over most of it. The gist of it boiled down to this: There was a different course, called the Executive Course, which might fit our golfing skills more appropriately.

Let's move on to what has come to be known as The Ride of Shame, shall we?

The Starter's extra special golfing-car had a red flashing light on the top. It had two orange triangular flags sticking out of the sides, and there was a clipboard on the passenger seat. It rolled slowly around the lake towards the Tee of the First Hole of the Blue Nine.

We followed behind, anxious to discover the mysteries of the Executive Course. It sounded so much more dignified than the Blue Nine. A professional golfing guy had selected us to the August Body of Golfing Executives.

As we began to pass the line of golfing-cars that had queued up behind us, we Executives smiled and nodded condescendingly to the Blue Niners. They mostly glared back in impatience.

I attributed this to class envy.

The driver of one golfing-car, perhaps fourth or fifth in line, would not make eye contact. He looked away sheepishly, with a look that I instantly recognized as Liberal Guilt. At that moment I realized:

We were riding the short bus to the special people's golfing-course!

Humiliation is always so much more intense when it follows hubris. We had gone from Executive Golfers with a Police Escort to Idiots being Hauled Away Before They Hurt Somebody in the space of three minutes. We had not even made it to the first green of the Blue Nine!

We were fools! We were boobs! We were clowns in a tiny little car!

Well, at least we had the shoes for it.

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