Boomers . . . and How They Got That Way
Epistle 30 – The Masters
It’s Masters golf tournament time and as I marvel at the splendor of Augusta National from the athletic position of my Lay-Z-Boy, I can’t help but compare the similarities of this grand event with my own early golf career. It all began inauspiciously when I was 15 and my brother dragged me along for a round of golf with a couple of his cronies on a hot Saturday afternoon. They claimed that I was essential to complete their foursome, but their hidden agenda was to torture me beyond human endurance. For thirteen holes I thrashed through the weeds of a course lovingly known by the locals as Goat Hill, spraying an assortment of golf balls in all directions and cutting nasty smiley faces in them out of spite. (That was back when golf balls could actually be cut, revealing a mass of rubber bands wrapped around a tiny rubber ball.) The clubs loaned to me had names like Cleek, Mashie and Spoon, sounding more apt for lunch than golf and serving neither.
My brother and his sick friends kept silent about my play as long as I kept up. If I was too wayward, they politely suggested I take a 10 for the hole and join them on the next tee, assuming I could find it from whatever wasteland I was lost in. Undaunted, I trudged on through the heat, knowing that my first round of golf had to end sometime. And then the unimaginable happened. Deep within the abyss of the sports world, the golf gods smiled upon me. On the 14th tee I hit a drive that actually landed in the fairway! Can you imagine that? The fairway, for God’s sake. Confidently, I strode up to my ball, basking in the glow of athletic achievement, and the envy of my fellow competitors. As though I actually knew what I was doing, I survey the scene, pulled out my Brassie, waggled it a few times for effect, and then gracefully launched the ball toward . . . ohmygod . . .the green! Yes, children, as impossible as it seems, it went toward the green. Not on it, but at it, and close enough to be deemed a success.
My chip onto the green was less than sterling, a scruffy looking shot that stubbornly came to a halt after about 6 feet of unattractive squirming, leaving me 10 more feet to the hole. Taking the advice of my companions, I marked my ball, spit on it and cleaned it on my pants, and then walked purposefully around the hole, pretending to notice every nuance in the green. Then, borrowing another tip from the greats, I closed one eye and held the putter in the air between my forefinger and my thumb, thereby allowing gravity to show me which way the putt would break. (Don’t ask me why.) Finally, without a clue, I hitched up my trousers like Arnold Palmer and confidently topped the ball with my putter in the general direction of the hole. For an eternity the ball rolled and hopped, turning this way and that, until finally . . . finally . . . it went in! I made par! I had reached the zenith of the golf world in only fourteen holes.
Preferring to go out on top rather than hang on long after my skills had diminished, I dropped my putter right there by the fourteenth green and marched off the course, the hysterical gallery parting like the Red Sea. An hour later, back in the clubhouse, my brother and his sweaty pals ordered a frosty pitcher of beer. Noticing my Coke was long gone, they generously insisted that we crown my laurels by filling my glass with beer, at which time the dragon-lady of the 19th Hole Grill swooped in, demanding to see my ID. My fellow golfers claimed they didn’t even know me and I had brazenly taken their beer without their permission, at which point I was marched out to the parking lot by the earlobe.
Perhaps my early golf venue was not the magnificence of Augusta National, but I can still say I went out on top . . . until I took up the cursed sport again 15 years later.
We Will Win
Filed under: Boomers . . . and How They Got That Way
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