Friday, February 5, 2010

6:59 AM - 2 comments

Ever the Sportsman

I like to play golf. Or play AT golf, actually. I’m not any good, but I enjoy it. It’s very relaxing to me to hit the little white ball, scream at it as it leaves the tee, and then to hunt for my club after I throw it. Yep… I like golf.

I got to thinking about it recently, too. If you actually stop and compare… I get WAY more golf than some great player like Tiger. I know… he’s had some bad press lately, but he’s still a great player. But swing for swing, I get more bang for my buck. If he and I played a round together, he’d be done after only about 70 swings. Me? I’d just be getting warmed up at 70. Shoot… at 70 swings, I’d probably be on about the third hole.

And what about how they hit. How tough is it to hit your ball out of the fairway? Bunch of sissies. I get my monies worth and see the ENTIRE course. Trees… sand… water… give me a hazard and I’ll find it. The fairway just doesn’t challenge me.

While I was stationed in Germany, I good friend and I played golf together a good bit. He gave me pointers now and then that helped me some, too. He soon met some locals who were in the process of starting a golf course. They initially started out with a driving range with the intentions of building a course later.

My friend, ever the entrepreneur, started building custom clubs for the German folks coming out to the driving range. After a while he made me a complete set. Nice clubs. REALLY nice clubs. But I just couldn’t hit them. I would tee off and the ball would slice one way. The next time, it hooked the other way. This was where I learned to play the ENTIRE course.

I kept those clubs for over ten years. I as determined to learn to hit them. But they never changed. Hook… slice… never straight. So after several years of trying, I thought about it and wondered if he, by mistake, had weighted the clubs wrong. Maybe it wasn’t ALL me. Maybe the clubs were off just a bit… enough to cause the ball to hook or slice.

So on a whim one day, I bought a new set of clubs. Another NICE set. I was ready. It has to be the weights in those custom clubs. They had to be off just a bit. So myself and a few friends got together one day at the base. An absolutely great day for golf. Temp was in the mid 70s. Low humidity. Beautiful blue sky. You couldn’t have asked for a better day.

So we got to the course and were getting ready to head out. And I pulled out this awesome set of clubs. They all had to look at them… hold one… take a swing. They were impressed. So we made it to the first tee. Got the ball teed up… stepped back to look at the line of where I wanted it to go. I positioned myself… swung that club… and hit that ball. I then realized… it hadn’t been the clubs after all. It WAS me. So off I went towards the trees to look for my ball.

Just like always.

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