Friday, December 28, 2018
I'd Rather Be Practicing My Little Swing
Summer is a wonderful
occasion but it is not without its downsides. One of the negatives from my
personal perspective is that warm weather means golfers will be out swinging at
tiny white balls and chasing them across acres of valuable land.
In my neighborhood, I will start
seeing these golfers loading their bags into the trunks of their cars at 6
a.m., hands trembling from half-dozen cups of coffee, eyes red from waking at
such an early hour.
Off they will go for another
relaxing day on the golf course, only to return pale and shaken, swigging from
bottles of Mylanta, after their scores ballooned out of control and their blood
pressure with it.
I realize this commentary is
likely to provoke a rash of vicious letters from golfers who will grab a stubby
No. 2 pencil from their golf bags and scrawl, "What do you know about
golf? You probably have never even played the game!" That is not, however,
true. I distinctly remember the first time I played golf. I took a 23 on the
first hole.
See, there was this creek in
the middle of the fairway, which struck me as kind of an odd place for a body
of water. Anyway, I kept plunking ball after ball into this creek. Finally, I
huddled with the other members of my college-aged foursome.
"Men," I said.
"Let me be brutally honest here. There are only 10 or 12 hours of daylight
left, at which point I'll probably still be out her trying to clear this creek.
So, how about letting me throw the ball the rest of the way?"
Everyone agreed that would be
the way to go since there was a crowd of golfers directly behind us whining
about not being able to tee off. Anyway, things did improve a great deal over
the next 17 holes. I finished with, I don't know, a 219 or something. So, don't
tell me about suffering.
The sad thing about golfers
is that they are not content to simply play their game and be done. Instead,
they insist on recounting, in detail, every single moment of their round. I
don't know if you've ever sat and listened to a golfer drone on about his
approach to a dogleg left, but it is an unsettling experience.
I have been at parties and
actually dozed off during heated discussions about the Maxifly DT ball, only to
be awakened with one elbow in the punch blow.
There is one more thing that
captivates me about golf: the imaginary little swing golfers like to take. A
friend of mind used to demonstrate his golf swing in all types of settings.
You'd be in the middle of a conversation with him when, out of the blue, he'd
take this imaginary golf swing.
To my knowledge, only golfers
display this sort of bizarre behavior. If you are talking to a softball player,
he will not suddenly take an imaginary throw from the catcher and make a
sweeping tag of second base. A tennis player won't suddenly pause in
mid-conversation and toss an imaginary ball in the air and pretend to serve.
But golfers take imaginary
swings at the ball all of the time. I'll tell you, instead of worrying about
their grip and back swing, they need to worry about that little swing.
