Golf

You thought this post was going to be about the Kings getting Shareef Abdur-Rahim, didn't you? Don't worry, we'll get to that in the near future. (I like that name. It isn't quite as melodious as Hakeem Olajuwon, Muhammad Ali or Zinedine Zindane, but it's pretty cool.) Today's post, however, is about golf.

I freakin' love to play golf.

I've been playing golf a long time, since I was nine, when my grandfather (called him Papa) started taking me out not long after he recovered from having broken his hip. It was like February or March of 1980 and, at the time, I thought the coolest part about it -- aside from Papa buying me Munch peanut brittle bars and Cokes while telling me that he didn't know if I was "worth a dollar for my hide and tallow" -- was how you could slide the golf clubs around in the dew like the U.S. Olympic hockey players slid their sticks (if you have a problem with the phraseology, give me something else) around while winning the gold medal that year.

There were a lot of good things and maybe two semi-bad things wrapped up in that. First, playing golf with Papa was an awfully good thing and I played an awful lot of golf with him. Second, I learned a lot about being a civilized human being from him while playing golf -- like not being so worked up about your own game that you screw it up for the people you're playing with, remembering that's it's a game that supposed to be fun, always remembering to shake hands after the round, that kind of stuff. Third, picking up golf early is a gift for your future life. It's what people do in business and it's a good thing to be halfway competent at it. Now about the couple of bad things. First, peanut brittle and Coke probably didn't help my teeth much, although I won't blame my two root canals solely on that. Second, Papa liked to play golf way early in the morning, so there were times when I was freakin' freezing. I remember one time when we started playing at about 7 am one December morning when, by about the 14th hole, I was biting my hands to get some feeling in them. Oh well, after they invented orange golf balls, you could use those in the winter and still find them when the course was frosted over. You haven't lived until you've played golf on a frosted course in southern San Joaquin Valley tule fog. Good times, good times.

Playing golf contributed to me being more than little geeky in those oh-so-enjoyable pre-teen and teenage years. The Muse still gives me a bad time about having a Golf Digest subscription when I was 12, although, hey, now that Snoop Dogg is doing commercials where he plays golf with Lee Iacocca, I prefer to think that I was ahead of my time.

I played on the high school team and, while still kind of geeky, there was a little bit of cool in that. One of my best memories of high school is still the time during my freshman year when I played a match for the last spot on the traveling squad (the way our league played, eight guys from each school played in the matches). One of the other players was a big basketball star who was a junior. He hit these banana slices so he would aim about 50 yards left of the fairway and slice the ball into the middle. It was only a nine-hole match and I had built up like a four-shot lead after six holes. I figured I had it in the bag. On no. 7, however, I screwed up and made a double-bogey 5 and he buried like a 30-foot putt for a 2. OK, one-shot lead, I can hold that, except I made a 5 and he made a 4 on no. 8. There was also a third player -- we were playing for his spot on the traveling squad; when he got a driver's license, he got an old 240Z that could get up to 100 mph or so in the mile or so from the high school to the golf course, or so I heard -- and he tied me on no. 8 too. So all three of us go into the last hole tied. It's a par 5 and I hit two good 3-woods to leave an easy wedge pitch to the green. The other guys did something bad, I don't remember what, so they're not going to make a par. I, however, kind of chunk my wedge and get it just barely on the edge of the green, about 25 feet from the hole. If I can get down in two, I win. I putt from the edge of the green and leave the ball about 4 feet from the hole. OK, if I make this putt, I win. If I don't, we all tie and go play some more. Man, that was a long 4 feet, but the putt went in. I almost floated home, puffy hair and all. Actually, my mom picked me because I couldn't drive, but still.

Once I went to college, I didn't play golf much for quite a while. I think I played maybe twice in college. I would play once in while in law school, usually just to get ready for the law school tournament, which involved a decent amount of beer and a lot of Latin phrases that non-attorneys don't use. (Did hit one of my better shots ever in one of those tournaments, a punch shot with a 3-iron under a tree that went about 150 yards and around a sand trap to about 10 feet. Our team missed the birdie putt, though, damn.) The summer between my second and third years of law school, I clerked at Napa firm that had a few golf nuts, including one guy who is really good and is the son of MacDonald Carey from Days of Our Lives. When they found out I played golf, they took me out to the Napa Country Club a few times and even Silverado once. That rocked. (Napa Country Club is a gorgeous course. There's one par-3 -- no. 4 or 6, I think -- plays over a little creek and is one of the prettiest holes that I have ever personally played.)

Played some more when we were in San Luis Obispo, but I discovered a relatively unfortunate fact: playing golf is pretty expensive. With The Mermaid's arrival, my golfing was somewhat limited. I did have one of my two eagles during that period, though: a wedge from about 100 yards that went in the hole on a short par-4 at the Avila Beach course. (That is my favorite course that I have played. Go play it. They built one hole that goes through a hill.)

In the last couple of years, The Muse has been telling me to go play golf more. This often comes up as the Kings season finishes -- badly, so far, because it's an unfortunate fact of being a sports fan that anything other than a ring really isn't a good ending. This year, I took her up on it and I try to play 9 holes every weekend. This has been great, except that it has accentuated the fact that I can't hardly keep my driver on the course. It does this just fantastic thing where the ball starts out going about 30 degrees right of where I'm aiming and then starts fading even further right. Then shots with more of my other clubs want to turn left. The thing with the driver is kind of counterinituitive (usually shots that starts out going right turn back toward the middle, if they turn -- the physics of golf is for another post). I was going to go get fitted for a new driver, but then I turned my ankle playing softball (yet another post) and haven't been able to go yet.

So all of this has been a really long-winded introduction to what happened yesterday. I am very fortunate that one of my partners is a member at a country club and invites me to play with him once in a while. He invited me to play yesterday. I decided that I would just leave the driver in the bag and hit 3-woods off the tee to try to keep the ball on the course. So that's what I tried to do. And, on the front nine, I ended up playing golf better than I have since high school. After 3 holes, I was 1-under par. Things got a little sloppy after that and I ended up looking at about an 8-foot putt on no. 9 where, if I made it, I would have a 39 for the front nine. I haven't played 9 holes in the 30's since high school (like the two golf practices I played my senior year before I quit the team, having decided that I had more important things to do -- there's 3 months of free golf every day that I'm never going to get back). I missed the putt. I planned for maybe half-an-inch too little break and the putt hit the bottom side of the cup and spun out. So I shot a 40. The back nine got real sloppy and I started in with my frequent golf role of The Webbed Toe, Forest Explorer.

But, my god, a 40 that could easily have been a 37 or 38. (If you hadn't guessed yet, golf is a somewhat addictive experience that affect users' perceptions of reality.) That's enough to keep me going for years. It puts my two long-term golf goals -- breaking 80 over 18 and playing well enough to play Pebble Beach without embarrassing myself -- somewhere in sight. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel like, boy, if I just practiced a little more, maybe I could be decent at this. Golf, it's a great game. Now, if that putt had just gone in, that would have rocked. I would have had to keep the scorecard. But it didn't. Damn game.