Life of Wry

Here is Desmond.  He’s in a bad way, but managed to get out of trouble here and did pretty damn well on the front nine.  I bailed out at the turn on account of stiffness, so wasn’t around to hear if he was able to duplicate his front-nine 44.  That’d make for a very nice score.

I, on the other hand, shot something like a 55 on the front nine, with four triple bogeys, two doubles and three plain old boges.  I like it when a triple is the worst I do on the day.. nothing terrible, no mulligans, no lost balls.  And I did most of it with a 9-iron. Yes, a nine.  Right off the tee.  On the last couple holes, as I got braver, I used a 7-iron.  For me, after not playing for five thousand years, I’m happy with that, it was totally my speed.. I was more concerned with hitting the ball cleanly, which I actually managed a few times.

I did play last January, also with Desmond, and did worse, so I’m trending in the right direction, at least.

Anyway, just nice to be out there.

Thing is, it was very crowded, and, how can I put this kindly …. I didn’t think there were that many old guys in the entire city of Davis.  Seems every last one of them was at Muni this morning, cruising around in carts, backed up at each hole.  Many, many old guys.  I felt like this youngster or something, rather out of place.  The two guys we were paired with included a 90-year-old.  I’m not kidding.  And he was really good, too.  Here he is: Wayne, 90, on left, and his friend from Indiana, David, a few decades younger:

Wayne has macular degeneration (which I wrote about last month, here) and is blind in one eye.  Most of the time, his buddy had to tell him where the ball went.  Then he’d have to tell him where to aim, since he couldn’t see the pin, either.

He still outscored me.

I’m a little beat (no, extremely beat, struggling mightily to stay awake here) and expect to be relatively immobile tomorrow, but it was worth it.  And it was lovely out there. I’ve always liked the course, off Road 29, in the middle of farmland.  Dodged a lot of wildlife, too. Look at the size of this bunny rabbit:

May be the biggest rabbit I’ve ever seen.  Honestly, looked like a small deer.  No exaggeration.

If I keep this golf thing up, I may have to update my equipment.  For starters, I played in running shoes.  I also used hand-me-down clubs that were generously passed along to me when my beloved clubs were stolen in 1994 (definitely remember that date, since the thieves also got my car, which is where I stored my clubs).  My new, old, clubs seem vintage 1950s–no high tech materials, just some kind of heavy, silver-colored metal–with very slippery old leather grips.  Then there’s my golf bag– anti-ergonomically designed, unwieldy, filthy, stained and torn.  I’m kind of an embarrassment out there.  Hard for a gear snob.

Anyway.  Golf today, in spite of high scores and funky equipment, was a thrill.

* you non-golfers know that’s golf spelled backwards, right?