Is every town overrun with golfers the way Ukiah is?
Is there any other group that seems to be everywhere all at once the way local golfers are?
If there isn’t a weekend golf tournament starting tomorrow it means there will be two weekend tournaments starting Friday. A weekend of golf brings them rolling in from as far away as Lake County. Heaven help us.
And if they aren’t out destroying their golf lawn you’ll find them having a banquet where they hand each other trophies.
And all this for what? To play the grand game of golf? I “played” golf one time and it cured me of wanting to go back unless the rules changed enough that there’d be a more interesting day of it. As it is, the sport of golf is the slowest, dullest stretch you can spend this side of watching daytime soap operas or doing six months in the county jail.
Sorry. I mistakenly referred to golf as a “sport” in the above paragraph but that overstates the nature of the practice. The word sport implies competition, as in badminton or checkers.
A sport involves two or more performers, each trying to score points while preventing opponents from doing the same. But the lazy frolic of golf has no intrinsic competition.
Golf can be played alone. This means golf is no more a sport than jogging. Or knitting or mowing the lawn. Golf is, at best, an activity dressed in silly clothes with glammed-up go-karts in fancy paint jobs and a driver who’s been drinking.
The fact you can drink while playing golf is one of the few things that recommend it. Drinking is what allows someone to endure six hours in the hot sun chasing someone else’s golf ball because his own ball went off and hid in the weeds.
And this, by the way, is yet another factor suggesting golf is something less than a sport. Think of NFL players passing around a quart of Seagram’s in the huddle. Imagine Mike Trout standing in centerfield, reaching in his back pocket for a thermos bottle filled with a nicely chilled Old Milwaukee beer.
But golf? Drinking might as well be written into the rule book, mandatory on some courses, optional on others but surely never forbidden. And after wasting the afternoon driving wedges, nailing putts and swearing at their nine irons golfers leave the course along with all the other fellow future AA members. And then what do they do? Why they drink!
And if today’s game is part of the ubiquitous tournaments Ukiah hosts all summer long, what do golfers do when it gets dark? They haul off to some fancy restaurant and have a big dinner honoring each other for their fine work at the task of golf earlier that day.
And drink some more.
And then tell each other lies about how swell a time they’d had in some sand trap, or how many birdies and free throws they accomplished. Because if there’s something every golfer does better than play golf, it’s tell lies about how great a golfer he is.
In fact there’s no known group more accomplished at lying than golfers, unless it’s politicians or car salesmen. How else but by lying to their wives about the price of golf carts and golf clubs could they manage to spend so much money on so frivolous an activity?
Not that it’s any of my business of course. What a golfer spends on his hobby is strictly between him and his priest or therapist or his lying buddies back at the clubhouse.
If the people in charge of the activity known as golf would sober up for a few days and make some small updates to the rules and regulations I might be persuaded to get back on the links or green or fairway. Whatever.
Put some speed and fun into the dreary old game. Allow an alternative style of hybrid golf that incorporates polo into the rules. Just think: Carts racing back and forth whacking at the green golf balls of their own and orange balls of the opposition. Teams would wear either green or orange uniforms and drive carts painted the same. It would make great television, and the more the players were encouraged to drink the wilder the action.
The carts themselves would have highly modified turbo engines but very little in safety equipment, starting with no helmets or seatbelts. Empty beer cans would litter the course, and hitting one while careening toward the next hole would improve the team score.
Light duty weapons would be permitted. Cheating would of course be part of the game.
After all, it’s golf.
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