Golf Is For Beginners

My name is Alvin Dartmoor, and I am a golfer. I stepped out on the golf course for the first time when I was 9 years old. Daddy and Grandpa took turns driving the golf cart and had me riding on the back with the golf clubs. I wrapped the strap holding the golf bags around my wrist and hung on for dear life! Especially after Grandpa got somewhat irritated with his play and started pulling out the flask from the flap in his golf bag that faced toward the front of the golf cart. This was usually around hole number 3 or 4... 10 if we started on the back nine (it was a tough par 4)!

I used to wonder why Grandpa would get so angry when he hit the ball so hard. Until I saw the birds all swarm out of the woods in a terrified aerial stampede, then I realized that he had just hooked it into the woods! I don't know if it was the couple of snorts from the flask or the curse of the golf gods, but my Grandpa almost always went into the woods after the ball.

I find myself doing that, nowadays, too, like when the Lord hardened the Pharoah's heart about the Isrealites to Moses. He knew he should just let them all go, after all, the water was turned to blood, the frogs were swarming, the crops were decimated, he had just lost all the first born of Egypt... what could possibly get worse?

I found out that is something you never ask yourself on the course. So when Grandpa would go into the woods he would say, "I can get to the green easy from the woods, no sense taking those 2 penalty strokes when I can save a little time by cutting through the woods! How can it possibly get worse?"

I think that was the time that the pelican became amorously attached to Grandpa. But that is a story for another day. Let's just say that it took Grandpa something like 15 strokes to get to the green, but I think he counted 4. But he took a shot from the flask after each stroke... which meant he had to get out the reserve flask when we hit the clubhouse after the ninth hole.

I remember that afternoon (we started at 9:15 am that day) when we finally reached the 17th green! It was a little par 3 with a lake and a stream surrounding the green. The course's mascot, Grady, the 7 foot alligator, had already eaten the pelican that had been harrassing us for the last 12 holes, and Daddy was rather certain that he was not going to be very hungry after that meal! I wasn't so sure, as that pelican had been scrawny, and that gator had been known to eat wild pigs before (although I don't remember anyone ever confessing to actually witnessing that while sober) and it had been a good hour since the pelican had been snapped out of the air at the fifteenth hole.

Now that had been quite a sight! My dad was trying to fend the pelican off of Grandpa with the pole from the 15th green while Grandpa was lining up his putt. He had nerves of steel, bending down on one knee with his putter in the air in front of his good eye, his mouth muttering either an incantation from the voodoo preistess he had been hanging out with over the last few month or the calculations for the velocity and acceleration necessary for going down the length of the green and climbing up the other, while Daddy cursed out loud at the pelican as it swooped down toward Grandpa's bald head and the flag pole knocked it right on the beak...

The sound it made was a lot like the sound you hear when the dog runs full bore to the end of his chain before he realizes that he can't go any further as his neck snaps him back while his body keeps going for another 2 or 3 seconds and the air rushes out of his lungs... except you would have to add the sound of a ping pong ball getting hit by an aluminum baseball bat... followed by a splashing snap of the gator's jaws on the fly ball into the stream!

I wish they would have made Flip cameras back then, because I would have had some real prize winners that day! After all, the folks at the clubhouse didn't believe anything we told them (I was sober, mind you, because I was still 9, although we had been on the course long enough that day to make me believe I had aged a decade or so) even after I brought them the lone claw from the pelican that had fallen on the other bank of the stream. I still hang that pelican's foot from my golf bag to this day, to remind me that it can always get worse!

Still, Grandpa made that putt, had to be a 19 footer, which made me believe that he had been incanting voodoo since there was no way he had enough bodily control to knock that ball in after two flasks of whatever hooch he had brought with him to the course. Too bad it had taken him 12 strokes to get on the green to begin with.

Even with these fond memories, I still wanted to play golf again. In fact, I started asking my dad if I could mow the lawn, so I could buy my own golf clubs, and pay my own way onto the golf course (instead of hiding in the trunk of the car until they came to get the golf bags with the cart). And on my tenth birthday, I got my own set of clubs, and a potato-sack bag to hold them. Grandma (the one not married to Grandpa who took me golfing, although I had seen them kissing before) had sewed the potato-sack into a very charming little golf bag... complete with a long handle to go over my shoulder and a bunch of pockets to hide my own flasks of Mountain Dew (I really did take cans of Mountain Dew and dump them into flasks just like Grandpa's - I wanted to have the real effect of golfing).

Remind me to tell you about the time I first played with my new clubs and bag. It was a blast, at least that's what everyone tells me. I remember crying a lot, wrenching my new golf bag out of Grady's teeth and calling one cranky old golfer some names that made my Grandpa burst out laughing before my dad smacked me in the back of the head.

Golfing has continued to be my life's passion. I will not go 7 days without playing 18 holes. Heck, lately I don't even go 24 hours without playing 18... but I play them much faster than Dad and Grandpa. I just know Grandpa is watching me when I am setting up my putt, and he is muttering that Voodoo or differential equation to help me make them in three or less tries! Thanks, Grandpa!