Golf among the Idle

I think playing more golf when one quits working and getting better is a common fantasy.  More play can only improve your game right?  I know that was my fantasy.  I kept a golf ball and tees on my desk and thought of smacking it long and hard, especially during bad phone calls.  You know; complaints, descriptions of risky situations, predictions of calamity, calls about budget cuts, bureaucratic threat both veiled and actual, lost grants, and the like.  I would listen to the speaker phone and respond appropriately, alone in my office, saying what I needed to say while staring at the golf ball, imagining it disappearing down the middle of the fairway.  More golf, less stress, was my goal.

It didn’t happen.  After I retired, aside from golf outings to raise money, I found few chances to play.  I played in a weekly league for a short while until it felt like an obligation and I quit.  I also slowly realized (this may not come as a shock at all to my women readers) that guys suck when it comes to organizing things, especially when such organization requires planning and communication.  None of my friends who golf contacted me about playing.
    

My wife was baffled and alarmed at my lack of golf.  She believes golf is good for me.

“Why aren’t you golfing?  You’ve got time.”

“Nobody talks about golfing.”

“Uh huh.  And do you talk to anyone about golfing?”

“No.”

“What makes you think your friends that golf are any different than you?  Nobody makes any plans.  Maybe you should try to organize something.”

Few meetings and little organization has been my mantra since I walked out of YSB for the last time.  Slowly that has eroded.  I have meetings.  I volunteer.  I have a calendar again.  But I was damned if I was going to organize anything.  It felt too much like work.

As a result I didn’t golf.  The clubs just sat there in the garage, getting older like their owner.  I pondered golf off and on all last winter.  I brought a golf ball to the shack.  Come spring I tentatively decided to do something proactive.  First I tested the waters with a few friends.

“Would you be interested in regular golf?”

“You mean like a league?”

“No, no, no.  Not a league.  Just an e mail.  No obligation.  Play or don’t play, nobody cares.  I’m thinking every Monday afternoon, different course, move around.”

“You talking serious golf?  Good golfers?”

“Hell no.  Duffers like us.  There’ll be rules against serious play.  Should I send you the e mail?  I’m thinking of e mailing eight guys, hoping to get four, no RSVP required.”

“Sure.”  After all, the people I was talking to were only committed to getting an e mail.  Guys live their entire lives being wary of commitment I think.

That phase went fairly positively.  I was close to getting eight guys.  There was one guy I know but don’t talk to often.  However, I serve on a local not for profit board of directors with his wife.

“Does (your husband) golf?”

“Yeah, sometimes, not often.”

“Think he’d like to be part of a loose, no obligation, once a week golf opportunity?”

“Yeah I do.”

“Give me his e mail address and I’ll include him.”

I thought that one over.  Before I included him blindly I sent him an e mail explaining the concept and asking if he wanted to be on the list.  He said OK.  I don’t like it when my wife volunteers me for something I know nothing about, so I decided to extend him the same courtesy.

I asked a guy at church.  I ran into a guy at an anniversary celebration.  So it went.  My criteria for choosing candidates was to be sure they were not serious about the game.  Sometimes I had to make reference checks with collaterals.
 

“You ever golf with Frank?” (Not his real name.)

“Yeah. Couple times.”

“How is he as a golfer?”

“Not that good. Bad actually.”

“Like us?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.  That’s just what I’m looking for.”
 

I assembled the group of eight and come the end of April I sent them this group e mail:

Gentlemen,

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while.  My idea is we set up a regular day and standing time to golf every week for a group of eight guys.  The theory is you never get everybody, so you send to eight in order to get a foursome.  No obligation to attend or RSVP.  If more than four show up they play too.  I’ll make two tee times just in case.

No betting or wagering, no throwing clubs, no buying beers if you get the high score, no bitching.  Just your standard low key golf for duffers.  Keeping score is optional.  Sign up for nine or eighteen as you wish or have time for.  Ride a cart or walk.  Each week we’ll go from course to course wherever we please as we choose.  Have a beer or food after golf or go home.  No requirements.  No banquet at the end of the season.  No bullshit of any kind.  I propose we start Monday May 4 at Pine Hills at 1:45 p.m..

Here’s the eight guys.  We can add or subtract as we go along if we need to, but you have to start somewhere.

As I listed the eight guys I flashed to an instance of failed organization at the nursing home in 1977. I had just gotten back from traveling in South America and needed a job quickly.  I took one as a nurse’s aide, the only male nurse’s aide at that time, and perhaps in the history of that now torn down very smelly old nursing home.  The head nurse immediately assigned me to work the men’s wing on the top floor.  They grouped all the guys together to keep them away from the women.  They were a motley lot, the guys in that nursing home in 1977.

Some were very old, victims of strokes, significantly physically compromised, assigned to wheel chairs, victims of dementia or otherwise obviously hard to care.  Yet others walked fine, were fairly young, and aside from appearing vacant and slightly off, looked and seemed OK to me.   The other nurse’s aides hadn’t a clue or a care as to why they were there.  Actually I must admit that despite fairly regularly complaining they seemed OK with their lot.  But the confinement, the boredom, the mind numbing sameness of their everyday life hanging out with nothing to do blew me away.  I’d been talking with the fellas and a lot of them knew how to play euchre.  I thought I could get two tables going, winners move. Couple of games at least.  Seven guys and me.  So I went to the activity director and asked if I could organize an afternoon card game for some of the higher functioning guys.  Give them something to do and look forward to for Christ’s sake.

“Of course,” she smiled. “I’ll give you anything you need.  Good luck with that.”

Having been given the go ahead I went first to talk with Tom.  Tom was the sharpest tool in the shed.

“Tom I’m going to have two tables of euchre going Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the lounge at the end of the floor.  You want to play?”

“You playing?”

“Yeah, I’m playing.”

“OK.  I could play.”

I went to Stan next.  Stan agreed right away, but added a caveat.

“Who else is playing?”

“Well so far you, Tom, and me.”

“Is that right?  Yeah, well I’ll play but not with Tom.  Me and Tom, we don’t get along.”

“That’s OK.  We’re going to have two tables.  You can play at the other table.”

And so it went. Buzz was immediately created and I had old guys coming up to me offering to play, but only if certain people were excluded from the game.  It got complicated.  Long story short, I ended up with three players and me, only after begging Tom and Stan to try playing at the same table JUST THIS ONCE with me and one other guy.  The game was not ten minutes old before Stan called Tom a downright terrible name and threw his cards in his face.  The third guy quietly stole away, I separated Tom and Stan, and that was the end of my card game organizing at the nursing home.

I’m happy to report no such problems organizing the golf group.  Congeniality rules.  For one thing we’re a lot younger and healthier than those guys in the nursing home in 1977 and have successfully avoided institutionalization.  I expect that to be the case until we all collectively check out.  I hope I’m right.

Ottawa is a small town.  The guys who golf on Monday afternoon knew each other, or knew of each other, or had at least heard about each other, so gaining a sense of camaraderie was fairly easy.  Creating an expectation that golf could be played with little competition was harder.

The first Monday however was iffy.  It rained like hell in the morning and participation was seriously affected.  I was the only one who showed up.

Undaunted, I reported to the group the next day in an e mail that play went on though there was a great deal of casual water on the course.  I attached a group photo of our first outing, a selfie of me on a Pine Hills  tee, and announced the location of next Monday’s outing.

 

The next Monday it promised to rain again.  Rain was heavily predicted but I went anyway as did one other member.  It was rumored that another of our group was actually in the parking lot at one point, saw dark clouds rolling in, and went home.  Amazingly the two of us were able to play through only occasional light showers and thunder, no lightning that we could see, and finish eighteen.  We again included a selfie, this time of two people, and the e mail report to the group demonstrated persistence if nothing else.  By the third week we hit our stride.  The sun came out.  The guys figured someone would always be there to play golf no matter what.  Numbers have been fairly good since, despite a horribly rainy June.
 

Like all true gentleman golfers we praise good shots and ignore bad ones.  All right, some shots are so horribly awful that we can’t help but bust out laughing but by and large we are amazingly uncritical of one another.  I report only group results.  The formula goes like this:

Number of pars (birdies count for two, have not yet had an eagle) divided by number of golfers x holes in the round.  So five guys collectively score the equivalent of 12 pars.  Divide that by the number of holes played (12 divided by 5 x 18 or 90) and you get 13%.  The Monday golf group has scored between something dismally low like under 10% (no doubt terrible conditions) to over 20% pars on our best day.  We don’t know individually who scored the lowest, the highest, who improved the most, made the most putts, had the longest drives, nothing.  We just know how we’re doing as a group of guys that enjoy playing golf together. And we do, very much, enjoy playing golf together.

Did we get better?  I think so.  One of us began the year hitting nothing bigger than a three wood off the tee and by the end of July acquired a big ass driver that he now hits well.  Some of us have figured out how to chip closer to the pin.  Some not.  I’m pretty sure all of us putt a little better than we did in May, with notable lapses, but I have no proof of that.  Monday afternoon golf as we play it is not what you would call data driven.

We’ve gotten better in the sense of remembering things the other guy say and think about things that matter.  As the summer went on we made better conversation.  We got over talking about just baseball, the news, and current events around town.  Slowly we began to talk about ourselves.  We got to know each other better.

I for one look forward to Mondays.  We are likely in slightly better shape due to our efforts, although we drive our carts very near the ball and probably closer to the greens than the grounds keeper would like. We don’t play a strenuous game. I know that I progressively napped for shorter periods of time immediately after getting home as the season wore on.  I feel energized by Mondays out there.  I might go so far as to say I felt loose, as long as I load up with enough ibuprofen.

Golf courses are big and green and expansive.  Even the worst course in the area is very pretty. It can be quiet out there, serene even, while at the same time hilarious.  Erratic and unorthodox golf swings create shots that defy physics. Golf balls take weird bounces.  Men on Monday afternoon have been known to laugh at themselves, their shots, their swings and each other.  Golf without pressure is damn fun.

One of our members, a big swinger who steps in the bucket like a pull hitter, tees his ball extremely high.  He carries those tees that look like pencils and has a driver with a head approximately the size of a campus refrigerator.  On one notable swing in mid season he inexplicably drove his tee a good ten feet while his ball simply feel to the ground where the tee had once been.  It was amazing.  A seemingly physical impossibility.  But he did it.  We gave him high fives all around.

We find the local golf courses underutilized on Monday afternoon and appreciative of our business.  I’m not sure all the courses we play this summer will survive, given the apparent decline of golfing.  Some say golf never recovered from the recession.  We saw few young golfers out there on Monday afternoons, but then with any luck most of them are working.  The lack of play on our local courses was OK with us. We were out there hacking away with little or no pressure from other golfers and enjoying ourselves.  Knock on wood, so far we have hit no one, amazingly, given some of the shots we’ve executed.  Maybe we’re blessed.

Golf with guys who enjoy not just the game but each other is a blessing in itself.  Fall brings dead leaves to the game and an increased risk of lost balls.  We’ll play till the weather shuts us down and season one will be over.  If we can keep a good group of guys like this together I’d like to play regular weekly summer golf for many years to come.  Many, many years.