Balls Magazine Volume 14

As I think I may have mentioned in the past, I’m on a thing at work where I HAVE TO take vacation days each month due to a vacation cap. If I don’t use them, I stop accumulating vacation time and I don’t trust stupid HR people to remember to restart my vacation accumulator machine.

Hence, I am taking two days off each month to play golf during the week. This works out great because the courses are usually not crowded and the greens fees are much cheaper.

This time around, I had chosen Thursday as my day as I only had a couple of meetings and nothing was that important that I couldn’t miss it or reschedule. Read: I didn’t have any meetings with my bosses.

Now, as you all may also know, the weather in Sunny Southern California has been more on the wet side lately. This is wonderful and has helped to pull us out of drought. However, it doesn’t help with the golf game.

Luckily, we had gone about a week without rain and there was nothing on the forecast for the next two weeks when I turned in my vacation request. Sure enough, on Wednesday night, it started to rain.

The rain wasn’t too hard, but it was steady through the night. As I woke up on Thursday morning, I wondered if I should even bother to play.

I went outside and saw that it had let up. It was only slightly drizzly. Fuck it. I had taken the day off already. What was I going to do, work? Fuck that.

I drove to the course through the rain. In some places, it was raining hard. The course is on the side of a mountain so I was worried it would be raining there. I was happy to find the rain had subsided when I arrived to the course.

My tee time was at 8 and I got there a half hour early to warm up. I went to check in before hitting the range and the pro shop guy told me the others I was supposed to play with had cancelled due to the rain. His under the breath “Pussies!” was implied.

He could put me on immediately with a father and son that were about to tee off. Fine with me!

On a cold and rainy day and with no warmup, I headed to the first tee. The father and son were very nice, so I felt pretty good about the round ahead.

The course we were playing surrounds a hill so most of the holes curl in one direction or another. The first hole was a dogleg left Par 5.

Now, keeping in mind that I had not warmed up at all and the hole curled more sharply than my dick to the left, I decided to hit my 1 Iron instead of driver or a wood.

It went straight down the middle and stopped at the perfect distance to set up the next shot. I repeated that on the next shot, chipped into the green, and two-putted. A picture-perfect par!

One thing I did do to prepare for the round was to write down on the scorecard my target score for each hole. I’ve mentioned before that since my goal is to shoot under 100, I can double bogey the 9 toughest holes by score index and bogey the rest.

I got a bogey 5 on the second and third, a double on the Score Index 3 fourth, and a true par on the fifth. I was way ahead of schedule!

The sixth and seventh holes were Par 3s, but I went over my target by one on each hole. The eight was a disaster 9 on a Par 5, but I made up for it with a true Par on the ninth.

I scored a 49 on the Front Nine with three True Pars. I felt pretty good considering:

• The ground conditions were not favourable.
• The rain/drizzle had started again.
• I was on pace.
• I play better in the Back!

We got a bit of a backup at the tenth tee as some players were going slow and others stopped to pee. We passed a twosome trying to figure the game out somewhere in the eleventh fairway.

I kept pace with my target scores on the first three holes of the Back Nine. The thirteenth was another disaster 9 on a Par 5 but I put it out of my head and focused on the holes ahead.

I hit my target score on two out of the remaining five holes and ended up with a 53 on the Back Nine for a total of 102.

Not bad at all considering I had played probably one of my worst rounds in years in similar conditions about a month earlier.

PROS

I was proud of myself for not pussying out and for playing despite the conditions. I was rewarded with a good score.

The course I played is more difficult than the ones I usually play. It felt good to score well on a tough course. I think this score might arguably be more impressive than the 98 I had previously scored.

It lowered my handicap.

CONS

The cold weather doesn’t agree with my Mexican ass.

OVERALL RATING:

Thanks to this 102, my handicap has officially been lowered from 33.2 to 32.7!

Btw, I think this round may officially be my best round ever thanks to something called a Scoring Differential. I’ll get into that next time. I just want to wrap this up so I can read the next chapter in Rikki’s The Night I Won The Super Bowl series!

See you next time.