As you may have noticed, I have been lax in publishing new episodes of Balls Magazine. That’s not to say that I haven’t been playing golf. I have. I’ve just been really damn busy with a lot of work and real life stuff. To wit, here is the latest:
- I played in a charity tournament as part of a 2 man Scramble team.
- I played a round in drizzle prior to a work luncheon.
- I played a 9 hole Match Play round as part of my golf club’s Match Play Tournament.
Results were mixed.
The charity tournament was a lot of fun and I would classify it as a huge success for several reasons:
- My team scored an 82 on a Par 74 course and finished somewhere in the teens.
- I entered a raffle drawing and won a free round of golf.
- I personally played pretty well. When my teammate hit a bad shot, I came through with a good shot. On the other hand, I didn’t hit too many bad shots.
The round did not count towards my handicap, but it boosted my confidence.
The round in the rain/drizzle before a work luncheon was an adventure.
I started out well but then started feeling miserable as the rain intensified. That translated into my golf game as I lost concentration and started losing some balls and making bad decisions. I ended up with a 116 at the same course I had previously gotten a 102.
Not great, Bob!
The fun part was changing out of my wet golf clothes into business casual attire for the work luncheon in the restaurant right next to the golf course. In classy DFO fashion, I changed in my car in the restaurant parking lot.
Finally, I had my Match Play round on a Friday morning (yes, I took vacation) and started off winning the first hole! It was a handicapped match, so I got strokes on several holes.
I started off the second hole decently but four-putted to lose the hole and even the match. We tied the third hole but then I fell behind on the fourth hole even though I got a very nice bogey. My opponent got a par and I wasn’t getting strokes on that one, so bad luck.
I did fairly well on the next two holes and I was only two holes down with 3 to play. On the 7th, I hit a bad tee shot into the left rough and, somehow someway, managed to hit the ball three more times before I could get it back on the fairway.
A disaster hole and the match was over. 3&2 is your final.
The thing was that I really didn’t play that bad! I had one disaster hole and a couple of bad breaks with my opponent getting really good scores when I scored well and that was that. His handicap index is ten strokes lower than mine, so he is a better player, but I thought I held my own. With some luck, I could have pulled out the win.
PROS
I am playing more and getting to know my strengths and weaknesses better.
I’m starting to minimize my mistakes although I still make plenty of them.
I won a raffle and I got a nice goody bag full of free shit! Plus I met a real life cute golf cart girl!
Match Play was a lot of fun to play.
CONS
The rainy round was disappointing. I should have done better mentally.
I am out of the Match Play tourney, which I enjoyed. I need to figure out a way to play that format with someone.
OVERALL RATING:
I am playing next week in a tournament where we are restricted to using only 4 clubs! That should be a cool challenge. I am enjoying playing these different types of formats. I’m thinking the more varied experience I get, the better it will be for my quest to improve.
With the free round of golf, I feel the universe is telling me I will improve. That’s encouraging.
And now, Rikki will now present the next exciting chapter in the golf cart girl story!
See you next time.
In happier, more adorable news…
“Teale, a four-month-old Labrador, became trapped in an extractor vent for a tumble dryer at home in Longtown, Carlisle, on Tuesday.
Rescuers from Carlisle East fire station arrived to find Teale “feeling very sorry for herself”.
They managed to free her “with minimal fuss” using small tools and she was said to be “no worse for wear”.
“She was very appreciative, and rewarded the crew with lots of cuddles and licks,” a spokesperson said.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cumbria-66039212
Good girl!
Good stupid girl!
“The cat made me do this.”
Found a funny:
One day a husband comes home from work. His wife greets him and says, “Honey, you know, in the upstairs bathroom one of the pipes is leaking, could you fix it?” The husband says, “What do I look like, Mr. Plumber?”
A few days go by, and he comes home from work and his wife says, “Honey, my car won’t start. I think it needs a new battery. Could you change it for me?” He says: “What do I look like, Mr. Goodwrench?”
Another few days go by, and it’s raining pretty hard. The wife finds a leak in the roof. She says, “Honey, there’s a leak on the roof! Can you please fix it?” “What do I look like,” He says, “Bob Vila?”
The next day the husband comes home, and the roof is fixed. So is the plumbing. So is the car. He asks his wife what happened. “Oh, I had a handyman come in and fix them,” she says.
“Great! What did he charge?” he says.
“Nothing. He said he’d do it for free if I either baked him a cake or slept with him.”
“Well, what kind of cake did you make?” asks the husband.
“What do I look like,” she says, “Betty Crocker?”
That’s wonderful
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/iraqi-refugee-sets-fire-to-bacon-stuffed-quran-pages-outside-stockholm-mosque/
He just called in a fatwah on his own ass.
Yeah, hard to think of what would be MOAR fatwa-worthy. Maybe a “Mohammad’s facial” porn parody series?
Suicide by fatwa?
Southern VR headset
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbXbRQmUes0
Bobby Huggins just needs a garbage bag full of cans of beer for his VR headset.
I want Huggy Bear to make an appearance on It’s Always Sunny. He seems like someone who would know Frank.
Has anyone here done a BIG home remodel? I’m barely a member of The Wednesdayer Nation and we’re heading into one.
It’s gonna be stupid.
Go ahead and get that divorce lawyer lined up.
I don’t know what you mean by “big”, (I have that in common with Deanna Favre), but we just did our kitchen, including flipping a bathroom backwards to connect it to an office rather than the kitchen, and doing some work in the dining room as well. Total gut job, lasted 6 weeks.
And I got Covid on Day 2.
It’s going to be frustrating, everything is going to be covered in dust no matter what you do, shit is going to be stacked everywhere and impossible to find, and you are likely going to become very familiar with every take-out place in a 20 mile radius, because even if you aren’t having the kitchen done, (you are; no one does a home remodel without touching the kitchen), you’re not going to want to cook in the mess your home has become.
Just keep in mind that all things come to an end and, on a geologic time scale anyway, your remodel really isn’t going to take that long.
I’m assuming the Sex Dwarf origin story comes from a remodeling-based fight.
Let’s just say baseball cards weren’t the only things that fell out of the ceilings.
Finder’s Keepers! First rule of the LAW right thar, ah tell yew wut
Six weeks is incredibly fast for a gut job kitchen reno, not to mention all the other stuff. You were very lucky.
The guys we used were sensational. 10/10, no notes. Delivered everything on time and on budget. We paid for it mind you, but it was very worth it.
Oh we’re gonna have to be out for weeks.
I’m prepared for the adventure. Not so sure my wife appreciates the scope of it all.
Oh man if she’s anything like the Dr. Mrs…
“You mean they can’t get it all done on the same day?”
We are, in fact, including the kitchen. It was definitely a “well we’re doing everything else right now….”
Question; i read this Wagner ‘took control’ of some Key Russian military base.
Like, they locked the General in a closet and took over the control room? Or just Attack of the Clones’d a bunch of guys off duty?
More like no one really bothered to stop them or do anything, so the General went out to lunch and was totally stuck in traffic when trying to get back to protest sort of totally deniable thing
That would have been helpful for CNN to report. But giving me a big banner link to their Editor’s Best Amazon Summer Buys is also worthy of a quarter of the screen.
I’m putting all this meat inside me!
-Not Deanna Favre
– Meghan McCain’s Wisdom Tooth Pocket
” – Deanna Favre”
– Brett Farve
Me, going through 500 pages of medical records and realizing I stopped on page 69 to make some notes.
“Nicccccccccccce”
I am 54 years old.
You are never too old for 69 material.
Well, until one is 70…
“Amatuers.”
— Houston
I had one disaster hole
We all have; lucky if it’s only one.
Also, I empathize with the golf struggles.
An overseas feel good story.
“The Night I Won the Super Bowl” OR “The Most Boastful Story Ever Told at DFO” (Part 12):
“Oh my God” the drink cart girl was saying, using one hand to cover her mouth. Her face was flushed.
While I’d like to claim credit for eliciting this exclamation, I cannot, as I was not yet in the process of winning the Super Bowl. We were still at the theater, and the culprit was her cellphone. The crimson color that had risen to her cheeks was due to embarrassment. Fortunately, the interruption had happened during intermission.
I could tell this was a new experience for her. After the first act I was a little worried that the play’s frank confrontation of several provocative topics (sexuality in a colonial environment, homosexuality, promiscuity) might be a bit much, but the play was well-written and well-performed and turned out to be more thought-provoking than prurient.
“Do you want to go see something cool?” I asked her after it ended.
A couple of months before, I’d been introduced to the Spruce Street Suspension Bridge, which is a minor landmark in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego. It’s a long pedestrian bridge that crosses over a canyon. I knew it was near the theater, but I didn’t know exactly where, so I tried to guess and drove us around looking for it. After a short while with no luck, I was feeling a bit flustered and ready to give up, so I pulled down a side street to turn around and discovered that we’d arrived.
It was a good spot. Interesting, but not overwhelming. Romantic, but not deserted. We walked halfway across, to the center of the span, and I kissed her for the first time.
You really don’t want to know what Buddy Cole’s version of “two man scramble” entails.
Bit of a spoiler; it does involve eggs.
Four clubs? 3-wood, 5-iron, pitching wedge, putter.
Lacey Underall….what a gig for that actress. Caddyshack makes a lot of people happy, but it makes me angry because I think it killed Doug Kenney. His original script got fucking steamrolled by gophers and Rodney and time-consuming improvised scenes. After the perfection of Animal House, it was more than he could bear. (Plus he was in Hawaii doing tennis balls filled with cocaine with Chevy Chase.) Noonan was basically Bill Murray, or an archetype Murray brother, and the script was based on stories of him caddying in the midwest. You can still see faint traces of the original plot in the movie, but they get pushed so far into the background they actually become annoying. (Anyone really give a shit whether Maggie was pregnant or not?) Anyway, if Caddyshack hadn’t been such a fucking coke zoo, Kenny might have survived the 1980s and produced more amazing work.
On the high side though, I learned that Ted Knight was a fucking badass on the set of that film. He saw how crazy it was getting on and off set, and that a lot of actors in that cast were children. He took it upon himself, when he wasn’t acting, to round up all the kids and take them to the movies, go-karting, for ice cream etc. Grandpa stuff. What a sweet guy. I just read an old interview with John Amos. He was talking about his time playing Gordy the Weatherman on the Mary Tyler-Moore Show. He said one day Ted Knight was walking around the set absolutely delighted, waving around a hate letter from a fan saying how obnoxious she thought Ted Baxter was and how much she couldn’t stand him. Amos remembered he was so childlike at having done such a great performance. Anyway, here’s a weird clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pXYHRMwIg
I was going along the same lines as you. I’m debating whether to choose the putter or maybe the 1 iron. Seems like a more versatile club…
Took me a while to find it, but I did, and its worth typing the whole thing verbatim, as its one of my favorite passages HST ever writ:
THE ART OF HITTING THE ONE IRON
“Not even God can win a preliminary hearing.”
-Hal Haddon, May 22, 1990
I cursed Hal Haddon when he told me this. “You lazy money-mad bastard,” I shouted, “Lee Trevino said not even God can hit a one iron”…which proved to be true, in his case–but so what?
“I can hit a one iron,” I said. “I can kick the shit out of a one iron.”
Which was true, for some reason. The Ping Eye 2 Beryllium One iron is my favorite club. All golfers fear and hate the One. It has no angle, no pitch, no loft…It is straight up and down, like a putter, and the chances of a normal person getting a ball up in the air with it are usually about 1,000 to 1 against…The one iron is a confidence crusher, a Fear Trip, an almost certain guarantee of Shame, Failure, Dumbness, and Humiliation if you ever use it in public. Few PGA pros ever touch the One, and most amateurs won’t even carry it in their bags. The One is so ugly, they will tell you, so evil and wrong by nature that its mere presence in the bag poisons all the other clubs. A used One is usually the cheapest club in the “33 Percent Off” barrel at any pro shop. Charles Manson once said he would rather use a wooden-shafted Frances Ouimet Two iron than a Ping Eye Beryllium One.
So it was weird when I picked up the Ping One and lashed five or six straight balls off the tee like line-drive homers at 240 yards each…A deathly silence fellow the crowd at the driving range. They watched in amazement, and said nothing, as I continued to bash low-rising 240-yarders like a golf robot who couldn’t miss.
Hot damn, I thought. This is wonderful. These people are frozen and stunned, like members of a vision…they have made me an object of worship, a Hero of Golf…
They were like law students watching my old friend Ed Williams (deceased) win five (5) preliminaries in a row, always in the face of huge odds…Indeed. One of my first Combat Memos on this case asked, “Where is Edward Bennett Williams? Now that I finally need him?”
Ed could not hit the One, but he was hell on wheels in a courtroom.
Woody Creek, May 1990
Heh heh heh. “Woody”.
I agree with Fronk. Not sure about that 1 iron. So much frequently comes down to putting. Depending on the lay I’ve used the putter within a few feet of the green.
Texas wedge FTW!
With my skill set, there wasn’t anything that I could do with those long irons that I couldn’t do more reliably with a 5-wood. For example. a 3-iron shot for me was awesome when it worked; definitely a gift from the golf marketing gods. Straight, far, the reason why you play. But that happened maybe half the time, and I might be exaggerating. For too many times it’d be a 20-yard trudge to where that miserable topped shot ended up.
I had a 1-iron with a blob on the back that made it look a little bit like a wood. It was sold as a ‘driving iron’. It sucked.
Also, I HATED the Maggie character/storyline. Totally unnecessary.
That’s the same girl who Boone molested in Animal House, and as near as I can tell those are the only two film roles she ever had.
Apparently the woman who played Lacey was out of movies soon after Caddyshack, too. Story was that she wasn’t aware of the nudity requirements, objected, and was told to either do it or get the fuck out.
Kinda changes the way I’ve watched the movie since reading that. I think in an oral history of the movie, (although if an oral history is in written form, is it really oral? I’ll leave those questions to Balls), named one of the producers as the primary asshole in that situation. The 80’s were a different time.
https://vault.si.com/vault/2010/08/02/caddyshack
Found it. She was OK with the nudity, she didn’t like being bullied.
Not that different, apparently stuff like that still happens but not as much now that there’s a new job called ‘intimacy consultant’ that’s supposed to deal with those sorts of difficulties for the actors. On the same note, apparently Sharon Stone was told they wouldn’t show what they showed in Basic Instinct
What did she think was gonna happen? “You gotta show Michael over there your kitty, so he can get into character. Some method acting thing, don’t ask. Anyway, don’t worry, we aren’t gonna film it.”
I’m sure she thought it would be lit more subtly, as opposed to being basically the same view her gynecologist gets.
It was fairly subtle, but every perv in the world slooooooooowed the tape down.
And the accent, what the fuck was that?
It was a hate crime against the Irish is what it was.
For me I would bump those first two down to 5-wood and 7-iron, because I could never hit a 3-wood off the ground, and I just liked the 7-iron better. Those four clubs did most of the work in my bag anyway.
I really like my 5 wood and 7 iron. I may use those plus a pitching wedge. Putter is probably the right call for the fourth.