Golf Fore the Good

While I was away, my favorite muni closed up for the winter. You can’t blame management for this decision, as the golf course is gem – a gem, but with poor drainage, under-budgeted for maintenance and played to death in season. The rest will serve it well and provide us all with a better golfing experience come next season.

It will take a few weeks for me to get used to the eerie silence that hovers over the fairways. Not the dog; he is in seventh heaven when we drop by in the late afternoon to take our day’s last walk through long shadows. Unleashed and with reckless abandon, he dashes down eleven at the geese, then lopes up twelve, across the range and wherever his nose may take him.

The dog walks me, essentially, on these afternoon adventures. He runs, I follow as closely as possible, barely keeping him in sight. He leads me on a haphazard route, crossing fairways in random order, leading me through thickets and out again leaving me to question, for just a moment, which of eighteen holes we’ve just stumbled upon.

The familiar is turned backwards- scrambled - so that which I always anticipate in such an orderly fashion in season, accompanied by my scorecard and my sticks, becomes a foreign landscape. The fairways that are usually so familiar take on a layout I’ve never seen. It is not my muni anymore.

We pass down fourteen. I have never noticed how the fairway slopes downhill just in front of the forward tees; this, then, accounts for the burners that roll so much further than they really should. I see now how it turns just barely uphill, out about 180, and realize why I really have to smoke one off the tee to get inside the 150. I see the left to right roll of the land at the hundred yard marker and think how often I approach the green from the right rough. Who knew?

I should recognize and assimilate these things, I suppose, to become a better golfer. Maybe I spend too much time enjoying my rounds and not enough time concentrating on my game. Maybe I’ll spend the winter analyzing the lay of the land, fore caddying for myself for the season to come, making mental notes like a pro to improve my play. Maybe I’ll just walk the dog, enjoy the quiet surroundings and be glad the USGA won’t be counting my strokes again until spring.