"A bad day golfing"

On Saturday, I found myself invoking the old saw about how a bad day at a fun hobby is better than a good day working. It turns out that I'm really glad this is going to be the last outing.

On the shotgun start, our threesome was the furthest out on the course. This made us the lead group; everyone else was behind us. I had golfed once this year. The most regular golfer on our team goes out every other week, and as a senior, has no distance to his tee shots. My friend Tom was the third, and he has also golfed very little this year. We had a good-natured debate at the outset over who was stuck with whom. We did okay (for us) on the first couple holes, though, parring them both in the increasingly heavy rain. On the third hole, we were on our third shot, about a hundred yards out from the green on a par four - very bad for a best-ball scramble to not at least reach the vicinity of the green in regulation - when the horn sounded calling us in because of the weather.

It would be about two hours before we could resume. Things didn't get any better. I think we had only one double bogey, scrambled to "save" a couple of bogeys, and made par about a third of the time. The best team posted 12 under par, but was eliminated for failing to sign their scorecard, so the winning score was 9 under. We finished 22 strokes behind the winners, 25 behind the best score. Still, I wasn't too concerned, and was having fun.

Except apparently my fun, or our combined incompetence, was interfering with others' enjoyment of the day. The sun came out about two hours after we resumed, we were drying out, and it was becoming an enjoyable day.  We had to go over to an adjacent green to pick up two errant shots that the double-hitter on that hole (in a best ball threesome, to keep things fair with the other groups, group members rotate playing an extra ball on each hole) had knocked astray. At that point, the youngest brother of the deceased for whose son the educational fund-raising tournament has been held each year told us that we needed to speed things up.

Well, here was the problem: we weren't playing slowly. We didn't spend a lot of time looking for errant balls we'd hit; if we didn't find them quickly, we just let them go, and sometimes we didn't bother looking at all. Also, we didn't spend much time standing over our shots, taking a bunch of practice swings. We were just playing very poorly. On the two "longest drive" holes, we were hitting our third shot from the marker where both the men's and women's longest drives had been hit. We took over 33% more strokes to complete the course than the best scoring teams did, including 42% (!) more than the disqualified team. Taking that many more strokes simply takes way more time. The only way to speed things up would have been to quit mid-round. So I attempted to explain this to John, who merely became insistent that, since we'd already had a two-hour rain delay and we now were slowing things down even further, we should do whatever it took to speed things up. As if just by him saying so we could start playing better.

Well, we did the best we could without quitting, which was really no better than before.

After dinner - which was originally going to be lunch - when we were waiting to say goodbye to Jeff (the deceased) and John's dad, who is my good friend, one of the other regular golfers was still chewing on his ear about what he needed to do to keep the problem from happening in the future. Well, this was already the last year for the outing - they've hit their fundraising goal - so I think they've fixed the issue already. But just in case they change their minds, they will never have this problem with me again.