Gawlf As I Remembers It

 What seems like a lifetime ago, I considered myself a golfer.

Not a gopher. A golfer.

Y'know...that sport where you pay to walk a lot, look around for a lost white orb a lot more, get craploads of aerobic exercise doing so, and employ endless colorful metaphors to describe in detail WTF it is you're doing.

Or at least thought you were doing when you started.

Like most sports I ever indulged in, I was self-taught. Recipe for disaster #1.

I quickly discovered that I was a divining rod in my previous life: if the course had one pond or a dozen of them, I'd find every mother's son of them. Oft-times at the expense of most of, if not all of the new golf balls I just bought. 

I will never forget 18 holes at Eagle Vail, CO: and I lost a ball plus on every hole. EVERY...HOLE. Came perilously close to running out.

Of course, I found other places to lose them: in the adjoining woods, for example. But sometimes that  proved to be a plus:

Until I had to hit out of those same woods. Then, not so much. Not only did I frequently have to dodge my own ricochets, but I may also be the only golfer in recorded history to have hit myself with my own drives. I did that three times. THREE TIMES.

The golf ball hurts a bit more, depending on point of impact.

A story that I didn't personally experience but know someone that did, came when a group ahead of him was obviously looking for a lost ball, and from the time they were taking, they weren't having much luck. Well, along side the green was a fenced pasture with a few grazing cows therein. My acquaintance decided to act on a whim, and venture into the pasture. His mistake was to then give in to a second whim and lift the tail on the nearest cow to the fence. Inserted in the ass, was a golf ball. He turned, pointed to the ball and yelled at the lady, "does this look like yours?"

It took a few weeks for the imprint of her five iron to heal on his forehead.

Beyond that there were, besides the obvious golf course hazards of water, traps and trees, other things to worry about:

And

And

And

And

Did I forget to mention other environmental factors:

And

And

Especially when #3 messes up your greatest round of golf ever, followed by #1 not appreciating you screaming "oh RAT FARTS!"

There's also the hazard of having a groundskeeper the likes of Bill Murray trying to kill every golfer...uh, gopher...on the course:

I have played golf with those who took the game so seriously, nothing -- and I do mean NOTHING -- could distract them:

And those who decided a libation was just the trick to help forget the banana slice tee shot that just broke a car window in the parking lot:

Then, there were those moments -- few and between but WOWSER when -- a distraction was more than welcome:

I could have used a whole lot more of these kinds of distractions.

Ah, the mammor...er...memories.

It's been 19 years since my last round of golf. And that round will probably remain my last round of golf ever.

After all, I looked like this when I first started in the late '70s:

Now I'd rather not think about how I'd look out there. Add to that my penchant for water, Greenpeace would be chasing me all over the course, trying to push me back in it:

Finally, there's one thing that's as certain as can be: I've already had more strokes on all those golf courses than all the Colorado hospital ICUs collectively in the past 40 years.

That's enough for one lifetime.

Did I mention that I used to play tennis? Never mind...