Saturday, January 24, 2015

Closing Time, part I


It's been a stupendous season of winter golf, better than one could hope for. But with a few inches of snow heading our way, the writing is on the wall. Fun time will be over soon. The coldest month of them all is just around the corner. Once snow blankets the ground, there'll be no recovering. Not in the short term. It could be two months before we tee off again--an unthinkable length of time in golf terms.
For now though, let us live. The climate over the next few days will be chilly, but dry and mostly sunny. The courses are all open, wide open most likely. There is no choice really. Seize the day. With my swing feeling and working well, and exceptionally tolerable January weather still upon us, there is no choice. Squeeze in as many holes as I can.


It's around forty degrees and the whatever ice lingers on the course is almost all thawed out. Too bad it's all going to be white in a few days. Anyways, for January this is a balmy day, and with the impending doom, I'm not surprised to see it fairly busy on the course.


It's a little damper on the ground than last outing, but most of the flags are still frozen into the holes.


Lo, a pin high birdie putt on the 2nd hole, from two-hundred plus yards out. Some good vibes early on.


What a mess, this place is in tatters. In a way I enjoy the hap-hazards of winter golf. This is the game stripped bare. Wild and free.



Casual water hazards everywhere lately.


Basically an all-inclusive resort for migrant Canada geese, the place has become a scatophobic nightmare. If you have an issue with walking through acres of feces, probably not the place for you.


Some sand is being added to bunkers all around the course as we speak. It strikes me as extremely odd but this winter I am seeing groundskeeping crews scattered around doing various work such as this.


Another frozen stick, but I guess someone tried a little too hard to yank it out and snapped it right off at the base.




Casual Ice could be a good name for a cheapass beer or flavored malt beverage.


The people out on the course seemed to all be Koreans. This foursome actually did a good job of staying out in front of me all by myself. It took about three hours and forty to finish eighteen, not a bad pace for a walking four. I guess they all just bunted it along in straight lines. From my vantage point they kind of resembled a football offense making a spirited drive downfield, pushing and pushing that line of scrimmage forward. Koreans, you know, some of them play quite fast, and some quite slow. Kind of like people in general I guess.


In addition to being gross and unsanitary these damn goose shits are also robbing me of distance in the fairway, I'm pretty sure.


A wave of the blahs overcame me in the middle of the round as I rode along absent-mindedly on the bogey train. "Hey, it's winter golf, nobody can really expect to play well in these conditions"--I actually caught myself thinking that. What a jerkoff. It is comical how self-activating the excuse-making part of the brain can be.


A round in under four hours on any given day is great; today, to my brisk winter golf game it felt slow and meandering. Too much time to stand around and feel cold. I held fast through those mid-round blahs though, clung to fundamentals and managed to scratch out a couple of solid pars to finish with an 84; if I'd avoided the double bogeys today, who knows? You know what, there are some decent scores out here to be shot. Goddammit, looking forward to another crack at it.

2 comments:

  1. "It is comical how self-activating the excuse-making part of the brain can be."

    Astute observation. I wonder if anyone in the field of psychology has studied this phenomena? I know I certainly fall into that trap. One starts the round full of optimism and often somewhere along the line, after making a number of bigger than desirable numbers, a decision is made that today wasn't one's day or that conditions/events beyond one's control have conspired to prevent quality play ... blah, blah, blah.

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  2. Those last three rounds look mighty good in these conditions. Goose shit everywhere looks familiar. They used to fly south. Not any more.

    Conditions are the same here too. Casual water?

    CeeBee

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