The quest for adequacy

Ridgecrest Golf Course, Nampa, ID
April 5, 2008, 108 (par 72) +36



The round of my life was well within my grasp.

Throughout a blustery, chilly day at Ridgecrest Golf Course, I had played some of the least damaging golf of my young career. My drives, when not landing on the women’s tee box, were straight and true. My iron play, when not unconscionably awful, was meaningful and dependable. My putting, albeit for a rather unfortunate four-putt, was brilliant.

Making the turn toward the clubhouse, I was within striking distance of a score I would not be ashamed to mention at the dinner table. I was so close I could taste it, and it tasted like affirmation.

Naturally, my quest for relative immortality failed, whiffing on opportunity like my gargantuan attempt at a long drive on the #1 tee box. But even having the chance to put myself into my own record book was exciting. It made me glad I have low standards.

To be within striking distance of respectability was a personal victory, not to mention astonishing. I had succeeded in areas of the golf course where I had never succeeded before. Case in point: five-foot putts. These little terrors had cost me great amounts of grief and strokes over the years, but on Saturday, I owned them like I own three copies of Heavyweights on DVD.

Things were going great for me throughout the front nine and well into the back. I was a new man, teeing off with reckless abandon and thrusting mighty fistpumps into the air after every heroic eight iron. Then reality hit.

Through fourteen holes, I had managed to put aside all of my golf inadequacies and play like a different person. After the fifteenth hole, I wanted to go home.

The fifteenth, in and of itself, was not difficult. It was a short par four with a dogleg to the left and a green protected by water, and I could double-bogey it in my sleep. Well, maybe triple bogey.

My troubles came from looking ahead.

The evil that awaited me on the 17th hole, I knew all too well. The big, bad seventeenth was a vertical ascent into the seventh level of golf hell with a steep incline, a disastrously small green, and little to no margin for error. And I love my margin for error! In my illustrious history, I have averaged a nine on the hole, not including the multiple occasions when I simply gave up.

Standing on the tee box for the fifteenth, I could see my nemesis towering over me across the way. It was intimidating and menacing, and the only things I could think about were the varying ways that I would blow my perfect day once I reached it.

Turns out, I would do myself in far before I ever got to the seventeenth.

My troubles began with my tee shot on the 15th hole. Despite its great potential, the shot, which began tall and mighty, eroded into a lagging and wayward drive that plopped down into the dry bed of the empty water hazard. Still, I thought I could handle it.

I couldn’t.

Playing my way out of the muddy pit (which I am not sure is entirely legal, judging from the fact no one else was doing it and the marshal followed us for the rest of the round) was a bad decision. And like most of my bad decisions, it ended with a bogey divisible by three.

After the drive, I hacked my second shot two feet forward, blasted my third immediately sideways, powered my fourth onto the playing surface, and scuttled a fifth well over the green. Then the putting commenced. When all was said and done, all my furtive club clamoring collaborated into a quintuple-bogey nine.

So much for my game of the century.

The fact that I lost my cool well before I planned on losing my cool was disappointing. If I was going to collapse (and odds were good that I would), I wanted to do so on the most difficult hole on the course. Struggling through the easy 15th hole was not in my plan.

Of course, neither was shooting under 110, so I guess I can’t complain.

SCORECARD
Driving: Only semi-embarrassing
Short game: Rather long, actually
Putting: Less is more…somehow
Overall: A career day in a less-than-spectacular career

Fringe Benefits

Purple Sage Golf Course, Caldwell, ID
March 8, 2008, 113 (par 71) +41

There are so many parts of a golf course that I have not had the opportunity to properly appreciate. Like the middle of the fairway.

Saturday’s round of disaster led me to another hidden treasure of the golf course, and following an afternoon of fruitless strokes, I might have been better off never to have discovered it.

The fringe has never registered with me before, probably considering how happy I am just to arrive at the green (usually upwards of five shots later). I guess it the fringe exists to reward golfers who get their balls close to the putting surface but not quite on it. The grass is shorter, the lies are better, and the chances of hitting a successful shot improve. At least, that’s the way I think it is supposed to work.

My experience on the fringes at Purple Sage Golf Course went a little more costly.

My round started off with a bang—a bang that sounded more like a splash. On the first two holes, I found water—cannonballing a fairway iron on hole one and duffing a 3 iron into the ditch five feet in front of me on hole two. Amphibiously speaking, I was batting 1.000.

My luck got better on subsequent holes, which were coincidentally water-free. My drives were suspiciously straight and long, and my irons and putter finally decided to show up. But then the fringe attacked.

With confidence well in hand, I approached the seventh hole, a rather long par four. After a workable drive, a towering three wood, and a weak-sauce 8 iron, I hit a high, lofting pitching wedge in the general direction I was aiming, near the green.

Believing that I had scored a reprieve from hacking in the rough, I was discouraged to discover that the fringe where my ball rested resembled a topographical map of grassy clumps. What was up with that?! The deep rough would have been a kinder, gentler lie than the Armageddon of horticulture currently forming the environs of my double bogey shot! Bummer.

Fortunately, I remembered a trick to playing from the fringe that I was taught in golf class: “Your arms look like spaghetti noodles.” No, wait. That was constructive criticism of my driving. “Putt the ball harder than you would think.” That was the fringe advice.

And if there is one thing I do well, it is swing harder than I should. So with my ball nestled in the highlands of the fringe, I smacked my putter into the unsuspecting ball, sending it to the other end of the green, passing the pin at 35mph on its way. Oh well. I was off the fringe at least.

I carded a nine on the hole, which was actually my worst score on the front side. Through some sort of semi-miracle, I was doing alright. My drives were obeying, my irons were moving the ball forward, and my putting was saving face. The kid who routinely four-putted was nowhere to be found, except on Hole 5. That sucker was tricky.

Still, I ventured to the back side with a 57, a good 21 strokes over par. The chances of lowering that number on the back were not looking good, considering I was sucking wind, freezing my ears off, and constantly fixated on what was for dinner. Do you think Tiger Woods has the same problem?

Things were going fine until the vengeful fringe returned. Clubbing my ball down the rough next to the fairway on the par five 12th, I finally got ahold of mostly ball with a burly three-wood hack, sending the scornful orb very near the green. In a fair world, I would get to shelve my frantically failing irons and test fate with the flat stick. It looked like I would be putting for a seven.

But, sadly, golf does not operate in a fair world. There my ball was, six inches from the redemptive green, wadded between two tufts of grass and wedged under a giant leaf. I would have preferred the dandelion patch to its immediate left.

With double bogey in sight, I knew that I had to concentrate to maintain a score that I was probably a little too presumptive to assume. I gripped my putter like I would a bottle of Roundup, swung it back like a pendulum, and sent my grass-stained Titleist screeching across the green and a good 50 feet past the cup. Fortunately, it skidded all the way through the fringe and landed in the rough. I considered it a victory.

Moments later, I was in the fringe battle again. In a twisted case of déjà vu, my ball was fringe-lounging 10 feet from the hole, literally minutes after I had just sent fringe play back a decade with my uncalculated brute force.

My plan this time was to cut back on the muscles and approach the approach with finesse. Well, my dainty attempt at holing out went quite for naught. The pitter patter of putter to ball caused a dribbling stroke that barely rolled off the fringe and hardly cut down any distance between point A and the hole. Nevertheless, I was putting, so “in your face, fringe!”

The rest of the round went by without event, unless you consider cracking the head off a driver, scouring for lost balls in a nearby neighborhood, throwing clubs into trees, and discovering new and exciting ways of carding triple bogies exciting. I don’t. I often experience worse on the driving range.

Thankfully, once I got fringe play out of the way, the rest of the course was smooth sailing. I am used to being in the rough, in the sand, and lying two from the women’s tee box. Those situations are as commonplace to me as three-putts.

It was that awful fringe that really threw me for a loop. Experiencing a part of the golf course that was quite alien to me proved far more difficult than I had realized. I had never blown a golf game on the fringe before. It was kind of refreshing.

Maybe next time, I’ll test the middle of the fairway.

SCORECARD
Driving: Straight and long, with the exceptions of holes 1,3,6-8, 12-15, 17, and the par 3s
Short game: Half of my 113 strokes
Putting: Still owes me reparations for the past three years
Overall: The fringe is not my friend