No garden, just golf.

Astute readers of this blog will notice there was no garden blog last weekend. That was because I was playing golf all weekend. (Nothing too major happened in the garden anyway…though the potatoes exploded, and last night I had to cover them up again. But that was it.) I have some big plans for this weekend, so keep tuned.

But since I was golfing instead of gardening, I thought I would pass along this story. So it was me, my friend Adam from work, and his Uncle Harold, heading out to the course on Saturday morning. It was pretty empty, surprisingly, and when we checked in at the pro shop they said we had a window of about 45 minutes before anyone else teed off. This was great, but as we walked to our carts, the starter came over and said, “Okay gentlemen, this nice young lady will be joining you today”. Now I have no problem playing with women; albeit I do find it a tad annoying because they play from the Ladies Tees, which slows things down a little bit. (And I like to play fast. If I have to wait even a little bit for a shot, I get annoyed, and if I have to wait a long time because the people in front are acting like total morons, I’ve been known to yell at them. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves.) That morning I was annoyed; not because we’d be playing with a woman, but because I’d have to share my cart with someone else, and I just wanted to be on my own that day. (Full disclosure: I was hung over.) But I smiled pleasantly and introduced myself, and she did the same and told me her name was Sandy. The starter described Sandy as “young”, but only because she was younger than him; she was probably around 55 or 60. We didn’t say much to each other on the way to the first tee, but when we got there, waiting to tee off, Adam, Harold and I decided to play for some skins on our own, and we figured out who got how many strokes, and what tees we’d play from. Adam and I decided to play from the Blues (which only measured 6,397 yards, but had a rating of 71.3 and a slope of 134 – pretty tough), and Harold, being 80 and not a long hitter, said he’d play from the White tees (5,993 yards, 69.2 rating, 129 slope). Sandy stepped up and said she was going to play from the White tees as well. This was a tad surprising, as I rarely, if ever, see women playing from anything but the Ladies (Red) tees. (For those not well versed in the variances in tees on a golf course, the Red/Ladies Tees are usually the shortest length on the course. At this place, the Red tees were only playing at 4,720 yards.) I was pleased, as it meant that our group wouldn’t be playing from 3 different sets of tees, and shouldn’t slow us down too much.

To make a long story short, Sandy smoked us all. I had an especially bad day, as the combination of my body detoxing itself, my swing being extremely inconsistent, and the course being very narrow (between Adam, Harold and myself, we lost 30 balls in that one round), I was all over the place. Sandy, however, made it look like we were playing a mini-golf course. She consistently hit fairways and greens with her long, graceful swing, and only on one hole did she ever get in trouble. Here are our scorecards, hopefully formatted so you can read them.

Doug: 8 8 7 5 7 3 6 3 4 (51) 8 8 4 4 5 8 7 5 6 (55) = 106
Sandy: 4 5 4 5 3 3 5 3 4 (36) 4 7 4 3 4 4 4 3 6 (39) = 75

(There’s nothing like starting BOTH sides with back-to-back 8’s, I tell ya.)

She had 3 birdies, and easily could have had 2 more with short putts that she missed. It was an amazing display, and is probably the best round I’ve seen shot on a golf course. She did admit that she used to be a teaching pro, but that was 20 years ago, and now has about a 6 handicap. She also mentioned that since she joined the club a month ago, she was having a hard time finding people to play with. She doesn’t like playing with other women (“They don’t want to play from the real tees, and they’re always playing for dimes”, she said), and said a lot of the male members there won’t play with her, saying either she plays too good for them, or that she intimidates them into playing worse. I told her that us men have pretty sensitive egos, especially when it comes to being beaten by a woman, so I wasn’t surprised she ran into so much resistance – though none of us had any problem with it. I guess I could always use the excuse that “she put me off my game” for the reason why I shot so poorly, but that wouldn’t be true. (Besides, I’ve shot much worse without 2 X chromosomes in sight plenty of times.) Either way, it was a lot of fun to watch someone play so well, and do it so easily. Maybe when I’m 60 I’ll get there myself.