So I golfed this morning with Joseph Mailander at the nine-hole Roosevelt golf course in Griffith Park — one of my favorites. It was a beautiful day and it was great to see him and I was very much appreciative of his willingness to suffer my lack of skills given my golf this day was something of a “last chance” desperation round on a “grown-up” set of holes, prelude to the tournament I’ll be playing on a PGA championship-level course in Savannah on Wednesday.
When I finally put my last putt into the cup on the ninth’s green I ended with a 20 over-par 53. To put it in perspective I would have been ecstatic with a 50. So I was not unhappy.
Closest chance I had to birdying a hole was the par-3 7th (though I ended up fucking four-putting for a two-over 5).
Closest I came to killing somebody after someone could have been killed was the hole previous, a 310-yard downhill straightaway that for whatever reason is notorious for being slow, thus resulting in trailing golf gropus stacking up behind whoever’s playing. This was certainly true for us as the group ahead really dallied, bringing the foursome behind us up to collectively twiddle our thumbs until it was finally our turn.
When it was, our foursome (Joseph and I were joined with a very nice pair of Asian men — who had far greater skills than us, and thankfully enough patience to endure us bringing up the rear) each hit off the tee, and as is the case eventually wound up on the green, after not a particularly inordinate amount of time.
But apparently it was too much for one of the fuckers in the foursome behind us because just as one of the Asian men was lined up to putt, in comes a drive that smacks into the green and lands about 10 feet from the player about to putt, and about 20 feet from where I was standing beyond him.
Granted it was one hell of a shot. But even more granted was that it was a major golf no-no, violating all three of the major rules of Basic Fucking Golf Etiquette & Safety:
- Make sure no one gets hit by a ball, a club or a cart
- Wait until the players ahead of you are out of range before hitting.
- Yell “fore†loudly if your shot has a potential of hitting any other players.
As such it was too bad the assbasket had to do what he did instead of waiting the additional minute or two it would have taken us to finish and put the flag back and move on to the next hole. Because my reaction the moment the ball thudded into our immediate proximity was to bellow at the top of my motherfucking lungs something along the lines of “Oh hell no you didn’t!” or “That’s fucking bullshit!” and then tromp over to where the ball had stopped, pick it up and discard it as hard as I could out of play over the fence behind me.
I bellowed further rhetorical questions such as “what the fuck is that shit?” and “who the fuck kind of idiot are you?” and when the perpetrator raised his arms as if to say “well hurry the fuck up!” I replied with “don’t you dare make this about how we might not be playing fast enough to suit your idiotic ass!”
Since he didn’t come charging down the fairway to get a piece of me damn if I didn’t close the conversation with a compliment: “That was a great shot but don’t do that bullshit again!”
Our game continued on through the last three holes and from that point on the foursome kept well behind us from there on out.
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