For Whom Golf Is A Religious Experience, Part 2
Have you read part one yet? Read it here!
There is a group of guys that I have been golfing with since 2012. While I wouldn’t say they’re exactly the type of extreme golfer I described above, each of them are accomplished golfers in their own rite. All three of them are definitely more skilled and serious about the sport than I ever was, so just being around and having a chance to learn from these guys has definitely helped me up my game. But beyond that, it’s the genuine camaraderie, joking around and good-natured ribbing that makes golfing with this particular foursome so enjoyable. Just for laughs, I thought I would present this two-part blog series as a way of introducing you to each of these characters, while recounting some of the funniest stories from our times together out on the course.
Chris the Hack
Although I have always enjoyed golf, I never played enough to get really good. So, I would have to consider myself a hack golfer. When I was a teenager working at Witmark Catalog Showrooms, I actually saved up enough money to buy a brand new set of Northwestern clubs, and although my fancy new sticks should have helped to at least give me the appearance of being a legitimate golfer, any modest gains were offset by the fact that I lugged around my new clubs in an ugly, hand-me-down brown pleather bag with a mismatched black shoulder strap. Honestly, I probably associate more with the goofy persona that I portrayed in the “How to Golf” video that my friend Brad Thomas and I made for our Mass Media class back in high school. In this classic Thomas-Knapp production (which I’m sure there is still a copy of somewhere, buried deep in the internet on someone’s private YouTube channel—hint, hint, Brad if you’re listening, post a link to the video on the Accessiversity FB page), the two of us, Chris and Brad Annoying (A.K.A. the Annoying brothers) win an all expense paid trip out to a golf resort in Colorado. The resort, owned by the club’s proprietor (played by our classmate Andrea Bird) is where we were to receive free lessons from their resident golf pro (portrayed by our other classmate Kosby Winne). The endless string of lame jokes, slapstick comedy and silly gags was loosely based on actual events, namely that nobody would ever mistake Brad or me as serious golfers.
When I wasn’t playing a terrible golfer on TV, I struggled with consistently hitting the ball in real life. I had a horrible slice when using my driver, my sand wedge was non-existent and I was always more comfortable with my short irons game. My one saving grace was that I had a consistently good touch when it came to my putting, not exactly something you want to hang your hat on since the greens of most 72 par golf courses are deplete of orange metal bumpers, and there are no tricky windmills or imposing clown statuettes for you to navigate your brightly colored ball through.
My claim to fame – what would later go down in the annals of the sport – is what we would simply refer to as my magic seven iron. Like most golf stories, these sorts of events take place in the company of a relatively few number of people. So, over time, there is a tendency to embellish those first-hand accounts, while there are fewer opportunities for facts to be checked or disputed. Such is the case with the story of the magic seven iron, events that took place sometime around 1993.
As it were, my best friend Matt is the only other credible witness that could either substantiate or challenge the events I am about to retell, and fortunate for me, Matt doesn’t have his own blog, and thus, does not have a platform with which he can call B.S.
Matt and I had gone out to Chisholm Hills golf course in Holt to distract me from some of the issues with my left eye that I was just starting to experience. On this particular trip we opted to play eighteen holes, which was unusual for us back then, because the cost of a round of golf equated to putting about a week’s worth of gas in your car. About two or three holes into our first nine, we came up to another pair of hack golfers playing right in front of us. To avoid slowing us down, they asked whether we wanted to form an impromptu foursome to finish out the round. We agreed, and played on with the strangers.
I’m not sure of the actual number of the hole, but there is a hole that finishes near the clubhouse and parking lot, before you have to take the cart path to switch over to the other nine. The important thing to know here is that there is a relatively wide, slightly slanted green situated some 20 yards in front of the parking lot.
We were hitting our second shots off the tee, so I’m thinking that this must have been a par 4. Matt’s was the first ball that we came upon, as it rested to a stop some 10-15 yards behind the 150-yard marker. Matt selected a five iron, and after completely smoking the ball, it one-hopped and hit a small pine tree sitting adjacent to the hole before eventually coming to a rest in the fringe just off the green. My ball was only a few yards in front of where Matt’s ball had been, so not wanting to overshoot the green, I decided to go up a couple of club lengths just to be safe. I grabbed my seven iron, took a nice easy swing and watched in amazement as the ball jumped off of my club face, soared majestically into the sky and just kept climbing. Even as it was happening, the four of us stood there in shock trying to make sense of what we were seeing, the only noise breaking the silence, a comment from one of the guys we were golfing with who just exclaimed, “Woah, easy Cecil!” (in reference to former Tigers’ slugger Cecil Fielder who was known to regularly blast tape-measure home runs off the façade, and occasionally even over the roof of the old Tiger Stadium).
My ball ended up going way over the green and landed about two rows of cars back in the parking lot before pin-balling off several fenders and skipping along the asphalt surface. I hadn’t heard any glass shatter so I was pretty sure I didn’t break any car windows or crack any windshields, however, with all the commotion that I had created, when I went to retrieve my ball from the parking lot, I wasn’t looking to draw any more attention to myself than necessary. I didn’t exactly stand around to carefully survey the damage.
We parted ways with our companions and Matt and I made our way over to the next section of the course to play our second nine holes of golf. As we played on I continued to struggle with my game, and after one of my drives only traveled a mere 50 yards off the tee, leaving me some 200 yards from the flag, I jokingly grabbed my seven iron saying that it was the only club that was working for me. Once again I took a nice, easy swing, and just as before, the ball jumped off of my club and went flying, this time landing off to the right of the green leaving me about a fifteen foot chip for my third shot.
And so, it continued throughout the remaining holes. For whatever reason, on that specific day, during that particular round of golf, I had one of those rare out-of-body experiences that can’t be explained. Something just clicked, my body and trusted blade working in concert to produce superhuman results. And to illustrate what a humbling and frustrating sport golf can be, I was never able to replicate the magic with my seven iron after that day., leaving me no choice but to begrudgingly return to my old earthly realm and once again walk amongst mortal men.
Like many of the other aspects of my life that got upended when I started to experience my health issues and began to lose my sight, I took what ended up being about a fifteen-year hiatus from the game of golf. That’s not to say that I didn’t have at least a few opportunities to get back out on the course to test the waters (and sand traps, and woods, and cart paths of adjacent holes, etc.)
One time my wife Teresa and I went golfing with her cousin Scott and his wife at this course up over the bridge in St. Ignace. I remember how it had this hole that ran alongside of U.S. 2, mainly because my wife Teresa (who’s slice is almost as bad as mine) had sent her drive into the path of an oncoming eastbound semi-truck, and that’s just not something you tend to forget. Another time, my father-in-law and I were golfing that same U.P. course and found ourselves confronted with a pair of 100+ foot approach shots that were positioned on opposite sides of this wide fairway. My father-in-law parked the cart on the right side of the fairway near where my ball sat, grabbed his nine iron, and walked across the wide fairway to then hit his shot. Since he was actually closer to the green than to the cart, I thought I would save him the hassle of having to walk all the way back over to me, so I got behind the wheel of the golf cart and started heading toward the green. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not an idiot. This wasn’t my first rodeo, and I knew that you don’t drive your golf cart up onto the green. So, as I approached the green I saw a light colored splotch of ground off to the right, which I assumed to be the cart path that I would need to take to get around to the backside of the green. As I attempted to keep this target fixed in my sights, steering the cart toward this lightly colored splotch of ground off in the distance, three things happened in very rapid succession.
First, I heard tree branches hitting the topside of the golf cart’s plastic canopy. Second, I heard my father-in-law yelling at me from across the green, and finally, I felt the front end of the golf cart I was driving drop into the edge of the sand trap that I had obviously mistaken for a cart path.
It took both of us getting down in the sand trap and simultaneously pushing up against the front end of the cart to dislodge it from the deep, sandy depression. And while I know courses usually provide rakes for people to smooth out the sand traps as a courtesy to the golfers playing behind them, I’m pretty sure repairing impact craters from Dukes of Hazzard aerial golf cart stunts are not exactly what they had in mind.
Teresa’s brother Jeff and I teamed up for another memorable golf outing after he had asked for my help planning their cousin Scott’s bachelor party. The first leg of the bachelor party consisted of having a group of guys meet at this course in Grand Rapids called the “Mines”, which incidentally turned out to be this super conservative course that didn’t serve alcohol, and certainly wasn’t ready for the sorts of shenanigans that we were about to inflict on it. As is customary with the epic-themed bachelor parties that our group of guys plan for one another, Jeff and I had come up with a “special” set of rules for the bachelor to ensure that he would not leave the course with his dignity intact. The first rule required that on each hole, Scott had to use at least one of several unorthodox clubs that Jeff and I had brought along for the special occasion, things like a garden hoe, hockey stick, crutch, pool cue, etc. The second, and potentially more embarrassing rule for Scott, required that he remove one piece of clothing per hole. Now just so you don’t think Jeff and I to be the cruel, heartless types, prior to the start of the round, we actually gave Scott a brand-new Speedo to wear beneath his other garb, mercifully adding a net one to the total articles of clothing that he would soon have to remove. Okay, so the goal was for Scott to end the round wearing nothing but his Speedo, and alright, Jeff and I might have added the words “9th hole” on the butt of his swimsuit, but does that make our gesture any less thoughtful or decent?
Scott was a good sport, and although I’m pretty sure we captured at least one picture of him standing in the 9th hole tee box wearing nothing but his Speedo, we eventually came to our collective senses and convinced him to put his t-shirt and shorts back on before proceeding down the final fairway to the 9th green where the course superintendent would surely be looking on from the clubhouse just beyond.
The first real opportunity to get back out on the course came in the form of an invite to play with a group of guys in a charity tournament/fundraiser for one of our friends’ whose police officer dad had been tragically killed in the line of duty. My buddy Matt was one of the guys that I would be playing with, and since both of us were rusty (probably me more so than him) we decided to go to the driving range to hit a few buckets of balls.
If you are wondering what the learning curve for a blind guy getting back into golf for the first time looks like, just reference the photo that accompanies this blog post. This is a photo from the driving range that Matt captured that night. In fairness to me, neither of us thought to bring any tees with us, so spent most of the time hitting balls directly off of the turf. And not all of those divots are my doing, there were a number of sizable gouges before I got there. And did I mention that I can’t see?
In any event, our friend’s charitable tournament did the trick. This first semi-competitive outing got me back in the game, and while I didn’t know it at the time, would soon lead to the formation of the most unlikely of foursomes.
They’re Not Booing, They’re Saying Guzman
Like most workplace friendships, our golf foursome started with some innocent smack-talking, friendly banter exchanged with one another at the water cooler or as we passed each other in the halls of the Victor Center where we all worked together at the State of Michigan. I had previously known Bob Sherer and Jim Lautenschleger from our time working in the Michigan Works! system, Bob and I worked together at Capital Area Michigan Works! in Lansing where we had gotten to indirectly know Jim who had been serving as Christine Quinn’s Business Solutions Manager and right-hand person at South Central Michigan works! down in Jackson. Rey Guzman, the fourth and final member of our group wasn’t actually part of our first outing to Centennial Acres, but just like the impact acquiring Brendan Shanahan had on the Redwings franchise, Rey ended up representing that one missing piece that took us from being a good team and turned us into the hack golfing equivalent of Stanley Cup champions.
Besides being a solid golfer, Rey is genuinely one of the nicest, most decent human beings that I have ever known. He is well liked and respected by just about everyone in the Michigan Works! system, which, as someone who has spent his entire career working in state government, is really saying something.
Rey’s signature move, the thing that he is most known for, is something that he does after hitting a really good tee shot. At Jim’s prompting, Rey mounts his oversized driver and with the shaft of the club dangling between his legs, he throws his free arm up in the air and skips around the tee box pretending to be on a bucking bronc as Jim cheers him on saying, “Ride ‘em cowboy!” Even being blind, it’s one of those things that you just can’t unsee.
Angry Bob
Angry Bob is the unofficial nickname that Rey and I gave Bob after we suspected that his consistently foul mood had to do with some unknown environmental factor or evil spirit emanating from his office on the third floor of the Victor Center. We couldn’t have been more wrong. In addition to relentlessly teasing me about my divots, without fail, making the same lame joke about me somehow trying to dig my way to China, and all the times he harassed me about smoking my cigars down past the band until they were unrecognizable nubs of slobbery goo, it was the offer of a cold beer, of all things, that finally pushed him over the edge and made Angry Bob rear his ugly head.
We were playing this country course outside of Mt. Pleasant. As usual, Jim and I were riding in one cart and Bob and Rey were in the other. Before starting the round, Bob and I decided to split the cost of a six pack of beer, which was now chilling in a cooler in the back of the cart that Jim and I were driving. As we were finishing up the third or fourth hole and walking off the green to head back to our respective carts to drive over to the next tee, I asked Bob whether he was ready for another beer. Convinced that I had heard him say ‘yes’, as I approached him at the tee box of the next hole I extended the cold beer out to him. For this act of kindness, Angry Bob completely lost his shit. He went on and on about how he wasn’t ready for another beer, how he hadn’t asked for one, how dare I assume that he would want a delicious, refreshing LaBatt Blue – I swear I have never seen anybody get so upset about being offered a free beer.
All kidding aside, Bob is a great guy and a better friend. He also has one of the wittiest senses of humor of anyone I know. Once, after I had text my friend Kate to tell her that I had accidentally run into a giant column in the middle of the Lansing Center, she immediately passed the information along to Bob knowing that he would get a kick out of it. Without missing a beat, Bob simply sent her back a picture of the Parthenon, the building in ancient Greece with like a million large stone columns, and just said, “We should never take Chris here”.
L14
Our friend and real-life triple-word Scrabble score Jim Lautenschleger goes by the much more streamlined nickname L14. There are very few who have been able to pull this sort of alpha-numeric nickname off, probably the most notable examples being C3PO and R2D2. But L14’s nickname doesn’t have some cool inter-galactic origins, sadly, it was some paper pusher at the DMV that required him to adopt this abbreviated moniker because it turns out that Lautenschleger isn’t the easiest name to pronounce, and there just happened to be fourteen letters in his last name.
Besides chauffeuring me around the course and faithfully playing the part of my man servant Jeeves, L14 also serves as my official spotter, strength and conditioning coach, and all around seeing-eye Jim.
When L14 upgraded to a new set of graphite clubs, it was me who benefitted, because he gifted me his gently used set of Powerbilt clubs, which were still like-new, and are by far the best set of clubs that I have ever owned. It was L14 who also introduced me to the blind golfer’s secret weapon, the oversized driver, and it was him that picked me up a 550CC Powerbilt driver from a golf show in Grand Rapids, and allowed me to cover his green fees and pay his bar tabs until I had sufficiently laundered the money I owed him for the club, so that my wife wouldn’t see the purchase on our monthly credit card statement and become suspicious.
A Vow of Silence
Golf outings are a lot like deer camp. Some stuff just can’t be told, it’s just better that way. Sure, there’s the stuff you’d expect, dirty jokes, smoking cigars, coolers of beer, and buying the occasional round of whiskey shots from the bar cart. In good conscience, I can’t even tell you why we refer to each year’s event as the Father Nelson Annual Golf Outing, other than it has to do with a joke I played on Bob that involved me demonstrating a rather unorthodox wrestling move which landed Bob in an extremely prone position, while L14 and Rey (who already knew the punchline of the joke) watched on, doubled over in uncontrollable laughter. I can tell you that we always play best ball, that each of us make wagers before the round and whoever ends up with the guess closest to the final score wins the pot. I can share that our code word for whiskey is “accuracy fluid”, and after consuming enough of the stuff you quit caring about being accurate. I can also tell you that these times out on the course, playing with this group of guys, represent the most fun that I have ever had out on a golf course. When you play with the same group of guys for long enough, you start to pile up quite the collection of funny stories. Many of these stories I am not at liberty to share, but below are a couple of my (G-Rated) favorites.
How Do You Like Them Apples?
We were playing the same country course outside of Mt. Pleasant that was referenced earlier in this blog when we came up to this long par 5. Of all our drives, Bob’s was in the best position for taking our second shot, so we headed over to where his ball had landed near this apple tree. Bob had honors, so he went ahead and took his shot first.
Then it was my turn. I walked to where Bob’s ball had been sitting a moment earlier and threw my ball down on the grass and started positioning my feet. Just as I was addressing the ball, L14 stopped me, saying, “Wait Chris, your ball is down in some crap,” and as he bent down to reach for my ball he added, “let me fix that for you”.
Once I got the go ahead from L14 and was sure I was properly lined up, I took a ¾ back swing, and swung down and through the ball making solid contact as I did. Immediately, I heard snickering coming from the other guys. At first, I thought this was because my club hit some overhead branches on my follow-through, but I was quickly let in on the group’s little joke. When L14 had bent over to fluff my ball for me, he had actually replaced my ball with one of the apples from the nearby tree. When I swung through, my substitute golf ball was instantly turned into a cloud of applesauce. Ironically, the apple juices did wonders for cleaning the residual dirt off of the club face of my four iron, and my only regret was that I had wasted one of my best shots of the day on a lousy piece of fruit.
Needless to say, we can’t come anywhere near an apple tree without those guys reminding me of the day I Roy Hobbs the shit out of that apple.
The Day I Almost Killed Bob
In the summer of 2014 our foursome signed up to compete in a joint MEDC-WDA golf outing at Royal Scot golf course out on the westside of Lansing. It was a particularly hot, muggy day, with temps in the high eighties and no clouds in the sky to offer any sort of protection from the sun.
We were well into our round, making our way across the back part of the course when we came up to this seemingly harmless par 4. Our tee shot (can’t remember who’s it was now) landed on the center-right of the fairway. I don’t know who hit first, whether it was Rey or L14, but by the time they had both taken their shots and walked over to take a seat in the nearby golf cart to wait, Bob and I had been standing there in the sun for several minutes.
Well, in the latter part of 2013 Bob had suffered a TIA (Transient Ischemic Attack) which was like a mini-stroke. As a result, Bob was having a hard time tolerating the sun and heat that day, so as soon as he took his shot, he b-lined it for the shade of his cart which was parked on the opposite side of the fairway from where L14 and Rey were still watching on.
When it was finally my turn, I threw my ball down onto the ground near where the others had hit. As I set my feet and addressed the club head of my five iron, L14 and Rey were facing me, somewhere in my 1 o’clock position, and with a direct view of Bob, who recall, was now behind me sitting in his cart near what would be my 7 o’clock.
When I was finally ready to strike the ball, I took a generous backswing, but then something unexpected happened. As I swung down and through the ball, I must have altered the path of my swing because I struck the ball with the heel of my club. Instantly, the ball shot backwards through my legs and on a direct collision course with Bob’s startled face. Bob ducked just in time for the ball to whiz by his ear before rattling around the underside of the golf cart’s plastic canopy, cowering on the cart’s bench seat like a squatting Chewbacca trying to avoid a careless laser blast ricocheting off the walls of a magnetically sealed Death Star trash compactor.
Of the four of us, I was the last to realize what had happened. Almost immediately, I heard cursing coming from a now, even more irritable Bob behind me, quickly followed by an eruption of laughter from L14 and Rey sitting across the way. As L14 began giving his unsolicited instant replay of the entire incident, partly for my sake, but mostly because he just couldn’t help himself, he could barely control his laughter as he described how big Bob’s eyes got in that split second between the time the ball left my club, and that “oh shit” moment of recognition when Bob instinctively ducked his head out of the way.
I think Bob must have been pissed at me because he refused to talk to me for the next four or five holes, and during that time, I had some pretty sizeable divots, so I knew it was serious since it’s not like him to pass up an opportunity to make one of his lame digging to China jokes. Eventually, even Bob was able to laugh about the whole episode. However, from that day forward, at least when it comes to me and my inexplicable trick shots, I’m sure the term “watching from a safe distance” will take on a whole new meaning for Bob, especially after all of the trauma that I put him through.
The Story That Has Yet To Happen
Recently I was having a conversation with L14 and he brought something up from our times out on the course that I hadn’t remembered.
It all started when he was telling me about two different occasions last year when he came within inches of finally getting his first hole in one. The elusive hole in one is the golfer’s holy grail, the quest so daunting that most believe that you are more mathematically likely to see Big Foot, get struck by lightning and win the Powerball all at the exact same time.
Now, since most golf courses are at least partially surrounded by woods, and because avid golfers seem to routinely test the boundaries of mother nature by taking temporary cover out on the course to wait out the occasional pop-up thunderstorm, odds say that eventually one of these nuts is going to catch a glimpse of Sasquatch at the same moment they get lit up by a bolt of lightning. But until they start installing lottery kiosks next to the ball washers, and the underlying theory of probability and statistics is fundamentally altered, the likelihood of this ultimate trifecta will continue to be the stuff of fantasies and dreams.
The part of this that has to be so frustrating and demoralizing for most avid golfers, is that statistically speaking, some statutorily blind, hack golfer like me has almost the same chance of getting a hole in one as they do. The scorecard doesn’t care if the person’s drive was a 160-yard worm burner, or that their ball dropped in the cup only after banking off of a tree limb twenty yards next to the green, the end result is the same. It’s not figure skating or gymnastics, style points don’t count, and there’s no judge from Russia or China standing between you and your gold medal because in their opinion, the ball wasn’t quite in the bottom of the cup.
Without a doubt, all three of the other guys on our foursome are way more deserving of getting their first hole in one than I am. That being said, L14 and I had joked that it would probably end up being me that gets a hole in one on some fluke, freak of nature shot that literally, none of us will see coming.
This gets to the part of the story which I don’t remember.
As we were talking on the phone, L14 asked whether I remembered what I said I would do if I ever got a hole in one while out golfing with our foursome. Of course, I didn’t remember having had this conversation, let alone what my response would have been, the only thing that I was relatively certain of, is that this whole exchange must have happened late in one of our rounds of golf after much beer and accuracy fluid had been consumed, suspicions that were ultimately confirmed when L14 finally revealed the answer to me.
According to L14, I said that if I ever got a hole in one that I would take out my fake eye, set it down next to the hole, and then head into the clubhouse to buy everyone a round of drinks, which is customary for any golfer who has just gotten a hole in one, minus the whole taking out their fake eye part.
Now I’m sure I probably said all of this nonsense, and at the time, it probably sounded like a completely reasonable thing to do, but I can’t help but wonder how this would all play out if I found myself in that position, and I was actually lucky enough to get a hole in one. Legally, I don’t believe L14 has a leg to stand on. But fortunately for him, the rules that govern the golf cosmos supersede any man-made compact, and in the jubilation and euphoria, through the whiskey and testosterone induced fog, there among some of my best friends, chances are that eye’s coming out.
