A GOLF STORY

Good afternoon, Sports Fans

     I'd like you to meet my husband, Larry.  A perfectly lovely man, who loves golf.  I mean it, he LOVES golf.  He started going out to the Como Park Municipal course in his St. Paul neighborhood when he was seven or eight years old with his little brother Al, or buddy Mike.  They'd sneak onto the course on those long, humid summer nights, when the sprinklers were on and the mosquitos thick, swinging their dad's clubs.
     Later, before he was old enough to drive to a real summer job at the paint factory where his dad worked, Larry took up caddying for a living.  Scrawny, lanky, sometimes hauling double, watching the weekend duffers, he learned how to think a round.  And when he got his first car, he, Mike, and Al would drive over to the football stadium at the U where, in the season of snow, a driving range was set up inside, beneath the bleachers.  Under the watch of Gopher coach Les Bolstad, he took up playing leftie, and the future was set
     Didn't play for the U, he tells me, not good enough.  Maybe, but having to work his way through college, these probably wasn't enough time in any case.  But he still lived near Como Park Muni, could still go out after dark with, by then, his own leftie clubs.
     Life happened.  He got married to me, strapped on the suit and tie and went to work managing other people's money, first for IDS, then Columbia Management out here in Portland, where we settled and raised our family.  Kind of a numbers guy, which would, later, prove to be a problem.
     He still got out a fair amount to the club in Tualatin, which he joined along with his friend Robb.  Got a good handicap, shot in the high seventies, low eighties.  Being in Portland, the two could go out all year round, sometimes negotiating a frost delay, enduring all but the most driving rain.  Mudders, you could say.
     And the years rolled on.  Kids left home.  We moved into town.  He joined the wonderful new Pumpkin Ridge golf club.  Robb, too.  A real golf club, no swimming pool for the wife and kiddies, and if there's a men's poker game, I don't know about it.  You'd have to ask someone else.  No silly day when women couldn't be on the premises.
     So I began to take up the game a little.  Me, I grew up in the country, no golf course for miles around.  Dad didn't play the game.  I never watched it on TV.  Therefore, an absolute tabula rosa.  I took a few lessons.  Went out to the course a few times at odd hours when my beginner's play wouldn't slow the foursome behind us.  We began to go to golf destinations on our vacations.  I learned how to manage my emotions when we were paired with strangers, that is, not to cry and kick my golf bag and so on.  And gradually I came to enjoy this infuriating, addictive game, although not really until I freed myself from the tyranny of the score card.  Just live in the moment, nothing behind or ahead of this one shot.  So I'm happy, leave me alone.
     Larry retired from his years of watching the ebb and flow of other people's money.  Now free to play as much golf as he liked, his scores perversely, began to climb.  Mid-eighties.  Okay, not that good, but.  High eighties.  Low n-n-n- well, you know.  Something must be done.  That's when he began charting, I believe it's called in the money profession.  Soon he began taking so much time between holes recording data that he forgot to notice the blackberries, ripe for picking, along the sixth, carpet of fallen apples on the tenth.  The rain.  Or not.
     "What on earth?" his wife would ask, as he noted the distance of the drive, greens in regulation, how many chips, how many putts, brand of ball used.  A system of pusses and minuses augmented the whole numeric thicket on the card.  "Why?"
     "So I'll know what to work on."
     "Ah.  You'll look at all these old cards and . . ."
     "Of course not.  I record the data on my computer."
     And work he did.  Hours.  On chipping, which had now been statistically proven to be the worst offender.  But his chipping did not improve, and his gloom expanded to fill our entire house, the garden, the neighborhood.
     At this point in the story, let me introduce Aaron.  He's our personal trainer and, I think, our friend.  He loves golf, too.  He and Larry talk golf.  Aaron devises special exercises.  They do not help.
     Aaron and I put our heads together and create a strategy.  Next time Larry and I golf together we will play a sort of scramble-type format wherein we both drive, then hit each other's ball alternately all the way to the green.  The theory is that he will not be able to record any meaningful numbers, although he will certainly try.
     To our mutual surprise, this proved to be fun.  If he had to blast a long iron from the sand where I'd put my drive, that was okay.  If his drive wandered into the rough?  Oh well, not his problem.  Suddenly we were laughing.  He could chip just fine, if it were my ball that had failed to make the green in regulation.
     We played that way all summer.  Robb was off in Montana, so I was the temporary BFF, the golf buddy.  And there must have been something about pulling my irons out of the fire, as he put it, which relieved the pressure of all those numeric evaluations to which he'd been subjecting himself.  He couldn't post a score for weeks, but he was making wonderful shots.  The kind that amazed those strangers we got paired with.  In fact, I got better, too.  Weird.
     I don't know how this story ends.  Fall is in the air, and Larry has gone to Spokane for a few days -- the rump sessions of a guys' tournament held every spring.  He'll have to keep score.  I hope he notices the pumpkins turning orange in the field, the rows of corn, the autumn sun.  We'll see.