Whoa Nellie!

Nuestra Dia

An all day, day with the boys today and I feel like sometimes it seems I’m a single parent, but it’s the vagaries of life today, I guess. I’m sitting here still up at 11 on a Friday and the rest of the family is tucked in. K went out with an old friend and the boys and I had our usual Friday, clashing, separating, laughing with Arnold Schwarzenegger imitations. Chinese restaurant, swimming pool day, cousins over for playtime fun…. I sat out on the back patio contemplating my navel and drinking a rum and pina juice, wondering if I should call my old buddy and see if he’d like to hang, but it’s late, he’s got family too and, well, I might be too wasted to go out again. Hell, I’m 40 and it’s not like I don’t have responsibilities in the morning. This same friend made a great comment once about children. He said, “watching children is a chronic condition,” meaning there is no escape, no one can take them away. You live with it.

Not that it’s all bad. I enjoy the little buggers immensely. I enjoy their struggles and sidelines and joy and pain. I enjoy my wife, lately more so, but we’re not going there… but it seemed today to hit home that I’m de-neutered in a rather special way. See, I’m home every Friday with the boyos. Work long and hard for four days, ten hour days -  but today is my day. So…. I’m there today, burning the shit out of my hands pulling dishes out of the washer, chasing the Benny bull for thuging his brother, whipping up a nice grilled chicken with Vidalia onion marinade and quesadilla for lunch and generally acting all mom-like, when I realize, I’m fucking “MOM” Caps on all those intended. I drove them to Lowes to pick up some birdseed. I helped wipe their ass when they took shits. I had the shoulder. The shoulder was there.

But here’s the kicker, I’m also DAD. Hard-ass dad sometimes because these kids… just… don’t…listen… and honestly, I’d like to slap ‘em around, but I don’t, but it’s hard, and maybe that’s why I’m up at midnight now drinking rum and rambling, wanting to hang with my buddies, re-playing those shit golf holes I fucked up earlier in the week. (By the way folks, I’m on vacation this week…It’s not every week that I get to play golf mid-week and write about it…)

Also, I usually don’t drink rum and pineapple juice but that’s what we had in the house….That’s just one of those checks,,, if you know what I’m sayin’ ….

I’d also like to write about:

• Visiting my mom’s grave yesterday
• Apprehension over the upcoming soccer season
• The idea that I watched nearly an entire Danish “art”
  film just to see a young girl’s breasts

And also those two three-putt greens on Weds. It's fuckin' killin me.

Just read the link...

Played nine holes at Rainbow yesterday in 95 degree heat. It's a little northern Catskills course that should be played with a regular. I say that because I hit several shots that I thought were decent only to find that they ran through the fairway and into trouble. Well, excuses, excuses... I actually had played there once before but not on hard dry fairways that turn my bloop stingers into wormburner lasers.  I started out 7, 8, with a couple unplayable lies and some awful chipping and putting. Yech. But I pulled it back together after that and had four pars and the legit opportunity to make two more. Three-putt greens on both. As I said, yech.

I'm not sure why I wrote the above. Who the fuck cares about my poor golf round....

This guy would care.....

Golfing Mongolia

I thought I'd check back in with the site I mentioned a while back. Two years ago, Andre Tolme, a New Hampshire engineer, decided he would golf his way across the length of Mongolia, perfect golfing territory if you ask me. He completed the trek last summer. Now I notice he's offering Golf in Mongolia tours. Anybody interested? Oh, to drink yak's milk out on the open fairway.... I'm there, baby.

   

4 a.m. golf

This time of year brings me back to the early morning days when I first started playing golf in earnest. Those summers I worked as a night watchman of sorts at our local town park – generally pledged to ensure that my fellow teens weren’t setting up shop with beer parties in the fields and fitness trails. A shift would run from 4 p.m. until 2 a.m. Due to an abundance of coffee consumption (I was ahead of the curve there) my circadian rhythm began to shift later and later. I’d get home all buzzed, veg out with some late, late shows and then watch the sun rise, falling asleep around 7 a.m.

I’m not sure why, but along about July, I got the idea that I could sneak on to golf courses as the sun rose and plow through nine holes in about an hour and a half. I’d park near the course as the sun was just glimmering on the horizon, grab my sticks and head out.

In the hindsight of 20 years, I can only approximate what I encountered and felt on those mornings as the dew made tracks behind me and the deer and fox glanced in my direction. It was peaceful. That’s about all I can say. I did encounter greenskeepers but only once do I remember being asked to leave or questioned on why I was out at 5 a.m. strolling down the 16^th fairway.

I’m not in the habit of inviting people to break the law, but you haven’t experienced the game until you awaken at 4 a.m. (hell, stay up all night…) and head out to a course to sneak in a few holes. There’s wildness to a golf course just before dawn, even a bit of a rush in avoiding the greenskeeper (if he’s even out yet).

Among the best told stories I heard when researching “Bogies and Billygoats” were those of Tom Delaney and his brothers, all caddies at the old Albany Country Club and top flight local amateurs. Their home was just down the road from the old course (purchased by the state in the 1960s for the construction of the SUNY campus) and they relished more than a caddie’s usual right of Monday playing privileges. Tom and his brothers would head out after dinner to play at ACC and often they encountered the rent-a-cop the country club had installed to chase out interlopers. After a while they made a gentleman’s agreement of sorts. If I recall properly, it had something to do with one of the Delaney’s being in uniform serving his country. A vet turning the cheek to help another vet. They did those sorts of things in the 1940s.

My own summer-long early morning experiences had no instantaneous effect except to plant the seed that grows in everyone who fixates on the game. Alone out there with the sun coming up and no one else in sight, it’s easier than normal to lose yourself in the game and your surroundings. Things get brought down to ball, club, distance, swing. Listen to cry of whippoorwill. Notice deer along the Normanskill. Ball. Choose club, gauge distance, swing. It was a beautiful thing.

British Open blather

So many golf stories this week…. But honestly I don’t feel like writing about any of them. Wie wobbles on way to Amateur PubLinx title. Jack does the sayonara thing at the Old Course. ( I choked up myself, and that was just on the highlight reels) and Tiger is relentless. I write this as Round Two winds down, and seemingly there is no way he’s heading anywhere but deeper under par. Classic Tiger Woods – catch me if you can golf. When he’s on this kind of tear, he just gives nothing back to the pack. I’d place even odds on the chance that he can beat the -19 he posted here in 2000.

Closer to home, the Futures Golf Tour is in residence at the local muni this weekend. A few years back I was the media director for this event, which through the years has struggled to find corporate sponsorship. It’s seemingly on solid ground now, sponsored by the city’s fire and police department charity foundation in some kind of odd nepotism, which if you know the history of the muni should not surprise you. Read more about the tourney here. Read more about the nepotism here.

Last year, I took the boys out of a Saturday to watch these young ladies play and ended up carrying both of them through the good part of a nine-hole loop. Their legs aren’t much longer this year and still not of the age where I could guarantee they won’t yell “You smell like poop!” during some lass’ backswing.

Anyways, I gotta go. I feel bad that I don’t post on a more regular basis but some kinda relevant message has to be there. I just haven’t been feelin’ the love lately. I’ll leave you with this odd conundrum….

PGA Star Jim Furyk and Orioles Vet BJ Surhoff

Separated at birth??

Go Os!!!

The Young and the Rest of Us

Oh, yes, the range today. It seems like it's always the range - a small bucket, a chance at redemption. Well, it's Sunday anyways. Boys were with cousins, wife was with sister, and so I range it. My life and my life's predilications are so predictable. Like a siren song, my swing is called to the muni swath... with the Sunday morning crew. No hobbies, but this - my swing. No hobbies but this, a meditation of motion, a way to steady my mind on something infinitely complex and stupidly simple.

Steady my mind, yeah right.... I take my position among the others.... and flog (with fleeting joy.. there's the rub).

I find myself muttering things like "spine angle, fucking spine angle..." and then look up to see others glancing hesitantly (perhaps knowingly) in my direction. I obsess (with pupose, I say) but it's all in the service of what? When I was 18 and starting to play this game, I dreamed of consistent improvement - a game that would take me to some (I don't know what) level of competancy that could banish the double and triple bogey forever....Like I said, I don't know what.

All I know is that when I have free time, this is where I go - pounding out another 60 balls. Likewise, others all around me. I've taken to picturing myself at individual holes played and replaying them range-wise (I'm told this is good practice strategy and it is) but God, I'm obsessed with my fucking swing. Fucking mid-life crisis golf swing. 

So, here, today, a bit of redemption. I'm next to stud kid, (20-23 YO, built) winging it out with some new R7 or something, but I watch for a bit and it's helpful and useful to watch others sometime.  He's got some semblance of swing and mechanics, but, again, he's all over the range. I catch him hitting it high right, high left. He's got the ping but it's all bling.... I grab trusty, aged Ram 3wood and just start popping, because you know it's a game on the range. It's a give and take. Now, I'm not hitting it out more than 200max but it's there - the sweetness, the head down pop thru completion. And I'm feelin' good and the more I pop it straight and narrow the more the kid keeps launching ICBMs to nowhere.

I feel good. I practice my putting. I come home to hearth and home. I'm the man.