If at first you don’t succeed

This Sunday was shaping up to be an interesting day. With all three of my regular companions again bagging golf in favor of other pursuits, I was faced with the choice of going it alone or forgetting it altogether. Fortunately I was able to get someone to join me. After asking last year and this year over and over again, our friend Stuart finally accepted the invitation. This was certainly going to be an interesting round of golf, because Stu has remarked on more than one occasion how his golf game was going great and how he was shooting in mid 80’s regularly, and didn’t want to invest the time to try to bring it down further. I have noticed that many a golfer who shoots in the mid 80’s finds that Saxon Woods is not the easy and generally can slip to the 90’s. Examples are, Bob from last week, Barry’s brother and my brother. All three probably had their worst round at Saxon Woods. Maybe the truth is that the course is actually harder than most. Since we play on it all the time, perhaps we don’t notice how difficult it is. I was curious, and I’m sure Bernie and Barry were too, to see how Stu fared against the mighty Saxon Woods. Alas, it wasn’t mean to be. To quote Bob Seger, “I woke up the sound of thunder.” At 5 am it was thunder and lightning and rain. Even though the radar looked like the storms might end in the next hour, since Stu was coming from Rockland county, we decided to cancel golf for this day. Of course if it were me and Bernie, we would have gone anyway, but Stu was a different story. Maybe he will join us another time. Of course, at 7 o’clock the rain stopped and the sun started to come out, so I ventured over to Saxon Woods to see if I could get a round in. Bernie will be happy to know that not only does the Starter know us by face, but he called me by name. He said he was going to try to get me out, because my regular time had passed. Sure enough at about 8:30 I got out with a threesome. These guys were regulars at that time but 1 of their friends didn’t show. They were a strange bunch.. They introduced themselves, but I quickly forgot their names. They rode in carts and hit from the blue tees. They all probably shot in the high 90’s so they weren’t great golfers, and that made my mistakes less noticeable. My usual style is to talk to the guys I play with, but these guys hardly talked to each other. So I just played my round, which was actually quite forgettable. As soon as I hit the ball these guys raced off in their carts to their balls, they never helped me look for any of my shots. Sometimes they didn’t even know where I was and parked their carts right in my way. These guys would hardly acknowledge when anyone hit a good shot. I found myself the only one who would say “good shot.” I even cracked myself up by saying it to myself when I hit a good shot. They smoked and cursed a lot and one guy got yelled at by the ranger for a new infraction. On the 16th hole, he didn’t even bother to leave his cart on the path and drove it right up to the tee box. This is a no-no in normal times, but after a big rain it is especially bad. After getting yelled at on 16th ranger came after him again on 17 where he was parked on the left side off the fairway and the ranger thought he should have been on the right side. This guy went ballistic and argued for a while with the ranger. After he left, this guy couldn’t stop ragging on what an idiot the ranger was and how he should go bother his wife instead of golfers. To make matters worse, it thundered and rained for about 15 minutes while we were playing. The only unusual thing about the round was that we finished in 4 hours and 40 minutes, with the rain delay. I guess having carts makes a big difference. It didn’t help my game, because I always felt like I was rushing to keep up, but it certainly led to faster play. I am looking forward to next week when Dan and Bernie will return. Bernie can also take back the reins of the blog.