Draw a Stripe or Stripe a Draw?

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Aztec Municipal Golf Course-Hole #3-Birdie #14 of 2017

     I had no “real” commitments today, so I got to play some stress and guilt free golf.  Thankfully, my back and knees survived.  C.J. chose stroke play today, but it was a little different from how we usually do it.  C.J., on the front nine now, takes pops on holes #1 and #9, and he tees off from the red tees on #3, #5, and #7.  On the back, he takes pops on #13, #14, #15, and #18, but he doesn’t move forward on any of the teeing grounds.  It’s very fair considering he has lost some distance.

     This birdie, in my opinion, was well-deserved.  There really is something to be said about having a lay-off and playing well because of that time away.  I was able to “stay out of my own way” on many holes today, and this was one of them.  My driver helped me get on the fairway, and from there I was just a pitching wedge away.  

     Before we teed off on #1, I told C.J. about a clever play on words I had recently thought of.  I was thinking about what my favorite club might be when I cleaned Eric’s and my clubs the day before.  Eric let Guy borrow his clubs, so I was cleaning them up to get them ready to return.  Since I had all the cleaning stuff out, I cleaned my own as well.  I thought a favorite club would...
draw stripes over and over again, and then I reversed it in my head and thought that it could stripe draws, too.  Clever, right?

     Well, my driver striped a draw on this tee shot.  It was beautiful!  My pitching wedge, contrarily, looks ugly!  It is so dinged up that the sole looks like a toothless old man.  I think it got a new ding when Guy borrowed my clubs to go to Sedona.  That’s fine, though, because it’s the club I go to when I need a club that can get scraped up.  It’s like our GMC truck; it’s okay if it gets scratched, because it’s a 2001 with nearly 170,000 miles.  

     As ugly as my pitching wedge looks, however, it can still make pretty swings, and that’s what it did on this hole.  My ball flew over the left side of the cottonwood trees heading straight for the hole on the top tier.  My ball mark was 12 feet to the right of the hole, but my ball still rolled all the way to the collar just off the back.  I barely got my ball rolling, or that is how it felt, but it just kept on going and going, and then it dropped into the hole.  

     Like I said, from where these tees are now, this birdie was well-deserved.  C.J. and I commented on how I would have earned some strokes on the rest of the field, because it is an extremely rare birdie on this hole from where those white tees are now.  

Aztec Municipal Golf Course-New Hole #13-Birdie #15 of 2017

     After the front nine, I was ahead of C.J. by four strokes.  He shot a 46, and I shot a 42.  We both ended badly.  I would have broken 40 if I had earned a par on hole #9, but he and I both got triples.  Yuck!

     On this hole, I attempted to drive the green, and I was picking leaves at the tops of the trees as my targets, so I did that here, too.  My ball flew straight, so I drew a stripe with my driver this time.  I guess that makes my driver my favorite club.  

     It took a bit of searching, but we found my ball just ahead of the bunker this time.  The bad news was that it was in some really thick grass, and I would have to swing down and through the ball since my left foot was much lower than my right.  The ball swished out nicely, though, and it bounced just off the green, but it rolled onto the green and stopped less than five feet from the hole and to the left (the flag was on the back right side).  I aimed a bit to the right, and I thought the ball would miss on the left, but it caught the left edge and dropped in cleanly (no liperdoodle sp?).

Until next time…