Because it's Eric's birthday today, and the pros are playing at Torrey Pines for the Farmers Insurance Open, I am posting this entry from over ten year ago...
Written on 6-18-09.
Written on 6-18-09.
Well, they do
have wi-fi here at the Inn at Sunset Cliffs, but they have it for only half of
the building. Unfortunately, it’s on the
half of the building that we aren’t in.
So, I am sitting in the room next to the office where the wi-fi is strong,
the U.S. Open is on a big Gateway flat screen television, and it’s nice and
quiet. Except for the cars going by
outside. And the guy in the office
talking on the phone.
This is our last
night here. What a trip so far! We’ve done a bunch of touristy activities
since we’ve been here. Let me see if I
can recap.
On Sunday, we
left for Las Vegas. We spent one night
there at the Hilton. Before we left for
San Diego on Monday, we rode the ride called Insanity on the top of the Stratosphere. James and Kyle went first. It was expensive! Wow!
For James, Kyle, Eric, Danielle, Rebecca, and I to go up to the top, and
for James and Kyle to ride one ride, it cost $95.00. It was $15.00 just for people to go up to the
top. To describe the ride, I’ll just
copy and paste the explanation of it right off of the Stratosphere web site…
Insanity
the Ride is a truly mind-bending experience! A massive mechanical arm extending
out 64 feet over the edge of the Stratosphere Tower at a height of over 900
feet, Insanity will spin you and several other passengers in the open air at
speeds of up to three 'G's. You'll be propelled up to an angle of 70 degrees,
which will tilt your body into one position - facing straight down! If you're
brave enough to keep your eyes open you'll be rewarded with a breathtaking view
of historic downtown Las Vegas. Experience Insanity and walk away to tell the
tale!
James, Kyle,
Rebecca, and I lived and walked away to tell the tale. I didn’t mind the height so much, but the
spinning was not so great for me. I
became dizzy enough to have my vision blur, so I wasn’t “rewarded with a
breathtaking view of historic downtown Las Vegas.” When it was 3-G spinning me around, it...
was
more like a moving mixture of grays and whites and browns. For some reason, all of the saliva left my
mouth, too. I had to constantly swallow
in order to keep (or even get) just a bit of saliva in there.
Late on Monday we
arrived at the Inn at Sunset Cliffs. On Tuesday morning, we all went to the beach
first thing. We had a blast, but the
children had the most fun going out into the water. James was very eager to go, and he was the
first one in. Poor New Mexico kids. They don’t have big waves of salt water,
waves that they can dive under or turn around and swim with, trying to get on
top of them with their bodies. They have
Lake Powell, which is magnificent in its own right, but nothing like this!
After the beach
and lunch, we decided this was the day and this was the time to go play golf at
Torrey Pines. It was spontaneous
decision to go play that afternoon, and I was thrilled that we were going! Because we were going right away, as far as
our stay in San Diego was concerned, the discussion about it would be
over. We would no longer have to worry
about when we could fit it in with any of our other plans.
Eric forgot to
bring the shorts that he had ironed just for playing golf, so he borrowed my
brown shorts. They were a bit too big
for him, but he cinched them up with a belt.
At least he had a nice shirt. I
played with my black pants and red San Juan College shirt.
I had no idea
what to expect when we got there. Would
we have to wait two hours like the guy on the phone for reservations had told
me? Which course would we play, the
North or the South? Was it the North or
the South the pros played in last year’s U.S. Open? Oh my goodness! I forgot!
I was so nervous to play and so tired and wired from the traveling and
the beach, that I thought it was the North.
Wasn’t it the North that cost $140.00/round; that must have been the pro
side, right? How would I play? I got nervous thinking about what my
performance might be like, but I did my best to put those thoughts out of my
mind. I would do my best like I always
do. I was so happy to be there!
I was so happy
and eager to get going, to find out when and where we would play, that I left
Eric behind in the parking lot. I walked
through a “tunnel” next to the pro shop and saw a line (about ten people) on
the balcony there at the starter’s booth/office.
It was getting
late, going on 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, so I thought if we really have to
wait two hours, we might not finish eighteen holes, and I really wanted to finish eighteen holes. The lady who was a few people ahead of me in
line said something like, “Well, that’s not what I was told on the phone, but…”
and walked away. Oh no, people were
walking away disgusted! Would we get to
play?
When the guy
behind the tinted starter’s window told me we could go out on the North right
now, right behind the group that was teeing off at that moment below the
balcony, I said yes. I was too
embarrassed to ask if that was the side the pros played. I could hear his thoughts if I did ask him,
“What an idiot! Don’t you know which
side the pros play? Do you even know how
to play golf? Get lost! You can’t play
here if you don’t know which side is which.”
I paid my $180.00
for the two of us (Eric paid me for his half later), and I immediately knew
that we were not playing the side the pros play since the price was so low, but
I didn’t really care; we were able to get going right away at Torrey Pines, no
two hour wait, and I felt warm with happiness.
We were about to play Torrey Pines!
At first we were
alone, but suddenly someone came over. I
asked if he was going to join us, and he said he was. We introduced each other and I learned his
name, Tom. I later found out he was in
sales. He sells stuff for construction,
and he said, with the economy as bad as it is now, sales are not so good.
Soon after
meeting Tom, Jim came up in a cart. He
knew Tom. They play together once a
week. They played match play. Tom walked and wore pants. Jim rode and wore shorts. Eric overheard that Jim was also in sales,
but I don’t know what kind. I have his
card. I should look and find out. Okay,
it says he is a marketing representative for a software company.
What really
stands out for me about Jim is that he had really small feet for his size. I felt comfortable enough to talk to him
about this by eighteenth hole. He is 6’
1”, but his feet are a size 9! He was
also the better player of the two. He
was working, throughout the entire round, on his tee shots with his
driver. He had learned something from a
lesson about keeping his weight more on his left side at the beginning of his
drives in order to make sure he followed through all the way to his left side
at the end of his drives. He said it
felt very strange to emphasize the left side at the beginning when using a
driver. He did leave a few shots out to
the right by not coming all the way around (or through), but by the end of the
round, he had it figured out and it was working really well.
Eric and I did
not play a game, at least not from the start.
We just played, happy to be playing, doing our best to adjust to a brand-new
golf course. Mostly, golf courses are
all the same. They all have teeing
grounds, fairways, and greens. Most have
yardage markers, signs that tell about each hole, and flagsticks to show
players where the holes are. The holes
are all the same size.
They are
immensely different in other ways, though.
The types of grasses are different (more on that later). The views and environments are different. The air density and altitudes vary. The difficulty varies from course to course,
too, of course.
After the front
nine, Eric thought I had done better, but when I added it up the first time, I
had added wrong. I thought he had done
better, but I actually won by just one stroke, my 50 to his 51. We both had two snowmen, but I adjusted them
to handicap sevens.
Sadly, on the
front, I had three pretty bad holes in a row.
Those holes turned out to be my three favorite holes, which made me a
bit sad because when I play beautiful holes at beautiful golf courses, I want
to play them beautifully. Holes #5, #6,
and #7 were my favorites. They were the
holes by the ocean. I had a great drive
on hole #5, but I messed up my approach by not checking and knowing the
yardage. Six shots later, two from two
different bunkers, and I had my worst score of the day.
#6 was not as
bad; I was just disappointed that I missed my par putt. This was the downhill par three, the one Tom
said was the signature hole for the North Course. I chose my pitching wedge, but I pulled it a
bit and missed the green on the left side.
It landed in the kukuya sp? grass, or as Jim called it, the ku”kill”ya
grass. My chip put my ball just above
the hole, less than six feet away. My
putt grazed the hole on the right side, but I made the comeback putt for a
bogey.
#7 was okay. I got a double. I pushed my drive into the trees and bushes
up on the hill on the right side there.
I hit a provisional, but this one was not much better. It went along a similar line, but it was not
as long. Because it was shorter than my
first drive, it was not in the bushes. I
hit my approach over the trees and short of the green. From there, I got up and down for a six.
Written on 6-20-09.
I lost a ball on
hole #11. I felt my left knee buckle
(just a bit) on my tee shot, so when I followed through I left my clubface wide
open.
Tom said
something like, “You hit that one right over the sh*%house,” which was true
because a bathroom was ahead on the right side.
I walked all
around the green just past the bathroom there while three other guys finished
holing out, but I never found it. I
can’t stand that! I should have hit a
provisional, but I didn’t. I never
thought I would lose it. It went right
over the bathroom. I would have loved to
have gone back and started over, but after all of my looking around, my group
was already up near the green. Hole
ruined, handicap seven written on the scorecard, I trudged over to #12.
On #12, the guys
in the group ahead of us were yelling back and forth about where one of their
balls had ended up. I should have
stopped my routine. It’s funny to me
that when I’m playing with Bruce, or someone I know, I’ll stop and start over
if something bothers me. When I play
with strangers like Tom and Jim, I don’t stop.
I worry that I’ll offend them by being such a picky player, or that
they’ll be upset for slowing down play.
I should have stopped, though, because I hit a low hook/pull that was
way short of the green. A bad shot slows
down play more than waiting to be ready to play my shot.
Oh, one of guys
in that group ahead of us had twisted his ankle way back on #7. I forgot about
that until just now. We were playing the
downhill #6 par three, walking down towards the green when we saw one of the
three guys rolling around on the grass just past the lady’s tees on #7. I didn’t know what was wrong with him at
first; I thought he might be rolling around on the ground with laughter. When he stayed there, however, I knew it was
something else, and I deduced it was a rolled ankle. I was right.
We found out later that the other two were going to go ahead and go
dancing without him later that night anyway.
Poor guy. Rolled ankle and no
dancing for him, abandoned by his friends.
Jim, who was three up in his match with Tom sighed more than a few times
between shouting over the sound of the waves, “Does he need a ride?”
He did. This caused Jim to growl with his chin down,
as if to stifle what would have been an even louder growl. He was already upset with that group due to
an earlier encounter on the driving range.
One of them kept shanking golf balls off the wall down at the far end,
sending ball after ball rocketing all different directions across the other
players practicing there. He recommended
that the guy move (although I bet he wanted him to just stop and leave
altogether), but he didn’t, so Jim just abandoned all his range balls and left.
After acting as
the ambulance cart driver, he returned as we were finishing up on hole #7. Tom was thrilled by this development. He suggested that they had to start over on
the back nine now that the match had been ruined on the front. Jim wanted to continue where they had left
off before he helped the rolled ankle guy, and just skip the hole that he had
missed, but after a lengthy discussion, he agreed. I thought Eric and I were competitive, but
these two love to win as much as we do.
Speaking of
competitive Eric, I asked him if he wanted to play a game when we came to hole
#14. He thought I had beat him on the
front, and like I had written earlier, I had, but just by one stroke. He was killing me on the back nine, though,
with his great start and my lost drive over Tom’s sh*#house, so I asked him if
we should play a game with the holes that were left. He agreed.
He recommended match play for us for the last four holes. Sounded great to me! I was sun and sea water exhausted, and I was
finding it hard to focus, so a little competition with Eric was just what I
needed to wake me up and get me to start playing better.
I beat Eric with
a bogey on #14. My drive landed just
under the branches of an overhanging tree, and I made a terrible tempo swing to
punch the ball out from about 200 yards, but my ball ended up right next to the
green. On my practice swing, though, I
knocked a pinecone off the tree with my follow through, so thinking back on it
now I should have lost that hole with a penalty.
On the next hole,
a short par four, I officially won with a bogey, so I was either one up or even
with him at that point. Then I won the
next hole with a par. I chose my 7-iron
because the tee markers were near the front, the hole was downhill, and going
long looked like it would be a bad mistake.
The flag was in the way back in the middle. I put my ball on the front of the green where
I was able to finish with only two putts.
Eric chose a 5-iron. He pulled
his ball long and left. We think it hit
the cart path, but either way, he never did find it. Now I was either one up or two up.
On the last hole,
a par five, I went left with my drive (so did Jim), left with my lay-up (so did
Jim), and left again with my third shot (and so did Jim!). With fifty yards left, I made one of my best
shots of the day, a pitch out of the ku”kill”ya grass that landed to the left
of the hole and curved nicely to a spot just three feet above it.
I won that hole
too (and that sealed the match for me even if I did lose hole #14 with a
penalty), but I was frustrated with my missed par putt. It reminded me of the time I missed that
birdie putt at Grand Lake with Guy and Curt, the birdie putt we needed to win
our cooperative game together. As I
lined up that final par putt, we were talking about the greens. Jim had told me earlier about how awful they
get at the end of every day since the grass grows quickly and every footprint
makes an indentation that can cause golf balls to go offline. I didn’t see any on this last putt, but I
missed it to the left anyway, unable to put it on the right line to get it to
go in.
That ended our
eighteen holes at Torrey Pines, the same golf course, but the North Course and
not the South Course where Tiger won his U.S. Open by fighting off a failing
left knee and a stubborn Rocco Mediate in a nineteen hole play-off almost
exactly a year ago.
We shook hands
with Tom and Jim. I got their contact
information, so I could get in touch with them later for my article for the
fall issue of Four Corners Golf Magazine. We could not have found two better hosts to
play with for our first time there. They
were polite, competitive with each other, and very helpful. If we had played the South, we would have
never met them, so I’m glad we played the North.
Eric then took
some pictures of me near the pro shop, and I took some of him. A family of golfers asked us to take their
pictures, too. This was a special
place. Taking pictures to commemorate
the experience was an important part.
Back at the Inn at Seaside Cliffs, Eric and I played
some putting games on the long rectangular strip of a practice green
(approximately eighty feet by five feet) that was sandwiched nicely between the
pool where our kids played and the view of the Pacific Ocean, just an
ocean-rusted staircase and a small beach away.
This green had a worn-out turf with some various tiny black tufts where chunks
of it had been taken out. The turf was
worn and paper thin, so it was comparable to putting on a sidewalk covered with
only fuzzy construction paper. It had
six holes, two at each end and two in the middle, all slightly staggered from
their buddy holes.
Eric and I had
some great matches on this homely putting green. First, he beat me in stroke play. He beat me by three strokes. Then I beat him. We played the same Stableford game that I had
played with Bruce. I won handsomely,
beating him by nineteen points!
It was during
this match that I had my most incredible putt.
With the ocean to my back, I had to putt around the hole on the right
side in the middle of the green and get it to go in the hole at the far end on
the same side. I could either go to the
right of the hole in the middle and try to make it, or I could go to the left,
try for the right speed and “lay-up” for a two.
I chose to go for it, but my ball actually went fast enough to go right
over the top of that hole in the middle.
It had enough speed on it that it just went right over the top of the
hole as if it wasn’t even there. Then it
curved gently to the left, straightened out for the last foot or so and fell
in.
We played this
match when Connie came to visit us for a one-night stay. Connie was
Belinda’s Aunt Kay’s partner, and she is a treat to be around. Sadly, Kay died of breast cancer this past
February, so Connie is like a widow, or widower, depending on your point of
view. Either way, she’s very much alone
without her partner now. We were so glad
she got to come spend time with us. We
had barbecued hamburgers (cooked on an incredibly worn out gas grill with one
knob that wouldn’t even turn since it was stripped out), some chicken, Ruffle
Chips and Tostitos with guacamole and salsa, coleslaw, and grapes. What a pleasant dinner with pleasant company
in unbelievably beautiful surroundings.
On our very last
night, Eric and I played two more matches.
First, we played stroke play again.
He beat me again, but this time by only two strokes. Then we played escalating skins for our final
nine holes (it was getting dark) with the last hole worth 100,000.00, and it
came down to the last hole. He had
$150,000.00. I had $130,000.00. The last hole was worth $180,000.00. I really thought I had it, but Eric made the
putt of the night, really the putt of
the entire vacation in my opinion, to
push the money one more hole where his two putts beat my three putts for the
remainder of the money.
I had already
finished with two putts to the hole in the middle on the side the pool was
on. When Eric attempted his first putt,
he put too much speed on it. It looked
like it would go off the green, but it settled precariously on the gap between
the green and the crusty black rubber trim.
In order to get his two, he had to play it off this tiny crack of a
position. His ball could have gone
anywhere! Even if he putted out of the
tiny little divot his ball was in, he had no control over which direction it
would go, and he still had about three feet of green to go across to get it in
the hole.
I told B to get
ready to do a little victory dance. Eric
had already made two long putts during our little competition, so both times he
did, Amanda got up and did a little dance.
She made us laugh both times. She
would stick her arms out, pretend to start a cheer, stick her bottom out,
wiggle it around, and then sit down again.
Very out of character for Amanda, and I think that’s what made it so
funny to us.
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