12th Excerpt From My Original Golf Diary-Part 2

    Today, our mother gets moved into Legend in Colorado.  What a momentous day!  Our parents have been at 1542 for over 50 years!

Written on 2-23-03.

We just had the Edgertons over for dinner, and Dale and Anna came as well.  Eric and I played Tiger Woods on the GameCube.  He beat me again, but I beat him finally the last time we played over at his house.  I beat him in a skins game pretty badly, and then we tried the par three scenario where you play four different par threes.  I got a 7, which earned me a gold medal.  I got three birdies and a hole-in-one at St. Andrews with a nineteen mile per hour wind!  It felt good to play well enough to beat him even though it was just on the GameCube.  We also played stroke play, and I managed to tie him with a 64.                Tonight, he beat me in match play, though.  I started out three up, and even had back-to-back eagles, one on a par five, and the next on a par four, but he steadily caught up and beat me.

        In the real game of golf, though, I have some good things to write about.  Here is the birdie I earned at Pinon Hills on Presidents’ Day.

Pinon Hills-Hole #13

I hit one of the best draws of my life right off the tee.  A good tee shot goes over the hill on this par five.  I used my 3-wood, and I didn’t take a long time to think about it.  My swing thoughts were to relax my grip and to swing my hands as far away from my head on the forward swing.  It worked!  I was a little over two hundred yards away and the pin was on the front, so I used my 4-iron.  I hit a terrible shot here.  I scuffed it, and it turned out to be a lay-up shot instead of a “going for the green” shot.  From there, I hit a nice 9-iron that went over the flag.  I had a long putt from there that went up over a hill, and then down to the left.  Craig said that it really turned into the hole, but it looked like it got on line and just stayed there rolling into the hole.  It was at least fifty feet away, and we wondered if they keep track of those kinds of stats on the PGA Tour.  That makes birdie #6 this year!  I want forty!

I did have a good plan before I played, and it did really help me focus and play better.  The plan was...

11th Excerpt From My Original Golf Diary-Part 2

Written on 2-19-03.

Tomorrow parent/teacher conferences begin.  I worked late after school today to complete a long Power Point presentation just for these conferences and the RETA class.  Lots of things have happened since I last wrote, some good and some bad.  I’ll start with the bad just to get it over with.  Eric has defeated me a lot lately.  Probably more than I have beaten him.  I don’t take pleasure in beating him too much, but I really don’t like losing!  I thought of another good thing about losing and not playing well sometimes.  That means that Eric and all the other people who beat me sometimes are setting the bar.  I want that bar to be very high if I expect to get better.  Also, getting beat gets me fired up and makes me want to practice and get better.  So, that’s three reasons to suffer through a bad round.  The alternative is to play against people worse than I am and beat them all the time.  Boring!  Who wants to do that? 

In real golf, he has shot some pretty low scores on the golf course during...

10th Excerpt From My Original Golf Diary-Part 2: Weighty, Dream Stuff

Written on 12-9-02.

Hello again!  No birdies to write about.  I played terribly.  Eric beat me easily.  I would like to say that I am not good sometimes.  I don’t play up to my ability sometimes.  Okay, I stink sometimes!  

        I shot a 53 to Eric’s 45!  I know that I can play better than that.  I didn’t enjoy the round at all.  Nothing seemed to work.  I’ve read that you’ve got to love golf even when it’s “bad”, but I truly hated it that day even though I did try to play the “glad game”.  

        I was thinking to myself, “What can I get out of this round?”

        I couldn’t think of anything.  My answer now is that I needed to play that badly in order to be able to say later that I used to play that badly.  It’s not much of an answer, but it was the best I could come up with.  I did catch myself getting upset after missed putts, so I reminded myself to finish my routine by accepting the results, but that was hard to do.  I made some really bonehead putts that were either too short or too long.  They were difficult to accept.

        I just finished an aerobic workout.  I watched taped footage of Tiger winning last year’s William’s World Challenge while I ran.  He made ten birdies to catch Vijay Singh.  If he can do it, I can do it!  Heck, if all of those guys on the tour can do it, why can’t I?  Every time I watch a golfer on video I pretend I am that person.  I might not look like him, but I pretend.  If they are short and stocky, but their hair is like mine, I look only at their hair and think, “That’s me!”  If they are tall like me, but have different hair, I look at their height, not their hair, and I think, “That’s me!”

        I thought of another goal I would like to attain.  I want to be the first non-pro to go pro on the Senior Tour and make more money than any other “regular” pro has ever made on the Senior PGA Tour.  Then I want to give most of that money away to charity.

        I want to be an inspiration to all thirty-somethings who think they have a shot at playing on the Senior Tour.  I want to inspire guys just like me who may not make it on the regular tour, because they are too old, or they haven’t played since they were four, or they didn’t play in high school and then college, and they want to play and do well on the Senior Tour.

A Brief Update on My Father

Written on 2-22-23.

        That was a cool date for last year, I bet.  I am in the kitchen working on my coffee project, and I am waiting to see if we are having a CORE Zoom meeting.  It’s 11:01 now, but I am not hearing or seeing anything.  I bet it is cancelled due to the big SIP Gatherings that are coming up on tomorrow and Friday.

Written on 3-16-23.

Wow!  Almost a month since I last wrote.  It is understandable.  I am sitting in Room 404 at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Lakewood.  Dad is stirring and groaning a bit in his bed.  He has a pained expression on his face; it isn’t a restful expression.  He does get out of here today!  That’s part of the good news.  The other part is the reason he is being released: he is free from the c. diff. infection.  The bad news is that we could not get him into a rehab facility in Colorado Springs.  He just rolled over to get his weight off of his back.  Now, he rolled back.  He is so much better now that the infection is gone, but then there is the bad news: he has a long road ahead of him.  How could that be?  He had a long road behind him.  Here is a short list of words to demonstrate what we have all been dealing with.  Dad said it about a month ago before going into the hospital, “Life is getting harder.”

He really had no idea.  I am going to play Pass the Pigs with him to distract him.  He is “panting” because of the pain now.  

I have won two and Dad has won two.  We are playing the tie-breaker now, but we just got interrupted by the nurse and medications.  They are boosting him up now to help him get more comfortable.  I am winning 78 to 0, but I could roll an oinker.  Okay, back to the game.

I ended up winning in a rout.  I am not letting his sickness allow him any charity.  It was great to play another game with my dad.  We need to finish our Sequence game that we started when he was in the hospital.  He was in there for 27 days, and seven of those were in the ICU.