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.

9th Excerpt From My Original Golf Diary-Part 2

Written on 12-5-02.

        I got to play at Encanto Golf Course in Phoenix this Thanksgiving.  We went to go see Jess during Thanksgiving.  It was a wonderful trip.  Jess very generously gave us our Christmas gifts early, four tickets to go see Cirque Du Soleil-Dralion.  It was fantastic! It was just as wonderful a gift as our trip to see the Titanic Exhibit last year at Christmas.  This show was incredible.  The acrobats/entertainers were amazingly talented.  The children enjoyed it as much as we did.  I especially liked what I called the hoops.  They linked three hoops stacked on top of each other on a square, one stack of hoops on each side of the square.  Then they tumbled and dived and went through the hoops.  They would never touch the hoops, and they would go through backwards and forwards and jump through the top hoop on one side and slip through the bottom hoop on the other.  Sometimes they would go at the same time without hitting each other.  One guy went from a bottom hoop through the top hoop on the other side.  I still don’t know how he did that!  I kept saying the word ‘Wow!’ throughout the entire show.  Joe had burned the CD of the show for me about a year ago, so it was neat to hear the music with the performance for the first time.  I am actually listening to that CD right now. 

I played well at Encanto again.  Last Christmas, Eric and I played the front nine two times.  I remember that my back was still very fragile after I had damaged a disc.  I did not play very well that first day, but the second day we played the front nine again, and I shot my best score ever at that time, a 39!  I even made back-to-back birdies on holes #5 and #6, a first for me.

It was similar this time.  I didn’t play well on the front nine, but got things going on the second nine.  On the front nine, I did par the most difficult hole #9 again!  I hit a long drive with my 3-wood, then a 5-iron up close to the green where I could chip it close and putt it in. 

On the back, I scored all fours and fives!  I shot a 42 with seven bogeys and two pars.  It felt great to play so well during the off-season, especially since I have not been practicing or playing much recently.  

        I played with some interesting characters.  Their names were Jaime (hi-mee) Laza, a master goldsmith who gave me his business card. He had moved here from Columbia some thirty years ago.  He always lined up way to the right of his target.  One time I thought he was going to hit in the water for sure, but he always pulled it back and ended up hitting it straight, just not very far.  Henry Gin was the guy I rode and played with.  He told me that Jaime had polio when he was younger and that’s why he played that way.  After he said that, I did notice that Jaime had one leg shorter than the other and it made a lot more sense.  Jaime rode with a guy named Lee, whose wife was a teacher of emotionally handicapped children.  He was quite opinionated about how public schools should be run.  He even helped his wife get a raise and reduce the number of students she was serving once.  His father was a superintendent.  Out of the three of them, he talked to me the most.  Henry was pretty quiet.  He made potato chips.  He asked me if I liked chips, and I said they were okay, but not very good for you.  Before our round, he took our cart over to his van and rummaged around, finally pulling out three bags of chips, which he gave one to each of us.  They were chips from Hawaii, and they were actually pretty good.  They tasted sweet.  He was not a very good player, but they said they were all playing in a tournament, and with his handicap being so high, I think he won.

I enjoyed the round very much.  I especially liked the back nine.  I was driving the ball very well.  It was also nice to satisfy my curiosity about the back nine.  They said it was tougher, but I thought it was easier.  On two holes, the tee shots were intimidating.  If you sliced it at all, you would be hitting a golf ball into oncoming traffic!  I hit two of my best tee shots on those holes.  They were holes #12 and #13.  It was on hole #12, a par five that I earned par, and hole #15, a 426-yard par four, where I earned the other par.  On that hole, I hit a great 5-wood off of the dirt to just off the green.  

Well, I am all caught up!  I am going to play this weekend with Eric and Chris if the weather is good enough.  Hopefully, I will have some birdies to write about.  Until next time…