Senior golf becomes a test of sight, memory and aging

     The senior golf season ended mercifully last week in a hail of errant drives, bad pitches and missed putts. Our team, favored to win the season-ending tournament since it had romped in the last event, couldn’t hit the ocean bottom from the deck of the Titanic.

    Our putts hit some edges, and we left three or four on the lip. Our scramble score of 1-under-par relegated us to a respectable third place and we cashed a whopping $4 each, but our egos had imagined 7- or 8-under and first-place money.

   That ego thing gets in the way when you have Tom, overall league points winner, his partner Jeff (they finished second overall), Mike, the birdies leader, and their sub, me, one of the longest hitters in the league.

   You might as well call senior golf Humility 101 because if you get too full of yourself and start cracking on the “old guys,’’ you can rest assured you’re eventually going to become one of the jokes.

   I observed all this from the first drive of the season. We hit shots directly into a low, blinding sun, and one ball descended into thick, wet rough. Think cabbage patch. The old guy in our group parked his cart directly over his ball, then wondered why he couldn’t find it.

   “I know it is here somewhere?’’ he lamented, wandering the area. It resembled a scene chopped from Caddyshack. We had to play our round and caddy for him.

    I glanced over at him as he lifted the ball from the bottom of the rough and nudged it to the top of the grass. My jaw resembled the coast of Florida. Tom informed me that this wasn’t cheating, but an accepted practice in this league. When the old guy putted out, his total on the par-5 was 13. He announced “10.’’

   What? Tom saw the puzzled look on my face, as if I were playing against Trump, then whispered that the worst score you could post was double-par. Aye.

    A couple of weeks later, I subbed on Mike’s team. One of our opponents had short-term memory issues. “You’ll have to watch me on the score,’’ he announced. “I have trouble keeping it straight.’’

  He struggled on a par-3, made a 7 and called out “five.’’

   “I think it was a five; I can’t remember sometimes.’’ We went with the five because we won the hole anyway. He had to leave after three holes when he became dizzy and short of breath.

   I was retelling this to my 93-year-old uncle, Bruce, when he kidded, “Geez, Jim, you’re offending me. I do all those things.’’

   Truth be told, he doesn’t. But it reminded me of my own faux pas. Every time the ball sails past 170 yards, I can’t track it. Blame it on age-onset diabetes.

  I also carry a shady past. When I did gardening work in the 1970s for the late Harold Munson, a University of Rochester professor who owned Pine Eden near Jacques Cartier State Park, he would hold court for his budding golfers, Billy and Andy Colburn and me.

   “If the ball ends up on the lip of the cup,’’ Munson forged as we nodded, “you can shade the ball from the sun, it will contract, then fall into the cup.’’

   We swallowed this whole. We teenagers put this nonsensical claim to a test about a month later on the 18^th green at Raymondville. Billy’s putt came to rest on the hole’s lip in the afternoon sun, so he laid down on the green. A guy came screaming out of the clubhouse. We didn’t linger to explain; we couldn’t get out of the parking lot fast enough. 

  I am guilty of setting a record for the slowest round(s) at St. Lawrence State Park Golf Course. Today, I’m reformed. I walk and carry at sunrise, ahead of the foursomes, playing 18 in two hours and 40 minutes. No practice swings on the tees or greens. Line ’em up and go.

   After the five-hour scramble, I told a guy in the buffet line that the pace of play was killing me, how I often played in 2:40, which included an extra five minutes to scour the woods, or fish balls from the ponds.

   “That’s really fast for nine holes,’’ he remarked.

    I said that was for 18. I think I play 18? I just can’t remember. I must be getting older.

          Morristown native Jim Holleran is a retired teacher and sports editor from Rochester. Reach him at jimholleran29@gmail.com or view past columns under “Reflections of River Rat’’ at https://hollerangetsitwrite.com/blog/