#190
When the final bell of the day rang, I’d loiter by my locker for an extra few minutes before heading out to the parking lot to see who needed a lift and try to remember if I had put my clubs in the trunk and if I had any snacks to see me through. The few of us who drove would carpool to the course about five miles to the east on old State Route 9. By the time 4 PM rolled around, you’d find us at the driving range, buckets of balls at our feet, and our coach milling around giving us small adjustments and pointers. For most of us, smacking the ball as hard as we could was the best sort of relief after a day stuck indoors listening to lectures on math, literature, sociology, history, or, god forbid, economics.
The back nine was still a work in progress, but the trees the club had planted were taking shape - some of the larger maples and oaks were big enough now to provide some shade when we needed it. After finishing off our buckets, we went off in groups of two or four to different holes and started our practice round. Coach would wander between groups in a golf cart, the only one who had one, and we’d walk.
I loved it.
The course was public. It was in all senses, my home course. My dad and I played there, he still does, and the front nine is still seared into my memory like a favorite movie or car. The two water holes and the long, straight fairway on #9 that was downhill with dense woods on the western side. One time, we were out with some of his friends, and I took a drink of a Coke that someone had been using as an ashtray. I didn’t hear the end of that for a while.
In high school, I was neither the best nor the worst golfer. It was the only team sport I played because it didn’t so much require you to rely on your team as much as sports like baseball or volleyball. During a competition, we got paired with a player from the opposing school, and we kept each other’s scores to keep things honest. If a storm rolled in, as often happened, we’d take shelter in one of the decrepit bathrooms scattered throughout, or, stand under one of the ancient oaks on the front nine.
One time, during practice, a particularly bad thunderstorm rolled in. The wind changed, and the temperature dropped. Lightening is a golfer’s worst enemy, holding a long metal rod in your hand is a temptation the God’s can’t ignore. I remember standing on the back nine as the rain came in sideways, soaking me and my teammate to the gills, when in the distance I could see my friend Luke, who worked there after school, on a green John Deere Gator, driving as fast as it went across the fairways towards us.
He collected us, we loaded ourselves into the flat open back, and we took off towards the clubhouse, all of us squinting our eyes at the rain that cut us like knives as we sped across the swampy grass.
Later, after the storm had passed, the ground was too wet to continue practice so we all sat around the clubhouse drinking pop and eating chips that our coach bought us, as if we were a group of old retirees shooting the shit.
I want to say our team experience was unique. I’m not sure the other team sports were able to find a sense of community that stretched through generations as it does with golf. I felt connected, grounded, not just by the game, but the landscape, the environment, the passive mental nature that the sport requires.
There was nothing better than spending my after-school hours walking the long, green pathways in the quiet of the late afternoon.
