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On The Eve Of The Ryder Cup, 2010

We are sitting at the bar at Oskar Blues off the diagonal in Longmont, Colorado after watching our daughter’s team play a volleyball match in Boulder, where the linesmen were barefoot and the locals were more interested in the five-piece band than the score. Anne is sipping water with lemon while I am drinking a stout thicker than roast beef that tastes like licorice.

Next to us three men in their fifties are talking about the courses they’ve played. Nancy Grant, a former player of mine at Nebraska, once told me that only thing that was a bigger waste of time than the four hours men spend on a golf course is the time men spend talking about golf after the round, and in particular the shots they could have made but didn’t. Her husband, Mike, is an avid golfer. I completely understand what she meant and I am guilty on all counts.

On the television above the bar three Golf Channel jockeys are in animated conversation about the four-ball pairings in tomorrow’s Ryder Cup matches, which are not named after the truck rental company, but an English seed salesman who first proposed competition between English and American golfers in 1925. In recent years Europe has replaced England because through the middle third of the last century Great Britain began to be not so competitive in a lot of things, among them the Ryder Cup. I always have difficulty getting “up” for a continent.

It is hard for me to get patriotic about the Ryder Cup because 90% of the professional golfers on both teams live in Florida, do not pay state taxes, have beautiful wives (in some cases multiple lovers) who drive BMWs on their way to Whole Foods and Sax 5th Avenue. Having said that, I will watch because I am fascinated with how athletes handle pressure, although it would be much more entertaining if each competitor put up twenty percent of his own yearly income, winner take all.

Later this week I will play in one of the thousands of Ryder Cup spinoffs that take place around the country pitting local clubs against each other. I was the 24th and last man selected for the Mariana Butte Team (a mountain course in Loveland, Colorado) that will compete against 24 golfers from the Olde Course, which sits on flat land in the center of town.

Selected is perhaps too strong a word. For the second year in a row, I will be one of the oldest competitors on either team, making the Mariana Butte team this year by the skin of my teeth, by  finishing with a net 70 in the club championship when several younger golfers allowed their minds to drift to the Broncos, the Rockies, families or fixing the leaf blower. God, how I love to compete. At 64 the opportunities are getting fewer and fewer.

After we finish our meal we get in our car and begin the short journey back to home, Anne happy that we stopped and sat and talked, me with the lingering taste of molasses from the home brewed stout, and I am reminded of the sweet contentment of the children’s book written by Margaret Wise Brown which I read to both our daughters before they grew up into the world of volleyball, SATs, college degrees and marriage. I shall paraphrase here:

Good night moon.

Good night to the three men talking

Swing paths in the Oskar Blues Bar.

Good night to the spaces between the stars.

Good night Anne, Katherine and  Emma

And facebook acquaintances wherever you are.

Good night to garish sweaters and and large white belts.

Good night to my father who turned 89 this week,

Who made my first golf club on a wooden lathe,

May he continue to dream of hickory shafted drivers,

Of walking from the the green to the next tee,

Of mashies, niblicks, spoons and cleeks.

One Comment

  1. Rich Boyer Rich Boyer

    Competion is why men golf. Competing against the course, your companions during the round or in a tournament and yourself.

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