I will start off by saying all the tests came back negative. I will watch what I do so let's all move on.
I mentioned my golf joke previously but I don't golf. I haven't since 1976. I do have a plethora of good golf stories and since it is the season I will share a few. I will relate that my favorite golf joke back then was I would limp and tell people I sprained my ankle when I fell off the ball wash.
As a young man, I was exceptional in baseball, darn good in football, adequate to good in basketball and downright horrible in golf.
For nine years I played the game every chance I got and I never could get the hang of it. Every time I would golf around 90 and start to think I was getting the hang of the sport, I would follow with a 120 score that had me bending my unbendable clubs.
I did have some good times between my fits of mediocrity I will admit and every once in a while I did something spectacular with club and ball that was worth bragging about at the nineteenth hole. Bragging that is since I had just reached a new height of ineptitude.
I was always a big hitter being a strapping young man. I believe I could hit a golf ball 400 yards. The problem was it was always 150 yards forward and 250 yards to either the right or left. I recall once hitting a fairway shot along a hole that ran along a cow pasture. I hooked the ball and nailed a cow right in the noggin. She mooed like hell but seemed to be alright so I hurriedly left the area before a dairy farmer came out with a shotgun.
Another time in a similar situation there was a busy street to my left and sure enough I nailed that ball into the traffic. I covered my head as I watched it bounce between cars driving by until it finally came to rest inside the bay of a gas station where a car was up on the lift.
When an angry mechanic came out with the ball in his hand, he looked at me and yelled something profane. I, of course did the only thing I could do. I pointed to the foursome in front of me and yelled, "They did it." I then helped my three friends off the grass who were in pain from laughing so hard and we moved on. I skipped that hole from then on when we played that course.
I used to do a practical joke that I will probably have to spend some time in Purgatory for, especially if the good Lord is a golfer. I will have to set the stage for this story.
There was, perhaps still is, a city golf course in Chicago called Edgebrook. Like many city courses, it wasn't exactly a well maintained course and had a very unique and strange nuance.
The course had to be built on two levels and after the first four holes there was a huge elevation to the remainder of the course. To offset for this, the planners came up with a very strange par 3.
What you had was a 100 foot mountain only 40 yards in front of you that required a quick loft of your ball or it would roll back down into a nasty creek. At the top was a green surrounded by burms that was only 75 yards from the tee. At the tee you couldn't even see the top of the flag so it was a real blind shot to the green. Out of consideration, when a group was done putting out, someone would go to the edge of the elevation and wave the next group on that they could hit their shots.
My friends and I were finished and I waved to the next group that we were leaving the green. The next shot which a golfer hit was a dandy. On the fly it hit the base of the pin and actually would have gone in if the pin had been out. I watched as the ball, after hitting the flag, rolled all the way to the end of the green and decided that wasn't fair.
Since no one below could see me, I picked up the ball and placed it an inch from the hole and left with my friends. Originally I thought my act was one of kindness but when I turned back and saw the golfer looking at his ball only an inch from eternal glory and how he was holding his arms up in the air asking why to God he couldn't have had that inch, I felt really bad. Well, I did for a minute.
After that I used the hole to reward or punish the foursome behind me. If they were considerate on the links, shots ended up close to the hole. For those who were always rushing my group or bouncing shots through us without waiting, their shots no matter how good they thought they were, always ended up as far away from the pin as I could place them without someone suspecting someone had jacked with their ball.
I often thought of helping one of the nicer guys get a hole in one but I never did that. I figured someday I will have to tell the Boss about all of this and besides getting me in trouble, the story would pop the bubble of some other poor soul waiting in line with an "I got a hole in one" T-shirt on.
Freelance writer, columnist, author and writing coach, ex-Chicagoan Mike Fak presently resides in Central Illinois. More information about Mike's services are available at his home website www.mikefak.com
Mike currently writes primarily humor columns for searchwarp bi-weekly and is the managing editor of www.lincolndailynews.com
Mike now offers a 26,000 word e-book on making money as a freelance writer for only $10.00 at this page. http://www.mikefak.com/id45.html
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