Golf on Tuesday - Season End

Tonight was our last night of golf in the league. I had a good night and a bad night.

I didn't golf really well. My brain kept getting in the way of my golf game. I made some great shots. Then I made some real stinkers. On hole number 15 a short par 4, it took me four shots just to get on the green. Then I buried a 30 foot putt, over a rise in the green with about a 3 foot break to the right.

My team went into tonight tied for 6th place. We wanted to try and get back into the top 5 (for some bonus money). Third place and up were mathematically impossible. Fourth was highly unlikely. But for 5th we only had to outscore the other two teams that we were tied with, and out score the current 5th place team by more than a point.

The night started out badly for me. We had to play the team captained by my wife's ex-boss. We were both the B players for our teams so I would have to compete against him. This put me into a tough situation. My own personal beliefs force me to be a good sportsman and polite to my opponents. It's part of golf. But it's the way I learned to play all sports. Unfortunately my personal dislike for this guy is way off the chart.

Our pet phrase for him around the house (when the kids aren't listening) is that he is a lying, backstabbing, sack of bovine excrement. Then I had to spend the next two hours being polite to him.

Luckily for me that golf is a game that makes it pretty easy to ignore your opponent most of the time.

Unfortunately I didn't golf well and he did. He won our match. I could have won the 8th hole we played which would have evened up our match. My opponent had to move his ball mark so I could putt. After I putted out, my partner and then his partner putted. When it was my opponent's turn to putt he forgot he had moved his mark. He placed his ball and was getting ready to putt. I wanted to just stand there and let him putt, but instead I asked if he remembered to replace his ball mark? He repositioned the ball mark and made the putt that ended our match. My partner looked at me and just shook his head, I whispered to him, "I'll kick myself for that later." He replied, "Maybe, but I know you, you'd kick yourself even harder if you hadn't done it."

But on the bright side the rest of my team beat the rest of his team.

We ended up winning five out of six points. This coupled with two other teams splitting points moved us up to 5th place and our opponents down to 7th or 8th.

All is all we had a pretty good season. We spent a couple weeks in first place. A position we hadn't been in since we won the league back in 1999. Our fifth place finish is the 3rd best season we've had.

No I have to start practicing for the club championships which are probably 5-6 weeks away. I don't expect them to have a over 19 handicap division this year so I'll have to compete with the rest of the handicap golfers.