Golfmosis

Now would be as good a time as any to tell you all about Golffest.  Golffest is an annual trip that some of my friends and acquaintances take in the fall.  The plan is usually to locate a destination with lots of golf, lots of good food and decent accommodations that don’t cost an arm and leg, all within half a day’s drive of the Dallas/Fort Worth, TX area. Luckily, there are quite a few of these locations so it’s rare to have a Golffest repeat.  We always try to stay where we can play a different course for each round.  Occasionally, we’ll double up on one of the two-fer days but it’s nice to keep things fresh.  The reason for the half day drive rule is two fold:  1 – we never have to fly anywhere (with these guys it would cause nothing but mass confusion and a logistical nightmare) and 2 – we always plan to play our first round on the afternoon of the first day.  We usually leave early on a Wednesday morning, play one round that afternoon, 2 rounds on Thursday, 2 rounds on Friday, 2 rounds on Saturday and 1 round on Sunday morning before we drive back.  I get a little tired just thinking about that last sentence but it’s nothing compared to how completely and utterly whipped we are after that Sunday morning 18.  We usually number from 10 – 14 so we always have 3 to 4 groups on the course right in a row.  There’s always a lot of jawing on greens and tee boxes between groups which keeps the action lively. 

Of course there are always games within games going on every day.  Everyone puts a little cash in the kitty to start with and over the course of the long weekend, approximations of handicaps are calculated and a winner is declared after Saturday afternoon’s round.  We don’t generally have to worry about anyone setting a higher than deserved handicap.  We’re all pretty familiar with each others abilities and none of us are really good enough to execute a controlled sandbag.  There is an “awards banquet” (if beer and little smokies counts as a banquet) in whoever’s room is the biggest/cleanest on Saturday evening.  Small, appropriate trinkets are handed out for various titles such as Most Lost Balls, Giantest Score and The Shit Shingo award. This last and most coveted award is named after an obscure reference to a shot that Shingo Katayama once hit in a PGA event.  It’s given to the golfer who hits the most heinous of shots that actually ends up back in the fairway or on the green.  The Sunday round is just for winding down and rehashing and selectively remembering the mostly juvenile behavior of the previous evening.  

Although the 4 days of golf is always great, the best things that come out of Golffest are the lasting memories.  Every time I play a weekend round with any of the “Festers”, someone invariably makes a reference to something that happened at a previous Golffest. 

One of these memories really stands out.  I’ll try to do it justice here:

My foursome was playing a par 4 parallel to a par 5 running the opposite direction.  The fairways were separated by a ravine about 50 yards wide. The guys ahead of us are four of our Festers.  The beverage cart had caught up with them as they were arriving at the par 5 tee box so they freshened their drinks and grabbed some snacks.  Business as usual.  While we were putting out on the par 4, we notice them all driving back towards the tee box laughing uncontrollably. Seriously, this is the kind of laughter you usually only associate with a 5 year old enduring relentless tickling at the hands of an ornery uncle.  They could hardly breathe.  We couldn’t imagine what could have been so funny but we just continued to play behind them for a couple more holes. Finally, we arrived at the tee box of a drivable par 4 where their group was waiting to tee off.  Still red faced and giggling, they struggled to fill us in on the details.  As I said, the beverage cart had met them at the par 5 tee box.  We remembered that the young lady driving the cart was remarkably pretty.  She was really quite flawless as I recall.  We had learned during our provisioning with her that her day job was as a cast member on a local Austin, TX soap opera.  She looked the part.  Apparently, the fellows ahead of us had been so smitten by her, they had forgotten to tee off and were 200 yards down range before they noticed that there were no balls to find.  They never seemed to recover that day from a scoring perspective but they were drunk on laughter for a day or so afterward.  I’ll take that trade off.

Golffest 2008 is coming up in late October.  I’ll make sure to post a recap once I return.