Elbow Jobertski
Active member
I started babbling about my youth golf experiences in that penalty stroke thread. I feel like posting about more low rent stuff so I figured I'd start a thread so myself and others who came at golf from humble salt of the earth blue collar working class backgrounds can tell a few war stories.
I started golfing because one day my baseball coach was angry at me for swinging at a low pitch, and yelled at me that "If I wanted to swing at s*** on the ground, go play golf." I had a pretty strong sense of the absurd when I was nine. So I pestered my dad about it until he took me to the executive length par-3 that happened to be in the same park as the baseball field, rented me some clubs, and the experience took. I found some old clubs and a cloth bag in an uncle's basement, and the year pass to that par-3 (within walking distance from my house) was $50, so an unhealthy obsession was born.
Our sophistication and understanding of rules and etiquette can be summed up with one quick story.
When I was 11, there was a small group of kids that were often around the course. We gambled, but sort of like with marbles we just played for golf balls. If you had the lowest score on a hole you won everyone's ball. We spent half the time in the woods looking for balls so it wasn't that big of a deal.
Anyway, one day myself and a slightly older lad got into a rules dispute. He claimed that on shots from off the green if the ball hit the flagstick and didn't go in the hole it still counted as holed. I strongly disagreed. Unfortunately he won the rules dispute by kicking the crap out of me and as far as I know if those guys still play (the ones who aren't in prison, obviously) they still think that's the rule. I soon moved on to slightly more sophisticated opponents, like the adult day-drinkers.
I can clearly remember being personally involved in five on-course fights, and witnessed another twenty. I lost all five, but it is sort of worth it to have the experience of having to take a mouthful of sand from the bunker I was face down in because if I didn't the guy who had me in a painful hold would try his best to break my arm. It is an interesting story that I try to tell whenever I happen to be a guest at a private club with at least a 10K initiation fee.
I started golfing because one day my baseball coach was angry at me for swinging at a low pitch, and yelled at me that "If I wanted to swing at s*** on the ground, go play golf." I had a pretty strong sense of the absurd when I was nine. So I pestered my dad about it until he took me to the executive length par-3 that happened to be in the same park as the baseball field, rented me some clubs, and the experience took. I found some old clubs and a cloth bag in an uncle's basement, and the year pass to that par-3 (within walking distance from my house) was $50, so an unhealthy obsession was born.
Our sophistication and understanding of rules and etiquette can be summed up with one quick story.
When I was 11, there was a small group of kids that were often around the course. We gambled, but sort of like with marbles we just played for golf balls. If you had the lowest score on a hole you won everyone's ball. We spent half the time in the woods looking for balls so it wasn't that big of a deal.
Anyway, one day myself and a slightly older lad got into a rules dispute. He claimed that on shots from off the green if the ball hit the flagstick and didn't go in the hole it still counted as holed. I strongly disagreed. Unfortunately he won the rules dispute by kicking the crap out of me and as far as I know if those guys still play (the ones who aren't in prison, obviously) they still think that's the rule. I soon moved on to slightly more sophisticated opponents, like the adult day-drinkers.
I can clearly remember being personally involved in five on-course fights, and witnessed another twenty. I lost all five, but it is sort of worth it to have the experience of having to take a mouthful of sand from the bunker I was face down in because if I didn't the guy who had me in a painful hold would try his best to break my arm. It is an interesting story that I try to tell whenever I happen to be a guest at a private club with at least a 10K initiation fee.