The friends that we went camping with last week have recently gotten interested in golf again. They mentioned ahead of time that they might like to get in nine holes or so while we were on our trip in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
It has probably been just shy of a decade that I played golf, but I figured "what the heck" and threw my clubs in the back of the truck just in case I decided to join them.
I enjoy golf, but I would never consider myself a "golfer". We had a teacher back in middle school that would take kids to the local golf course to play a couple of holes or hit balls on the driving range after school. I had a friend talk me into going a couple of times, but I never really played after that until much later in life.
About 20 years ago I was working with a guy that wanted to sell his hold Spalding club set for $40. I thought it might be handy to have a set laying around so I took him up on the offer and those are the same clubs I used last week.
After calling around to a couple of places, our friend was finally able to get us a tee time at the Northern Michigan University Golf Course. It was a cloudy Monday when we pulled into the course an hour or so before noon. As I mentioned in my last post, we had planned for much cooler temperatures which meant I had to golf in my jeans instead of shorts (because I only packed one pair).
We decided to just play the front nine and I was pretty surprised when I found out the cost was only going to be $27 for me to golf (including the cart). Like I said, I don't golf a lot, but that price seemed pretty reasonable to me.
Let me be clear, I had pretty low expectations for this outing. As I said, it has been years since I have been golfing and even back then I was far from good. I was very upfront about the fact that "I suck" and our friends said not to worry because they weren't that good either. I told
I forgot to mention, I had clubs, but no golf balls, luckily my father in law is on a golf league and had a basket of them in the garage he said I could help myself to. I grabbed about 15 of them just to be safe, I had a feeling I would be losing a lot of them...
This was the first hole and being honest, I was terrified when it was my turn to tee off. I don't know if it is pretty common, but this golf course has four spots you can tee off from. The red markers are for the women, yellow is novice, white is normal, and blue is professional. Wanting to see how well I fared, I decided to hit from the white markers the same as my friend, meanwhile his wife hit from the red markers.
I remembered from the last time I went golfing, my ball has a tendency to go to the right when I hit it. I made my best effort to adjust for that and surprisingly I didn't do too badly, I think
We were waiting for a twosome to play through ahead of us so I took the opportunity to snap this artistic shot on the third hole. I actually ended up driving past the hole from my tee shot and I was wishing I had used a higher iron than my five.
I am not going to lie and say this was a clean game. I only lost about four balls which was far fewer than I had anticipated, but there were some instances where I was stuck behind so I tossed my ball out into a more favorable position. For the most part I deducted strokes when those instances happened, I am sure I missed one or two though.
It seems like the majority of most courses have at least one water hazard these days and hole number 5 was the one for this course. I briefly thought about hitting from the yellow markers, but not wanting to look like a "wuss", I hit from the white ones. Both my ball and my friends ball went straight into the water. His wife who hit from the red markers was able to make it over. While my friend dropped his ball on the far side of the water, I am a stubborn sort and I was determined to make it over. I dropped my ball on the tee side of the water and was able to get it over and very close to the green on my first (really second I guess) try.
By the time we got to the ninth hole, I was starting to get a feel for things again. The only problem was we had been golfing for three plus hours and I was starting to tired and "hangry" (angry because I was hungry).
This was by far my best tee shot of the day. The blue arrow indicates where I teed off from and I was standing where my ball landed. It won't get me on the PGA tour, but I was more than happy with my improvement!
I'll take the 84 I shot this time. I only ended up in the sand twice and like I said, I only lost four balls. I hope to get out to the driving range at some point this Summer and work on my swing a little more. I also have my eye out for a cheap set of clubs for
It was after we passed our third hour of play(on nine holes) that