Robservations: No excuse for bad golf? Think again
All right, I’ll admit it. But just this once.
Your friendly neighborhood sports staff hit the links last Friday, and — as painful as it is to say — Dale beat me.
Barely.
But I didn’t feel good. My head hurt. My shoes were too tight. The greens were cut too short. The fairway grass was too high.
Need any more excuses? I’ve got ’em!
The only problem with last week, however, was I couldn’t use my best golf excuse. Since I lost to Dale, who works five feet from me every day, I couldn’t pull out the old, “I have to work too much to be good at this game.”
You’ve heard it before. Some twice-a-month hacker tries to hold his own against his country club buddies, and ends up falling by a double-digit stroke total.
But he laughs off his defeat, and launches into a rant something like this: “If I worked banker’s hours like you boys, and could get out here whenever I wanted, I’d probably have an even lower handicap than you.”
Sure, you laugh. But it works. It’s quite possibly the best excuse for losing a game of golf that the world will ever know.
So use it, fellow hacking dogs. You’ll feel better about losing, and your playing partners — if they buy your schpiel — may even feel guilty about being privileged enough to play so much more than you. Heck, they may even spring for a cold soda pop after the round, just to make you feel better and to feel better about themselves.
But, just in case they don’t buy your whole “I work too much to shoot in the 80s” speech, I’ve come up with a little ditty you can sing to them, to the tune of Aaron Tippin’s “Working Man’s PhD.”
You only make a birdie ’cause of blind-hog luck,
change your shoes on the tailgate of your pickup truck
A bad round of golf sure ain’t much fun,
but if you like the game, then get out there, son
So grab a box of balls, and a bunch of tees,
you’re shooting for a working man’s one-oh-three
———
With your glove on your hand, visor on your brow
you tee off then you wonder just where it came down
if it’s left, or it’s right, or it’s in the sand,
I’ll bet you could have thrown it farther with your left hand
It could be worse, it could have gone O.B.
‘Cause you’re a man who shoots a working man’s one-oh-three
———
Now there ain’t no shame in a really bad round,
especially since you’re probably playing out of town
I’ll freely admit I rarely hit it straight
I put it in the water twice on number eight…
So if you want to win a match, then go play with me
I’m lucky to get a working man’s one-oh-three.
Call me crazy, but that’s got “gold record” written all over it.
OK, maybe not. But it gave me something to think about while I was hacking up the course in Smithville Wednesday. In fact, while I was waiting on the group in front of me, and trying to get my mind off my most recent duffed shot, I came up with most of the lines you just read.
I can only imagine how badly Dale would’ve beaten me last week if I’d spent that round trying to change the lyrics to a song.
Hey, wait a minute! I think I just came up with a new excuse!