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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
SHOWCASE
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December 2006 / January 2007 Contest Results |
Rental #7
By Daniel Marquez,
FPO/AP
I knew it to be
a mistake, right from the start. “Hey Dan, let’s go play some golf
tomorrow”, said my friends. “I don’t know how to play golf, and I don’t
have any clubs,” I offered with as much regret as I could credibly
muster at the moment. “Don’t worry, they have rental clubs”, came the
reply.
Instead of doing the smart thing, like flat out refusing to play, or
feigning cardiac arrest, I did something that I have since vowed never
to do again. I played golf.
My reluctance to play golf with my friends was compounded when I came to
find that they were all expert golfers, who had apparently been playing
golf since they were in the womb. In contrast, my golf experience was
limited to watching a Channel 7 news report, in which a tourist was
mugged with a golf club, leaving him with a permanent handicap (insert
snicker here).
The following day at the golf shack (or “clubhouse”, as the insiders
like to call it) started out benignly enough. In an attempt to look like
I knew what I was doing, I peered at my friends in my peripheral, and
mimicked them as they went through their pre-game rituals of stretching,
pointing their clubs to the sky and eyeing them as though the secret to
eternal happiness was etched in small print on the sleek, graphite
shafts. My club (which looked as though it had been used to bust years
of rust off of a freight barge) just said, “Rental #7” on it. I don’t
know what that meant, but I felt sure that it had nothing to do with eternal
happiness.
To add to my discomfort, I discovered that there is an entirely
different language used on the golf course to which I was not privy. I’m
not talking about the language that the greenskeeper used when I
knocked over the drinking fountain with my golf cart. I’m talking about
a language that relies heavily on words like hook, slice, birdie,
stinger and skulls. All words which, although I never learned what they
meant, reinforced my belief that golf is a terribly violent sport.
When it was finally my turn to “tee off,” I sized up my opponent, an
insolent little white ball with dimples all over his face, sitting
smugly in front of me, as if to say, “Just TRY to hit me, pal!” Try to
hit him, I did. Once, twice, three times... “Try using a tee!” shouted one
of my pals helpfully, referring to the little wooden stakes that litter
the bottom of your golf bag. I was thinking that the only conceivable
use for a tee would be to impale tiny vampires on it, which I imagined
to be far easier than trying to hit a golf ball with it.
After an eternity of humiliation, I finally managed to hit the ball
(which I presumed was the general goal of the game). It was good thing,
too, as the greenskeeper was striding angrily out to my position,
wondering in a dizzying display of profanity, why his teeing ground
looked like a WWII battleground after an all night artillery barrage. It
was at that moment that I realized that those golf carts don’t drive
nearly as fast as they should.
And so went 18 holes of golf, each hole worse than the last. My friends,
being the amiable chaps that they are, waited until we were on the 18th
hole to tell me that you don’t use a tee on the fairway, and that the
teeing ground closest to the flag is “generally” reserved for ladies and
people with physical disabilities, such as degenerative polio. Another
helpful suggestion I received was that I should try right-handed clubs
next time, as I am... right-handed.
Since it was my first time playing golf, my friends were kind enough to
refrain from laughing in my face, and tactfully waited until I was a
comfortable distance away (a little more than a club swing away, to be
precise), at which time they laughed themselves into various stages of
major organ failure.
Their fear of being clubbed to death was unfounded,
however, as they had seen what had transpired when I tried to hit the
little white ball (which I could hear somewhere down in the tree line,
shrieking with laughter).
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