Average Joe: A nearly 24-year hiatus from golf ends with a wild comeback
A doctor, a lawyer, an engineer and a journalist go out for a round of golf ...
Sounds like the setup to an elaborate joke, and I fully expected that I'd become the butt of it as the journalist in this real-life bunch. After all, it was my first time golfing again after nearly 24 years away from playing.
Actually, "playing" is a generous description of my game. While golfers are famously self-loathing when it comes to assessing their own skills, I'm a person any one of them can point to and say, "but at least I'm not that guy."
That's pretty much true about me for all of sports. I'm a menace to any activity that requires coordination. On the grand scale of athletic potential, I fall somewhere below Wacky Waving Inflatable Tube Man and maybe only slightly above Jell-O gelatin.
I can't even spectate without embarrassment. One of my best buddies once watched me spill a big bag of M&Ms all over the student center rec room floor and into the path of a professional-grade table tennis match. We're both big Peanuts fans, and he turned to me and said, "of all the Joe Thomases in the world, you’re the Charlie Browniest.” (Eerily, former Beacon Journal columnist Bob Dyer arrived at that same conclusion years later as he repeatedly witnessed my peculiar brand of clumsiness when we became neighbors in the same workstation.)
'Aaugh' is the name of the game
Charlie Brown is an apt metaphor. It's not a simple matter of my underachievement in the wide world of sports — it’s my tendency to fail spectacularly. For instance, there was the all-school fitness expo when I was in fifth grade; my class had to demonstrate springboarding over a pommel horse in front of all the other grades. Everyone else sailed through the drill with ease. But when my turn came, I hit that springboard and belly-smacked right up against the horse. Oof. My brother Dan will never, ever let me forget that.
Then, there was my first track meet of freshman year in high school. I thought I was running in the 800 meter event, but it turned out to be the 1,600. For two glorious laps I was a phenom, way out ahead of everyone. Then, as I thought the race was supposed to be finishing, everyone flew past me and kept running and running. I dogged my way through the last two unexpected laps, finishing dead last.
I didn’t fare too well in a men’s bowling league; I was its only member to record an average below 100 (so close, though. It was 99). And I was chided for always turning out a swinging bunt when I joined a softball league. I had no power whatsoever as a slugger, and only once ever did I manage to send the ball out of the infield.
My most memorable moment on a tennis court was nearly getting knocked out by a well-smashed ball that rocketed about a mile off the top of my skull as I dived awkwardly to try to keep it in play.
I was even a winner of the Charlie Brown Award one year at the WAKR Kite Fly in Schneider Park, predictably for my misadventures while trying to put a kite into the sky. For my troubles, radio personalities Adam & Bob awarded me a double album Liberace collection.
Misguided shot at sports redemption
When college came along and I had to choose a course to burn off my physical education requirement, I settled on golf as perhaps my one viable hope for mediocrity in sports. I’d be able to tell people that I learned the game from a card-carrying member of the PGA (the instructor was the club pro at the university’s golf course). I went out and bought a beat-up set of clubs at a garage sale and set out to learn the game. But I was so bad that it brought down my grade-point average (I was too aloof to have realized I just could have taken the class pass/fail).
On top of that, nearly every time I tried to set foot on a course, dark clouds would converge in the sky and either wash out the plans before I got a chance to tee off or wait to do their worst and clear the course after just three holes. In five total attempts to golf beyond my class, I managed to play just one complete 18-hole round. Terribly.
My last outing before the hiatus was in July 1998 at the Doolin Pitch and Putt par 3 course just north of Ireland's famous Cliffs of Moher. It was a cold, gray, wet and windy day on a course perched over the Atlantic. Ooh, that first swing made me an international, PGA-member-trained golfer! But our group bailed on account of the miserable conditions after just a couple of holes. Goodbye, golf. Maybe forever.
Or at least until 2022.
Return of the prodigal
The lawyer (remember him?) recently invited me to go out for a round of golf. He’s my oldest friend, going all the way back to kindergarten. He’s been with me when we’ve been rained out at Sycamore Valley (which eventually shut down, probably because I jinxed the place) and also when a severe, practically tornadic thunderstorm chased us off the course after just a couple of holes at J.E. Good Park.
I reminded the lawyer that this was a terrible idea, given my haphazard track record. He laughed and told me not to worry about it; we’d have a great time. We’d be playing with friends — the doctor and the engineer — all of us with the better part of a day wide open while staying outside Columbus as our daughters competed as a team in a state writing tournament.
I started feeling remorse right after I agreed to play, but resolved to go out even if it meant humiliating myself once again. I realized I'd need to brush up on etiquette, a very big part of the game. You know, things like saying “please” and “thank you” and “how do you do?” and “many happy returns of the day.” Oh, and, a bunch of other somewhat goofy golf stuff.
I had secretly wished for terrible weather when our appointed golf date arrived, but we were greeted by perfectly gorgeous, sunny, gently breezy skies. There was no turning back.
I was too nervous to even operate the golf cart at first, recalling my daughter’s reaction when I told her how I’d be spending my day: “Wait. You golf?” I realized it’s a thing none of my four kids had ever known me to do.
But the game — my game — quickly started to come back to me. Atrocious breakdowns of form led to some magnificent whiffs on tee shots, resulting in divots that could have been seen from outer space. But I darted to prevent that satellite possibility, remembering the etiquette, and carefully tamped the errant clumps back into place. After some coaching from the engineer, I finally managed to connect with the ball — but my drives were seldom pretty.
On the whole, I didn't score well. About the closest I got to a birdie was sending a faulty shot off the fairway and directly into the path of a robin that was nonchalantly poking around. It saw the ball rolling toward it and casually hopped out the way just in time, as if to say “meh.”
The other gents were patient and very helpful. They coached me on which clubs to use and when to pick up and drop the ball closer to keep things moving along for the groups behind us. Etiquette, etiquette, etiquette.
After the front nine, we pulled up to the clubhouse for a quick break and refreshments, as many other groups seemed to do. But a potential breach of etiquette was called to our attention when we moved to resume play. We passed the cart of a man who was waiting for his golf partner to return from a quick potty stop. He gave us the stink eye and had a colorful way of paraphrasing “I do not understand what is going on here.”
What were we supposed to do in this situation? Etiquette, I thought. Maybe I needed to say, “And many happy returns of the day to you, sir.” I opted against that, and the doctor, the lawyer, the engineer and I convened to discuss this situation. We decided to wait and let the disgruntled golfer’s group play through ahead of us. Nothing was going to disrupt our enjoyment and contentment of an exceptionally fine day on the links. I was actually having fun on a golf course for the first time ever.
Fate flips the script
While I had braced for some kind of ghastly blunder to add to my collection of Charlie Brown prize moments, I walked away with something entirely different.
It happened on the approach to the green on the fifth hole, with my ball sitting in a little dip of rough just off the fairway. I was maybe 20 to 25 yards out from the pin, on a downhill slope from it to just where my eyes were level with the cut of the green.
The lawyer handed me his chipping wedge. Chip shots, I remembered, were just about the only decent part of my game all those years back. I set up and swung the club with enough of an angle for it to jump up into the air. And then, time itself seemed to slow to a crawl. I watched in complete disbelief as the ball landed on the green, right in line with the flag, and rolled and rolled and rolled until it dipped out of sight at the pin. I heard roars erupt from the doctor, the lawyer and the engineer, and I dropped to the ground in a fit of laughter.
Just before we had teed off on that hole, I had asked the lawyer: "What's so great about golf that keeps people coming back?" As if to summon Jack Palance’s cowboy Curly from “City Slickers,” he held up his pointer finger and said, “You could be the worst golfer in the world, but all it takes is one great shot, or an excellent round, and then you can’t help but feel like you’ve got to go back out and try to do that all over again.”
The timing could not have been more celestial.
So, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer and journalist go out to golf and only three of them come back. The journalist is still out there somewhere, shaking his head in disbelief and marveling about the shot that somehow dropped and the punchline that somehow didn't.
When he isn’t toiling away as the Beacon Journal metro editor, you can occasionally find Joe Thomas musing about everyday life as the Average Joe. Reach him at jthomas@thebeaconjournal.com
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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Average Joe: A 24-year break from golf ends with a wild comeback
