Last Thursday was the final men’s night at Blue Ocean Golf Club, and Barrie invited me to play my first ever nine holes of golf with all the men.
Actually, how it worked was that Barrie and I joined Blue Ocean’s head professional Tara Roden while they played as a team against all the two-man teams participating in men’s night.
The game we played is called a scramble: both players on each team tee off, but the person in the best position sets the next location for the approach shot of all the other players.
Let me just say, this is fantastic way to start a beginner on a golf course. I hit some pretty nice shots on my first time out, but a few of them went pretty far off course. A couple of them landed about three metres in front of me, sometimes with a clump of grass just a little farther away.
I broke eight out of nine tees, which is almost a perfect score. And I only lost one ball. On a couple of occasions, I actually hit my tee close to where Barrie and Tara hit theirs, right in the middle of the fairway.
My crowning achievement by far was on the sixth hole, which is an interesting one because the tee box is at the top of a steep hill and the green is at the bottom.
It’s a par three and I made par. My first shot landed on the green and I putted it in with two strokes. I actually was pretty close to getting a bogey. Tara says it “took a look going by,” when the ball nearly misses the hole.
Something that Barrie has mentioned to me a few times, but that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around until we played through a round of golf, is that you always use the same golf swing.
Except when chipping and putting, which was covered in lesson two.
With the noted exceptions, it’s never about hitting the ball harder or softer to adjust the range. Each golf club hits the ball a certain distance, the golfer calculates the distance it needs to travel and selects the appropriate club.
After the round Barrie invited me to have dinner with all of the men in the clubhouse. Dinner was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. It was delicious.
While I ate, I mostly thought about how I had played on the course. Barrie and Tara had both been impressed.
Another group caught up with us as I was teeing off on the ninth hole. They stopped and waited quietly while I made my swing. The swing came naturally and the ball flew straight down the fairway.
Everyone clapped softly for me.
“The addiction begins!” one of them yelled.
I think he was right.
