I don’t know about you but I’ve surely got a bad golf jones!
It’s been three weeks since I last teed it up and nearly four weeks since I’ve watched any live golf on TV.
That first and final round of the truncated Players Championship will likely be our only live golf fare on the tube until July or August, maybe even later than that.
And although the local courses in the St. Augustine area are open for play, I’ve decided to abstain, at least for now, since both my better half and I are members of the “vulnerable community “.
Why is it that the only “club” I have membership in is one that no one wants to belong to?
So what’s a guy to do?
Watch reruns of past tournaments on Golf Channel.
I admit it sounds pathetic to watch an athletic competition that you had previously witnessed live, that you know what the final outcome will be, and that is lacking any real drama, which is the lure of all sport.
Well, my friends, I’ll let you onto a little secret of mine.
The key is to have a bad memory.
With that in mind – or out of mind, as it were- I fired up the Golf Channel last week, or maybe it was the prior week, I don’t recall, to catch the reruns of the 2109 WGC Match Play Championship from Austin Country Club.
I had a vague memory that Kevin Kisner won this event but the match play format, especially the early round robin portion, was almost like watching a new, yet to be determined event. With 64 guys teeing it up in 32 matches per day it was relatively easy to forget that I had watched all the original matches a year ago. A year is a long time in the intriguing life of this aging hacker. Hell, a day can seem like a long time these days.
Austin Country Club’s unusual layout also made it easy to view this event with unjaded eyes. The front side of this course twists and turns around the hill country of Austin with the most severe elevation changes this side of Kapalua. Rough terrain, cascading chutes and long carry’s over ravines and gulley’s (some were wee gulley’s) provided a great venue for match play.
The course winds down the hills to the Colorado River basin and Lake Austin and Voila- it’s like you took a cross country trip to Florida for the back nine.
There is water everywhere coming in and heavy winds during much of the play sent loads of mishit balls swimming. There’s some fun to be had watching world class golfers lose so many balls but this blood letting just reinforced my abiding hatred for water holes on a golf course.
I live in Florida now where it seems every old geezer (my contemporaries) uses his ball retriever nearly as often as his putter. But I digress.
So getting thorough the first three days of round robin was, at the time, surprisingly fresh. When the round of 16 cued up I began to have clearer recollections of the match outcomes but didn’t give a damn. Ditto through the quarter finals, semi’s and finals. I knew the outcome but so what? It was high level professional golf! And I was satisfied.
Come Monday, Golf Channel again aired the Match Play quarter’s and semi’s and finals and did the same on Tuesday and Wednesday.
I could fool myself the first time around, and even the second, but damn if I could go for watching a third slate of reruns- I do have my standards.
So, with my search for slightly used golf TV temporarily stymied, I fired up the DVR and tucked into some non-golf events- past NFL playoff games (Chiefs/Texans AFC Championship) and NCAA basketball classics (1992 Duke over Kentucky). Even my addled brain had a clear memory of the outcome of these, and other, games.
But the sports habit needs constant feeding.
So I switch on the Golf Channel for more vintage viewing and find reruns of their classic made for TV fare- Big Break.
I can’t wait.
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