It’s been about 30 years ago that I first attempted to master the
game of Golf. I’d bought a gigantic red leather bag full of odd clubs and
talked my old buddy Cornbread into giving it a try with me. Cornbread was my
regular riding buddy and that was a great (albeit weird) time in our lives when
we were all about riding our Harleys. I rode mine everywhere I went. It was a
early shovelhead engine in a slick little 57 model straight-leg frame. It had a
dual-disc lowrider frontend, with no rake or stretch. What they might call a
“Bobber” today. It was little, bitty for a Harley and you couldn’t haul
anything on it but yourself. So I did what anybody else would do; I
bought a second one. It was a big, ex-police, Full Dressed Harley that you
could pile the stuff on and travel. I figured it was perfect for hauling two
sets of golf clubs and it almost was.
This huge black and white monster had two sets of floor boards and
I discovered that you could plop the bags on the rear boards, strap ‘em up the
sides and tie the whole thing at the top to the back rest. Going down the road,
you never knew they were there. Flawless.
So it was that on the first try we loaded up and set our sights on
Paris Landing State Park. We arrived without incident, unloaded and parked off
to the side of the parking lot on the hill over the clubhouse. We’d had a great
time to this point, but alas, the fickle finger of the golfing gods intervened
(just as they always do). We played poorly, quickly hooking and slicing away
the two dozen balls that we’d bought (thinking they’d probably last us a couple
of years). We spent the next several hours tromping through the woods looking
for balls with which to extend our day, while blue-haired old ladies glared at
us as they played through.
We struggled on with this pattern through 9 holes, when I didn’t
think I could stand any more of those Spalding Easter-egg hunts. On the ninth hole,
as we approached the Clubhouse for the turn to 10, Cornbread sliced one off
high and hard into no-man’s land lying in between the two fairways. He was gone
for a while and I should have gone in to help, but my spirit was pretty well
broken by then and I was hoping he’d emerge without a ball so we’d have to
leave. When he came staggering out of the woods 20 minutes later, he had his
shirt folded up like your Grandmother carrying potatoes from the garden. “I
found the mother-load”, he declared as he dumped the shirt full of Red-striped
balls into the top of his golf bag. That did it for me and I told him
that if he expected me to cart his bag back home, he’d follow me back to the
motorcycles, post haste.
It was as I attempted to load the bags onto the bike that things
really turned sour. Rushing through the procedure, I must have flung the big
red bag with a little too much gusto because it struck the starter relay (poorly
located on the frame, over the footboard) hard enough to bend the metal cover into
the electrical contacts within. The result was the starter engaging, IN GEAR
and without a rider. WOMP, WHOP, WHOP went the starter while propelling the
600lb scooter along on two wheels and the big crash bar like a tricycle.
Meanwhile I’m trying foolishly to dislodge the bag, while Cornbread was hanging
onto the sissy-bar as we were all dragged across the parking lot. We
went a good 30 feet before the front tire connected with an ancient yellow
Datsun Bluebird Sedan, right about its front passenger side fender.
That old Harley must have slammed that fender a half dozen times
before I managed to beat the cover off that relay, with what I believe to have
been a 6 iron. I swear that even the relay cover was slicing hard to the right
as it careened across the parking lot…….Anyway, as Cornbread and I struggled to
get our breathing under control, we silently agreed (with a mere exchange of
looks) to get the heck out of Dodge.
We took the back roads out of there and eventually stopped to
regroup. I felt kind of bad about the damage to the Datsun, but heck, it had
plenty of other dents to match the one I’d just left, although none of the
others were marred black with Avon Speedmaster rubber. I was leaning there
considering all this when I heard Cornbread hit that first red and white range
ball into the Springville Bottoms cornfield that we’d stopped beside. It was
the best golf we’d played all day. FOUR!!!!
Jesco
