Not Really A Golf Story

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