Train Wreck at TPC Summerlin

I love to play golf. I love to play golf in all sorts of weather. I can play in the chilly days of January and Febuary. I can play golf on the 3 days of the year that it rains here in Las Vegas. I have played with snow on the ground in Utah. I have trekked the links in Vail during a nasty hailstorm with my late and dear, dear friend Mark Neis (Each time I think of Mark, it just makes me cry and I'll blog about his beautiful big heart and the children he and his wife adopted from Russia only to see his life cut short by cancer at 41 at a later time), and I love to play in the blistering heat of Southern Nevada in the summer months when the temperature exceeds 110 degrees.....I actually love summertime since no one is on the course in the afternoon and we can easily get in 27 if we tee off as late as 4pm. The one thing I don't like to play in his the wind. Hawaiian wind, Nevada wind, California wind, Texas wind.. the wind gets in my head and I start overcompensating...overthinking, overswinging....I'm a basket case. The wind is worse than playing golf early in the morning. Why anyone would want to be "first off" at 6am utterly confounds me. I played that early a handful of times, and frankly, I sleepwalk through the entire round....don't even remember it later in the day. Rivals will make morning tee-times just to throw me off since I usually don't hit the sack until 1am or later.

So....I have been staring out my window at work all week waiting for the wind to die down. At times it actually howled in my office so I knew that wasn't the sign I was looking for. So my golf pals and I decided to just do it anyway.....the wind be damned and play at 3pm today. Ha! Old Man Bill was the starter at the club and he's like a hundred years old and by the late afternoon, he is one sip of coffee away from pissing his pants. Frankly, I don't know how he finds he way out of the parking lot at night. He is a very nice guy though, but the wind had him thoroughly messed up too. He asked us to start on the back nine. Uh oh. That NEVER works for me. I need to start at #1 since that where my brain says we should start. Starting at 10 really screws me up. We've dubbed holes, 10 through 12 as Amen Corner since they will eat you alive on a calm day, let alone trying to play in a tornado and taking our first hacks of the day/week. I got rocked like J Guth in his first start of the year for the Orioles....I took a quadruple bogey on 10. This means I shot an 8 on a par 4. My previous worst ever on this hole had been a 6, best was a 4 so an 8 was sort of like getting kicked in the balls right off the bat(I actually had this done to me one other time this week (hypothetically speaking)on Monday by a breach of loyalty by someone that pissed me off so much that I did the whole jewish thing and tore my shirt to signify this person is dead to me [I think that's what the jews do or else I ruined a perfectly good E. Zegna dress shirt]. I digress. I also overreact but in comedic folly that is actually pretty entertaining.

So the torturous round today ended when I carded a 95. I have shot a 77 on this course and should be between that number and an 82. There were several times I felt like throwing my entire bag of clubs into one of the several ponds. Actually the pond on # 12 has a wedge at the bottom, the water on #16 has a 2 iron rusting beneath the surface. My old club, Canyon Gate easily has a set of clubs littered throughout their pond system. Good thing I have toned it down A LOT over the past decade.

So here I sit....tired... my lips are chapped, my face red from windburn, my golf ego is in shambles....

Janae...hurry home.

P.S. Acknowedgement: Steve beat me by one shot....another dagger in my back. More blood loss.