Or, Why You Shouldn’t
Warm Up Before
Playing with Strangers
By Leif Skodnick
“Eyn umglik iz far im veynik.”
-Yiddish idiom (One misfortune is far too few for him)
Rare are the days where I find time to hit balls on a range for 45 minutes or so, and rarer still are the days where I can leave work on a Monday to play in an outing.
So there I was, at Burning Tree (not that Burning Tree — the other one, in Greenwich, Conn.), for a golf writers’ outing in September. Looking forward to the opportunity to hit balls on the range for 20 — no, maybe even 30 minutes(!) if I got there early. I was among the first to arrive.
I parked, pulled out the bag, and went to the range. After five warm-up strikes with the gap wedge, I hit five 9-irons. And then, on the third shot with my 7-iron, THWIICCKKKKKK. The ball went 45 yards, 10 feet off the ground, and hard to the right. You know what it was.
Hoo, what was that? I thought, pulling another pellet onto the mat and trying to banish the thought from my head.
The truth is that this all comes from my setup. I’m generally a little close to the ball, and my contact tends to be a little closer to the heel than it should be.
Of course, once you hit three hosel rockets in a row, you’re not thinking about that simple fix, you’re merely thinking, Dear G-d, I hope I don’t fucking shank this fu---THWIIIIIIICKKKKKK.
FUCK.
I tried switching clubs. Go back to the gap wedge, easy swing, come on, you---THHHHWICKKKK.
Shit.
Finally, I gave up and slunk off the range tee like a seventh grader who got rejected at a dance, figuring that maybe, after the presentation inside and lunch, the disease would go away.
And so off I went — playing with three guys I didn’t know — to the eighth hole, where I hit my drive well enough. We got out into the fairway, with a 90-yard shot to the stick, and I pulled out my gap wedge. A stock gap wedge, for me, goes 88 yards.
My ball ended up in a flower bed, to the right of the cart path.
On the next hole, I had an 8-iron shot from the fairway. It happened again.
And so we went on.
It was like this for 14 holes. Despite making a birdie on the next-to-last hole, I felt like I was no longer qualified to think about golf, much less write or talk about it.
Thank G-d we were playing a scramble, because oy vey is mir, the mishegas with the ball going low and right was making me meshugeneh.
I looked like a complete schmuck, a schmendrik, a schlemiel even, as I shlepped my tuchus around the course.
By the time we got to the schmooze at the end, the glitch in my swing had turned me from a single-digit mensch of a player into a complete schnorrer.
My grandparents, Michael and Ruth, did not want their sons to speak Yiddish at all, ever, under any circumstances.
My father, however, is fond of throwing Yiddish idioms around the way FIGJAM throws around flop shots — especially when he’s frustrated.
They also wanted their sons to play golf, but that skipped a generation — my uncle because he was a writer of some note, and my father was never able to fix his slice.
My advice to you: don’t show up early to visit the range. Only bad things can come of it.
You’ll find yourself on a golf course where you’re not a member, with people you don’t know, eviscerating yourself in a language your grandparents never wanted you to speak.
Oy gevalt.
Leif Skodnick, a recovering journalist, lives in Rye, N.Y., where he maintains a handicap index that indicates he's modestly abled at the game of golf. He enjoys golf, sailing, beer, barbecue, and hopes one day to own a beach house in Ocean Springs, Miss. He'll gladly caddie for you for $100 a round plus tip. Follow him on Twitter at @leifskodnick.
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