Debunked: You Play Better Sick

Monday morning, I woke up with a dreaded feeling: more tired than when I had gone to sleep, a raw throat, and some invisible gremlin slamming a sledgehammer straight into the inside of my skull.  Normally, I wake up fairly quickly, but not Monday.  I was sick, with either the first day of a bad cold or perhaps the flu.  Yikes!

I went to work anyway, because, well, I’m just stupid that way.  Actually, I had some stuff I needed to deliver to the office and I figured that once I was there I could just close my office door and work as well as I could when I am at home.  By the end of the day, still not feeling better, and with that damned gremlin still jackhammering inside my head, I hit the road and headed towards my greenside bunker, my house.

Instead of collapsing onto the sofa with Irish whiskey and the Cartoon Channel, I did what any sane sick man would do: I tossed my clubs on my back and trotted out onto the golf course.

This was all in the name of science, of course.  I wanted to see if I could play better when I didn’t feel well, a popular myth that seems to forever circle golf.

I live on the 17th green, and on the 0ther side of that is the 16th tee. It’s a 415 yard par 4, with a straight but slightly elevated fairway, ending in a green that is one of the modern rolly-polly deals where placement is critical, because dropping a shot on the wrong side of the Tom Kite designed putting surface virtually assures a three putt.  It’s an easy hole if you can bang a long draw off of the tee and drop a ball with your wedge with the same precision you would use with a teaspoon of sugar in your tea, but it is also one that if you make a mistake anywhere, a double-bogey or worse is in your future.  In fact, in the past, when I have hit wayward tee shots, my mood changes to one of a death row inmate: you know that you’re getting shot in the morning, you can’t do anything about, so why waste your time yelling and screaming?  After all, the reason you are there is because you brought it on yourself.

Anyway, in my feverish haze, I decided to play two-ball — a game I play when I am alone on the course.  Two Ball helps me practice honestly, because it is an honest competition.   Today it was the all-time champion, hailing from Golf Galaxy, the Titleist Pro V1.  The challenger, coming all the way from my friend the Taylor Made rep, the brand new five layer Penta.  Lowest score wins, play it as it lay, and good luck gentle-balls!

I gave the Penta the honor after I limbered up and pounded a couple golf balls I had found on the way to the tee towards my backyard.  It’s sort of a fun target practice, your own home, and one day my game will probably improve enough to where I can hit my house, which is a mere 320 yards from the 16th tee.  That’s also the day my wife will wrap an R-9 driver around my head, but that’s another story.  Anyhow, I hit the Penta smooth and true, but on my follow-through, a feeling like I was about to melt into the dormant grass coursed through my blood.   After catching my breath and coming back to life, I gave the Pro V-1 a whack, and he too landed out in the fairway somewhere.

Walking towards the two balls was not fun.  I have to say I almost left them laying out there and came back in to the sofa, but since I only have one Penta, I figured I had better go pick it up.  I had a feeling that was a mix of vertigo and shivering uncontrollably, mixed with a very strong dollop of “why the hell am I here?” on the top.  Like a good soldier, though, I kept marching.  I heard birds overheard as I walked, and I am not sure if they were real or imaginary vultures circling me.  If they were real, I think they were closer to dinner than they knew.

Once I found the rocks out on the fairway, I figured what the heck, I might as well play on.  I mean really, who can resist a juicy drive laying 145 yards from a fluttering pin?  For the benefit of Mr. Kite, I played a 9 iron on in to the flag.  And I bladed it.  Out of bounds.

Damn!

I don’t usually do that. It’s not like I am some kind of Sunday hacker who plays hit and giggle golf in between slurps of Bud Lite.  I take a poor shot from a perfect lie like that personally.  No I don’t explode in anger, not usually anyway.  Instead, I take grim note and pound an extra hundred balls out on the range the next day.

The Pro V1 was another five yards down the fairway, and I was so mad at that last shot, I decided to fix things right then and right there.  Is there anything that tastes as sour as leaving the course after a perfectly awful shot?  Not in golf there isn’t.

So I hit the same 9 iron, a little smoother, and with a lot more concentration.  This one did okay, and landed dead center of the green.  That’s a problem, however, because Tom Kite decided to put a dip in the middle of that green that drops about 4 feet and collects balls in a sort of an on-green bunker.  Yes, you can putt out, but to say that it is a challenge to get the ball to stop near the hole from there is an understatement on the level of saying that the Rolling Stones partied a little while they were on tour.

It was what it was, and really, that’s the nature of golf.  You have to live with not only what you give yourself but also what the rub of that green leprechaun gives you too.

I figure that the Penta was dead, so I thought I would just play the Pro V-1 in to the cup and call it a day.  That’s when it hit me.  I was shivering, dizzy, feeling really nasty and not only that, looking at a tough putt.  I really had little interest in playing it, but this was science and the experiment needed to be finished.  I mustered as much concentration as I could, lined up the putt and hit it to the hole.  It scooted four feet past, leaving a downhill sidehill greaser coming back for par.  Well, damnit, I was going to get that par.  I know that putt, I have hit it a bunch of times.  It’s sort of a classic putt for the 16th at my place, and you’ll learn how to sink it one way or the other.  Carefully, I picked the right spot and let the putter just…barely…touch…the….ball.  It came roaring down the hill as if it were a rabbit being chased by a hawk.  But instead of diving into the deep, it hit the edge of the cup, circled round and came back towards me.

Argh!

I tapped it in and went back home, and thankfully got in before Nurse Cratchett, my lovely wife, came home to spoil all my fun.  She takes care of me with an iron will, even when I don’t want her to, and I am very lucky to have her round.  I am also very lucky at times to escape her clutches, and this was one of them.

So now, I have come to a couple of conclusions:

1. Golf when you are sick is about as much fun as work when you’re sick, which puts it somewhere in between a colonoscopy and a root canal.
   
2. The idea that you play better when you are sick is bunk. Golf is balance and concentration, and when you are woozy and worried about leaving lunch on the fairway, you have neither.
3. I was an idiot to even try this experiment out. The fact that I am an idiot is well established, of course, so that’s not news.  It was good, however, to once again prove that I am an idiot and document it so that I will have no problems when it comes to renewing my membership in the International Society of Idiots.  I hope that they will make me an officer one day, I want to work on improving fools just so we can continue to thwart boffins who dare think they can make anything “fool-proof.” Maybe playing golf in 42 degree weather while I was catching the flu will put me over the top this year.  You never know.

I’m getting better now, thanks to Nurse Cratchett’s regimen of  grilled cheese, soup, ginger ale and aspirin, thanks. She hid my bottle of Irish Whiskey…the wench believes in some foolhardy idea called “modern medicine” which is of course silly, because any so-called scientifically based medical discipline that ignored tried and true cures like whiskey and honey is no more good than a bunch of hippies banging drums and dancing round in circles.  Really.  Even if the stuff doesn’t work, it helps you not care how miserable you are.  That’s kind of a cure, right?

But I digress.  I healed nicely,  and I am ready to play golf again, this time back when I am my normal self.  And seriously, I did learn my lesson: that playing stone cold sick, well, that’s for the top pros.  Not me.  I do it if I were playing for something like a few thousand bucks, sure.  Otherwise, forget it.