My First Golf Tournament
I was behaving like I did on my first day out to the college. The nervous edgy feeling about having forgotten something or being under prepared and over dressed in someway. It was my first Golf Tournament after having been at the sport for close to 2 years now. For someone who has played competitive Tennis (and I daresay been pretty good at it) and coming from a family where excelling at sport is almost necessary (though far in between experienced phenomenon) it was crucial to do well, which in golf really means - “don’t make a fool of yourself”. The fact that the tournament was in an army run golf course and where “being a fool is as good as being dead” wasn’t making things any easier.
We “teed off” at 7.00am and my worst fears came true when we were asked to play the back 9 first. Those 9 holes that we seldom play in the normal course of our golf game. The first or the 10th, as it was in our case, was played out safely and so was the 11th. The 12th was a disaster and it was only later that I came to view it more kindly (the 13th made titanic seem like bad luck). The 14th was only marginally better before 15th took me right back to the point where I began to ponder if I should just give up the sport all together. Between all this my partners (remember golf is played in groups of 4) continued to try their best to make me look better than my scores did. Their scores were frequently running into double figures and we were running the risk of our 9 hole score looking like what people mostly have after 18. By then the sun and turned out in full and it was beginning to get warm which does well for your body when its into its 37th summer. Then came the 16th, 17th and 18th holes and changed things for me miraculously. I played the 3 holes very well and went in to the breakfast break feeling confident and almost looking forward to the resumption of play for the front 9.
The front 9 started with a beautiful drive on the 1st and just when I thought things had turned around, I messed up the glorious start with a much below par green game which brought back memories of the back 9 start. Another good start on the 2nd saw me get a par and I backed that up with a good show on the 3rd and 4th holes as well. The 5th was another par and the 6th one too was a good show. The 7th was another one over and after playing out a decent 8th, I played another par on the 9th and the last hole of the round. So eventually I turned out a more than decent front 9 performance which lent some credibility to my overall card for the day.
We beat a hasty retreat from the course thinking that we would certainly be among the bottom finishers. However, it was only on the next day that I found out that I had indeed scored well and finished in the top 5 and the icing on the cake was when I found that I had actually won the prize for hitting the highest number of pars for the day. It was a delightful bit of news and I was very proud of my golfing skills. I guess I might still be able to make it in golf…..”Sr PGA…here I come”