ACE # 13 Scot Schreiner in Kerrville

with our eyes stinging from the cedar pollen wafting mercilessly on the winds,

we could hardly see the ball,

plus that green is uphill a good bit

4 iron, 168 yds, quartering wind from the right hurting was a frozen rope

a west texas wind-cheater

that landed short of the green,

but the little bulldog bounced left away from the trap

tractored up the steep face to the green

and obviously to me rolled toward the cup

but still

the chances seemed minimal

having a terrible round -- 

but that's the way it goes with duffers

they get their aces during bad rounds

me and my witness

the scorecard

i'll update my chart of premium holes later.

Golfing Papa

Mamie Smith - Golfing Papa
Golfing Dan was a golfing man
He'd golf morn til night
He had a mama, a loving mama
He didn't treat her right
He come home all tired out
And right to bed he go
His mama soon got tired of this
And these words she whisperd low

Golfin' Papa, you're way over par
You'll have to stop puttin' on the green
You had your way on the fairway
You know just what I mean

Now your start is perfect your aim is true
But when you drive you fail to follow through
Golfin' Papa, you're way over par
You'll have to stop puttin' on the green
Use your nibblets
You have to start putting on the green

Now what you need is a golf coach
You're all right on your drive
But bad on your approach
What you want, your mama has got
But son you better practice
You're so ___ on shot

Now listen papa you must learn your stuff
Cause when you drive you fly to go right in the rough
...From paying green fees, you've got me broke!
Your shafts are bent, and now you've lost your master stroke!
So pack your golf bag, you've had your fun
I've found another man who's made a hole in one!

Golfin' Papa, you're way over par
You'll have to stop puttin' on the green
Turn in your golf cart
You'll have to stop puttin' on the green

foozle

Wordnik Word of the Day for July 01, 2019

foozle

1. transitive verb To do or deal with poorly or clumsily. from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

2. noun The act of bungling, especially a poor stroke in golf. from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

3. undefined To bungle; make a moss of; do clumsily or bunglingly: as, 'to foozle a shot', in golf. from The Century Dictionary.

4. noun In golf, a badly played stroke. from The Century Dictionary.

5. noun A tedious person; a fogy. from The Century Dictionary.

Too many recent sessions have ended with a "kill the foozle" as the solution, and Gini in particular said that it was nice to have an ending that could be resolved via diplomacy. Gamemastering Is An Art, Part VII: Catching Up

There are a frustrating number of mazes with "hunt the foozle" puzzles, wherein you have to find a switch that is wall-colored or walk through every tunnel until you find the one that actually goes somewhere. It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas Is Over....

Not only did he foozle his drive badly, but his face was worried, and his forehead creased in a big frown. Partners In Crime

But with Harleston's entry the affair assumed quite a different aspect; and it is no reflection on you, Marston, that your expedition to his apartment didn't succeed; though somewhat later Crenshaw did act as a semi-reasonable man, and secured the letter -- only to foozle again like an imbecile. The Cab of the Sleeping Horse

'We can hardly be expected to foozle on purpose, just to let Archie show off before his girl.' The Man Upstairs and Other Stories

"I don't think my father would kid us," Paul said slowly, "but I know he would be awfully disappointed that we had made a business foozle." Paul and the Printing Press

There was a rumour running at large in the Academy that the Old Fellow wrote poetry, but he ran the mathematics and didn't make such a foozle of it as you might suppose, either. Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908

The word 'foozle' comes from a German word meaning 'to work badly or slowly'.

Utopia Golf

The Buried Lies Cemetery -- and take a moment to parse the poetic levels of that phrase! -- is next to the golf course in Utopia Tx where the film "Seven Days in Utopia" was filmed . . . golf course seemed flat & uninteresting, really . . . . the best thing about the rather pious film was Robert Duval . . . about a down-on-his-luck pro golfer finding his game again . . . 

Cheater

P.G. Wodehouse wrote that the best way to discover a man’s character is to play golf with him. In his short story “Ordeal by Golf,” the narrator declares, “In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself.” Donald Trump is an avid golfer, of course, as well as the avid proprietor of seventeen golf courses on both sides of the Atlantic. 
New Yorker Article

Jack's Beautiful 2nd shot on Benedictine # 5, par 5, 523 yds.

 THIS -- you may well say -- THIS is a bridge too far: to blog about imaginary golf achievements by an imaginary (cyber, rather than fastasitical, tho' let me be the first to say: Jack Nicklaus is Fantastic, still, if you see how i mean), on an imaginary golf course, built on very old software from a defunct vendor.

I mean, first of all, and no kidding, the Great Singularity is Surely Upon Us, imminently, if not sooner, so when i tell you that Cyber Jack is a clear harbinger of that Great Singularity, and make no mistake. I find that I must keep making the courses more difficult, as he is still improving, even as i have ratcheted-down his skills in the game controls (strictly so that he is not tooo goood, like striping his 3 iron 250 yds stiff to the pin, not so that i can beat him more often than not, certainly not).

And i suspect a certain amount of information sharing (and i say this strictly as an IT professional for-lo-these-40-years) behind the scenes between the game machine and cyber jack -- nothing too heavy handed you understand, just a thumb on the scale of luck, sometimes.

Just a little background: Benedictine is a course i made in response to my own perception that my courses had gotten just too hard. Jack was limping around in the low-80s and myself never broke par,
but i HATE that Driver-Wedge kinduv golf. I still put in MacKenzie-like camouflage, and trees (i am from east texas and i like trees as golf course features), and elevation changes, to keep it all interesting . . . just the length of the course changed . . . .like no 250 yd par 3s.

So #5, par 5, 523 yds, is no particular challenge to Big Cyber Jack, especially downwind. All the things that would flummox a duffer faze him not: not the water not really in play, tho' visible; not the tree-lined, sloping-to-the-water narrow fairway; not the contortured green that challenges even jack to hold . . . 

But look at this shot! Jack has played conservatively on his t-shot, away from the water, but behind this row of trees that hangs out in the short rough that intrudes into the fairway. This 1iron from about 250 yds has a slight fade off an uneven lie, that jack got over the first small trees, then under the loblolly-canopy. That first bounce is amazing to watch (I saved the shot 8^D . . . ) . . . 5 yds shorter or longer and he misses the green by a long shot, but that big bounce took all the starch out of the ball, then it trickles across the elevated corner of the green and back down to hole-high, stopping short of the sand trap . . . I . . . with my architects knowledge of the course, hooked my drive a little so it landed on the front of the green, and rolled down into the trap. That shot trace wasn't near so interesting.

The Woman Who Invented Augusta

Augusta National was a men-only club until 2012, when it admitted its first two women members, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a businesswoman from South Carolina. (Since then, it has admitted at least two more.) Surprisingly, given both its history and the history of golf, the club actually owes much of its original conception to a woman: Marion Hollins, who in the late nineteen-twenties created a golf club that the founders of Augusta National initially treated almost as a blueprint.

New Yorker Article

Samuel F. B. Morse, a distant cousin of the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had acquired an enormous piece of property on the Monterey Peninsula, a hundred and twenty miles south of San Francisco, and Hollins helped him develop it. The centerpiece of Morse’s project was the golf course known today as Pebble Beach—but Hollins built him an even better one: the Cypress Point Club, two miles to the north. When Morse’s chosen golf architect, Seth Raynor, died shortly after beginning work on Cypress Point, Hollins replaced him with Alister MacKenzie, a British physician, who had collaborated on several courses in the United Kingdom but was barely known in the United States. MacKenzie credited Hollins—in a memoir that wasn’t published until many years after his death—with the design of Cypress Point’s most famous hole: the sixteenth, a par three, on which the ideal tee shot has to carry two hundred yards over an ocean inlet, from the top of one cliff to the top of another. Raynor had said that the shot was too difficult, MacKenzie wrote, so Hollins dropped a ball to the ground and showed him that it wasn’t. Cypress Point is currently No. 3 on Golf Digest’s biennial list of the hundred greatest courses in the United States; Pebble Beach is No. 7.