An Aging Jock Takes A Last Fling At Stardom On A Par-688 Golf Course

Bill is master of ceremonies at the annual Mason County Chamber of Commerce banquet, and he occasionally gets off a good one. But I thought that this one was his best. "Sorry, partner, but I can't do it," I said. "Ain't no motels between here and Brady."

He said, "We're not going to walk. Nobody would expect that. We'll figure out some kind of golf cart to ride."

"That aside," I said, "over at Brady, when I shoot my average 90 I'm exhausted when I finish. And out of that 90 only about 50 are hard swinging strokes. The rest are putts and chip shots. At best, even alternating shots as you suggest, I will be hitting the ball at least 300 times before we make our way to Brady. And all of them will be hard swinging shots."

He said, "It'll be all right. Just don't worry."

I said, "Bill, we're talking about high weeds along the right of way. We're talking fatigue. We're talking pastures with cows and bulls. We're talking hills that go up and down. We're talking about me swinging a golf club roughly 300 times."

That was in May when it was still cool, and June 11 was a long way off, so finally I said, "Well, what can it hurt?"

I found out later that it could hurt your arms and your shoulders and your feet and your hands and even parts of the body you didn't know you owned. But at the time I actually went away chuckling because it looked as if I'd found my One More Time.

But then the local papers started running stories, and the radio station in Brady wanted to follow us tee to green. And there was a TV station out of San Angelo covering the event. But worst of all was the Associated Press putting the story on its sports wire, and the item being picked up all over the country. Sure I wanted my Just One More Time, but I didn't want to do it in front of a packed house.

June 11 and Texas summer arrived at the same time. We were to tee off from the courthouse square at 10 a.m. By 9:30 the temperature was 96 and rising. Par had been determined at 688 strokes. I don't know where that number came from. All I knew was that I was afraid of three things: the plate glass windows getting out of Mason, staying alive down the highway and the plate glass windows as we played through Brady.

Bill got us safely past the Commercial Bank's huge windows with his first swing, a beautiful seven-iron shot. But then it was my turn, and I hit a sort of dribbling fade shot that ended up in the yard of Country Collectibles. That's an outfit that specializes in old wagons and old farm machinery that, for whatever reason, people from Houston and Dallas and San Antonio like to put in their front yards.