Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

I am a golf addict. I generally play in just about any weather. Last Sunday tested me, though. I think old age is creeping in.

We had to wait for the frost to melt on the greens. Frost–in South Texas. Usually, we’re off before the sun gets above the horizon. And there were only six of us instead of the usual ten to twelve. So, we decided to play as a single group. There were few other idiots, and we only had to let a twosome play through on the seventh hole.

None of us played well–too much clothing. In fact, we had a skin on almost every hole, and only one was a birdie. Many skins were won with bogeys that day play was so bad.

I had a miserable second hole, a par three. My tee shot dribbled off the front of the teebox into some heavy rough. My second didn’t clear the pond that fronts the green. I dropped in somewhat lesser rough and hit the ball well, but it hit the front of the green and rolled back toward the water. Fortunately, some fluffy grass caught it.

I had one of those lies where you can slide the club completely under the ball and not even move it, so I was conscious of getting through the ball. Of course, I hit it thin and the ball shot hot off the club. All I could think was, “Hit the flagstick!” It did, about three feet above the ground–then disappeared. I had never seen such a thing. It was if a vacuum sucked it down into the hole, and it happened just that quickly–for a double bogey.

You’d think something like that would turn around what seemed to be the beginning of a bad round. It didn’t. My fingers are just now thawing out.

I received the latest issue of Golf Magazine in the mail yesterday. It took me about twenty minutes to go through. I spent almost as much time removing the subscription cards from it before reading.

After quickly reading David Feherty’s column inside the back cover, there was little else of value. And even Dave is losing ground. There was an annual selection of “10 Great Courses You Can Play,” all of which are a long way from Corpus Christi, and at places I’ll probably never visit. There were plenty of ads for homesites in golf communities, each of which cost half a million and required building of a home in the $1.5 million range–the kind of thing I would expect to see in an edition of Executive Golfer. Then there was an article on Kevin Kostner as a golfer. He really isn’t. He seldom plays more than nine holes at any time, spent his most recent honeymoon at St. Andrews–for the fishing, not the golf–and views time on the course as a “performance.” The magazine’s quality certainly has slipped.

No Peter Kessler interview this month. That’s a sore point. Kessler was the best interviewer The Golf Channel ever had. Arnold Palmer fired him because Peter, a true golfer, took Arnie to task for using clubs that don’t conform to USGA requirements. The magazine picked him up, and he normally has a great interview with someone of interest.

Of course there was the obligatory collection of tips on how to improve your golf game. I never read these. I do glance to see if anything new has been discerned by the skilled instructors and tour pros on the staff, but have yet to see it. There is never anything that hasn’t already been written about. A dozen times. A hundred times.

One of my playing partners in Dallas was a Golf Channel addict, and he watched every episode of “Academy Live”, even when it wasn’t. Each weekend he regaled us with the latest and greatest he had learned fom that week’s show. As we waited to tee off one morning, the Director of Golf for the club stood by and joined in the bull session. When my friend asked his opinion about some new contortion, the director simply smiled. “You keep watching those shows. It puts money in my pocket because you get so screwed up you have to get three or four lessons from me to get you back to where you were!” For a couple of weeks we heard no more of “Academy Live.”

Unless the next few issues improve, my subscription will simply expire–like their quality.