COURSE REVIEWS

Kiss of the Golf Widow

By Reid Champagne,
The Washington Golf Monthly

My family and I had gotten back the night before from a great vacation to Kiawah Island, where I had played my best golf of the season. I was anxious to get to my club, post those scores, and test my newly discovered prowess on the home track.

I was out of bed at 6:30 on a bright and warm Sunday morning, and had my golf shorts halfway on when my spouse arose sleepily and asked,

"Where are you going?"

From her tone, less the inquisitive than the inquisitional, I immediately sized up the situation as one in which "To play golf" was not on the list of acceptable responses. Having played golf virtually every day of vacation, trying to squeeze another round out of our first day back with vans and suitcases still to be unpacked was obviously way over the line. Caught quite literally with my pants down, I quickly chose to beat a high and hasty retreat.

"Just going out for some bagels for our breakfast," I answered innocently, hoping she hadn't noticed the tees I still had in my hand.

"Good!" she said, much less pointed, but still more of the parole officer's "good!" upon reviewing a parolee's activities report for the week.

On whatever battlefields the War Between The Sexes are staged, few are more enshrined by smoldering clashes and ignoble defeats than those where the combat was engaged by the golfing husband and the non-golfing wife.

In fact, were there no such thing as infidelity in this world, golf might very well have become the third rail of married life. And to be perfectly honest about it, we - the golfing spouse - deserve all the trouble we bring down upon ourselves. Every weekend during The Season we begin by invading Poland, and we end it with Berlin in flames.

You know, if we could just bring ourselves to once in a while clean the gutters, straighten up` the garage, pick up some groceries, or maybe just take the odd moment to notice the new wallhanging, we might succeed in having the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately, any of these helpful activities (except noticing the new wallhanging) always seem to pop up right when a round of golf calls to us like a Siren. (And new wallhangings, as we are all aware, pose a serious distraction to our practice putting in the family room, and, therefore, have to be ignored.)

Take the annual golf season as another example. You look over the calendar for the coming year, and you instantly see that the rule of "once during the week, and once on the weekend," is not going to be honored except in its breach.

It begins, of course, with the spring break to Myrtle Beach. This right of passage, occurring so early in the season, digs you in so deep, there's little chance of recovery. It would help if we didn't spend the previous three months talking about the trip like it was a space mission, but boys will be boys. And for us golfing boys, a golf road trip is Halloween, Christmas, and Easter all rolled into one.

Then, by the time we've made it through our club's tournament season (especially those 2-day, 36 hole marital aides), and that last minute call from a brother-in-law needing you to fill out a fall roster you had earlier passed on, you will have created stress cracks in your marriage that even Bill and Hillary haven't confronted.

Every year we dig this pit for ourselves, and by the end of it, we vow to do better. But we never do. Is there a prescription that can be followed that will allow all the golf you are driven to play and still preserve marital bliss? No, unless, of course, you discover a genie in a bottle, and one with a lot more than just three wishes, since three wouldn't begin to cover all the necessary bases.

I tried once going to The Source herself for guidance and insight into resolving this other American Dilemma. And my own blushing Gunnar Myrdal replied,

"You mean you want to find a way to reconcile your marriage to golf and your recreational interest in me?"

Anyway, just as I was about to despair of finding a way out of this irreconcilable difference, a Deus Ex Machina fell into my lap like a 35-footer dropping for a bogey save. It was a bright, sunny Saturday and I had run out of the nerve it took to announce that I was thinking about heading out to the course for a quick 9 or 36.

I decided instead to stay close to the roost and maybe accumulate some bonus points. Then, like I said, God delivers the following from my beloved's lips: "You know, if you're just going to lay on the couch like that all day drinking beer and watching football, you may as well be out playing golf."

I couldn't believe my ears, but I was way too hungry to question this manna falling from the sky. An hour later I was on the first tee feeling like the luckiest man in the world. OK, so she didn't word it exactly the way I might have wanted , but as they say about this magnificent obsession of ours: it's not how, it's how many.

Or as my wife tried to put it when I got back that evening, "It's not how many, it's how many more."

Now, what the heck did she mean by that?