Say - Do these pantaloons make my butt look big?

Golf for me was mostly a lot of work. I had to practice lots and play 3 or 4 times a week to get to the place where I didn't suck on a continuous basis. I was average. Oh sure, that's not to say I wasn't able to sometimes put together a decent round, say, in the lowish 80's. This only happened when the planets were aligned just so and I was zen-ed out and one with the golf course. In fact that was the cause of the big brouhaha that went down the year my golf league partner, I'll call him Johnny (that's not his real name - his real name was Terry) and I won the league title. Yep, we were the Champs. Number One.

The sad truth is we really had no place even playing for the league title, let alone winning it.

See, first of all, Johnny was a cheater. Now to put that into perspective every Saturday afternoon duffer cheats a little. You know, you kick your ball up onto a tuft of grass to improve your lie, stuff like that. But Johnny would do things like kick it out from behind a tree, or pick it up out a creek and drop it on the bank without taking the penalty stroke. Stuff like that. That's a no-no. That's *really* cheating, crossing the line, and, well, Johnny was a cheater and as such he cheated. It's what he did. Probably lied on his taxes too and most certainly screwed his customers (he owned some kind of distribution warehouse place and made truckloads of money) etc etc. As such I never lectured him about it, or even brought it up, but I did hear people talk crap about him in the clubhouse. It's not like I was pals with the guy, he was my partner simply by luck of the draw, and to be honest he was loads of fun to hang about with despite whatever moral failings he may have had. Plus he had a super hot daughter, but I digress.

Johnny and I ended up playing quite well at the end of the summer and that put us into position to play for the championship. The big wazoo. The whole shebang. We were going up against a team of guys who were good golfers, by all rights these were the kind of guys who you would expect would win in a league like that. One of them actually played golf for a major Uni (Indiana I think), of all things, and the bastard could shoot even par on a good day. He looked like a golfer too, wearing slacks and real golf shirts. I never said much to him all summer aside from "hey" or "how's it going" cause he wasn't really *my people* if you know what I mean. My people were the guys who wore AC DC concert tee-shirts and were lighting up a joint by the time they got to tee box of the 2nd hole. I think you get the picture.

The evening of the championship round was one of those planet-alignment days, for whatever reason, and I was flat out whomping arse. I was beating Johnny (Johnny was the A guy ((the best guy on your team was your 'A' guy)) from our team, partially because he cheated, and I was the B guy, cause, well, I pretty much already went into all that. Each team's A guy played the other team's A guy, and the B guys played each other and you took the point differential between the two ((after adjusting for your handicap)) to determine the winning team) which means that I was flat out slaughtering the B guy from the team we were playing. Enough so that Mr Slacks-Wearer would have had to shoot an amazing round to make up the difference.

Mr. Slacks-Wearer decided to accuse me of sandbagging after about the 6th or 7th hole when, baring direct intervention from God, it became apparent that Johnny and I were going to win. He accused me in an angry sort of way. "You're a fucking sandbagger" I think was his direct quote. Now a sandbagger was the type of guy who played like crap all year, ON PURPOSE, in order to inflate his handicap, then when playing in a tournament game he would play up to his normal level and be impossible to defeat given the fact that his handicap didn't reflect his true skill level. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internets, I'm a lot of things, no question about it, but a sandbagger I'm not. Mr. Slacks-Wearer could be heard mumbling "Mother fucking sandbagger" after I would tee off. "Mother fucking sandbagger" when I would chip from the rough to a couple inches of the hole. Etc Etc Et friggin cetera.

Not only is this kind of behavior on the rude side, given that golf is a gentleman's game and all that, but it was simply not true. I was working like a pig all summer at the driving range and on the practice green just to be totally average and the fact that I happened to shoot one of the best rounds of my life during the League Super Bowl, well, it was just one of those things. Kind of like when the head cheerleader dated that Frankie Dorfmonger looser guy for a couple months during our senior year at High School. Nobody could figure it out. It defied all explanations. It was written off as a freaky kind of weird two-universes-collide scenario where some matter must have gotten mixed with some anti-matter and that was the end result. It was just freaky. Like Brittney Spears career. Or the success of Oprah Winfrey. You get the picture.

I was ignoring Mr. Slacks comments and simply enjoying the fact that I was kicking arse and was going to win while he was going to go home a LOOOOOOSER. Johnny (who is a bit of a hot-head) was ignoring him too, right up until the last hole. At that point Johnny said something then Mr. Slacks said something then Johnny said something else and at that point Johnny decided Mr. Slacks was hiding weapons of mass destruction and deceiving UN Weapons inspectors and as such needed to be dealt with in a forceful manner. They're standing just off the 18th green (which is right by the clubhouse) screaming quite loudly at each other, getting ready to bring the fisticuffs out when the clubhouse worker guys come scampering over in droves. At that point myriad people are yelling and trying to grab people and lots of guys who were there to play are standing around watching and sheesh, it was really something. My one and only golf league championship and it ended with an exclamation point. A real brouhaha if I ever saw one. A donnybrook even.

The clubhouse worker guys got it all sorted out nobody ended up hitting anybody. Mr. Slacks-Wearer quit the league and Johnny and I left with a rather sour feeling about it all. Johnny and I came back next year to defend our championship but ended up finishing in 4th place. I ended up quitting after that year, cause, well, it had all been done, where does one go after that?