Fall Golf
and Other Stuff

By Bob Simpson

 For the last six years I’ve scheduled our fall trip in northern Michigan at some of the best golf resorts  in this part of the country. We get great prices and beautiful scenery to play in, but the weather is always iffy. We always seem to hit rain and cold temps on at least one of the days we are there. So this year, with the help of numerous meteorology studies, prayers to Mother Nature, black magic, and the wisdom of Solomon, I took the TBirds west to Gull Lake View Resort near Kalamazoo where it should have been at least ten degrees warmer than up north. The weekend before the trip was nice and the one after the trip was gorgeous. My weekend, of course, required long johns, ski hats, and hot chocolate. Waking up to temps in the 30s and hitting the course at around 42 degrees you would think you were in Aspen at the end of the ski season. In fact, our usual optional day of golf on Friday got blown away with 45mph winds and horizontal rain. This scenario led me to be ridiculed by my so-called golf buddies for being the worst weekend picker for golf trips in history. It’s a mystery as to why the golf gods seem to have it in for me as I am the Kinder Gentler Bob (KGB) nowadays, as my cohorts will attest to. They’d better or I’ll break a few.....

The amazing thing about this situation is that while we are bundled up in the cold like Jeremiah Johnson all forty one faces are smiling and sporting a great attitude. There is something twisted about avid golfers that transcends logic and common sense when it comes to the game they love. These catatonic clowns are as bad as those hosers who strip down and jump into a ice hole in a frozen lake every year. Fourteen layers of clothing that prohibits a full swing of the club, a sock hat down over their eyes, ski gloves on both hands, and blankets in their carts doesn’t stop these buffoons from milling about with Special Olympic smiles on their faces. It makes me sick to see this perverted activity going on. I just don’t understand the mentality involved!!

This was actually a part of my plan so I could kick butt on the course dressed in my state of the art lightweight super warm golf duds. Shooting a 79 on Saturday’s outing scored me Low Actual Score, Low Handicapped Score, First Place-Men, a CTP, a Skin, and Fewest Putts. (A big raspberry to Tom Czarneicki who wasn’t on the trip who usually takes home the bucks). I don’t remember who else won anything....it’s not important. (It’s all about me, you know.) A special WTF goes out to Jim Michon who golfed so bad on Saturday that he actually packed his bags and went home, missing out on Sunday golf. Judging from everyone else’s scores he should have had a lot of company! I’m glad they all stuck around to party and have a few laughs, though. Thanks to my roomies John, Kathy, and Kim for putting on a fabulous welcome party, and to Shirley Cookson for hauling up a ton of stuff to make it happen.

Gull Lake Resort sports five nice courses. We played the East and West tracks. If we get a good deal I want to go back and play the others next year. They have a super club house and the food was great. We now know, however, that a buffet is the way to go...not ordering off the menu. It just takes too long. The staff and service is unrivaled by any resort we have gone to in the past. They catered to my every whim and request to help put on a good trip for my little monsters, and monsters they are! Yes, I lay out a world class prize table and give out a ton of money, but that is secondary to why I run this trip every year. Great resorts, beautiful scenery, and comradeship all take a backseat to exposing the conspiracies and scoundrels that infest the game of golf at the T-bird level.

 There seems no end to the line-up of unscrupulous, malevolent, and contemptible practices that are perpetrated upon myself and others in order to bolster some depraved soul’s agenda to further his/her own ends in the game. To mark, forever, in the eyes of fans everywhere, I unmask these flimflam artists by bestowing on them the Butthead Plunger Award each year on Saturday night after the prize table is empty.  This year I uncovered a nest of vipers intent on keeping me from winning the trophy on the TBird golf league. Led by chief conspirator Mike Baran a team of rapscallions tried their darnedest to hoodwink me into losing the first prize once again. Mikey recruited Chuck Trewin, our statistician, to cook the books and post erroneous points to myself and others. He brought in Linda Sullivan to distract me on the course using her feminine whiles and batting her eyelashes at me. Using old manuals recovered from Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, Mr. Baran reanimated Ed and Lynn Bacon from the grave to stumble around like the walking dead in front of me on the course to throw off my timing. Mike, himself, employed a plethora of idiotic shenanigans while golfing with me to disrupt my game. These included a backswing so fast it broke the sound barrier, creating a whip crack, moving his feet around during his swing, and having me help find his ball every other shot. High speed cameras were used to show what he actually was doing on the tee. Sure enough, after gripping his club in a pornographic way, the footage shows the club head moving so fast at the top that it momentarily disappears into another dimension, his foot movements while he is swinging resemble the Soupy Shuffle, and the downswing morphs into a Happy Gilmore finish. The result is a flaming streak of grass at a forty-five degree angle going out about thirty yards and two beheaded gophers. Then he saunters over to the beer cart and woos the young lady driver with his favorite line from a childhood cereal commercial, “ Hi, my name’s Mikey.....”

 You can see why my game went to hell with all this going on, and how Mike won the trophy last year. So Mike and his crew were all presented with plungers this year. Fortunately, I caught on in time to this conspiracy and was able to regain the trophy for 2011. Mike Hiler from the Ann Arbor club also got plungered for being the only one dumb enough to golf in the rain on Friday.  My investigations are ongoing, so be sure to sign up for the Fall Golf Outing to get in on a great trip and find out who gets the plunger next year.