Warning, what I'm about to say might seem overly boring to those who are not sophisticated enought to appreciate the game of golf.!!!!I've been here for almost two months and was finally able to step onto a golf course today. Had to drive almost 70 miles to do it, now that's dedication (or maybe just desperation). For those of you that go on our golf outing each year, the course reminded me of Quail Meadows, maybe just a tad nicer. The first picture is of hole #1, a par 5--550 yds and your drive has to carry 150 yds to clear the water. I was kind of nervous b/c I hadn't swung a golf club in two months and it didn't help that everyone stopped to watch the "duge Americanie" drive the ball (that means "big American" but I like to think that I'm just Husky). For those of you who don't know, teeing off on hole #1 with a bunch of people watching is the stuff that causes Amateur golfers to wake up at 2am in a cold sweat. With great precision. . .er um . . .luck, I absolutely crushed it down the middle (ala Phil Marrero at the '06 Manitoumi outing), that was the first and last good drive of the day, but it didn't matter because I was finally golfing AND no one but me would ever see those other drives.
Over half the people on the course were Asian businessmen. I played with the CFO of LG Electronics (from South Korea), he spoke a little English and I had Korean food one time, so we had some things in common. His first drive went off into the woods and he looked at me and said "moment," he went back to his bag and got another ball, after he hit again he said "mulligan". Oh, that was a welcome word my friends. It seems "mulligan" crosses all linguistic and ethnic barriers. Its nice to know you can go anywhere in the world and have people identify with that term. A term of humility and a term of forgiveness. The other adjustment to playing in Poland is that all the distance is in meters. When your irons are dialed in like mine, that tiny difference in distance is HUGE. By the end of the day I figured out that that 150 meters needed one more club length than 150 yds. Had I figured this out earlier I would have been in the back bunker of each green instead of the front one. No problem though, this allowed me to pracitice my Korean, Polish, and English by saying "Mulligan." Finally, an interesting side note, I was in the woods on hole #8 and found a golf ball with the intials BV. Maybe those of you who go to Bible Baptist can help me find its rightful owner. At the end of the day I realized that golf, whether in Poland or the US, is a wonderful game I love to hate. Can I get a witness??
2 comments:
Pastor Stover,
Great to hear that you finally got out to the golf course and "got lucky" on your first drive. I couldn't help but notice that you left out your score, but I'm sure it was in the 80s. I think that ball you found belongs to Bill Vaglienti, it's probably the one he hit at Prairie Bluff last week.
The golf course look American to me, like you said it must be a universal sport. Did you wreck any of the golf carts? Do you know how to say "fore" in polish?
It's great that you are finally beginning to have a "Ministry" there in Poland. Don't forget to take some tracts to the golf course.
Say hello to Ginger and the kids, tell them we love them.
In His Service,
Don Jackson
Don,
I stayed away from the golf carts, only one near death experience a year for me now. As far as witnessing on the golf course, I need some of those Bible Baptist tees to leave at every hole. Oh and my score was dzeiweic-dzeiweic, it was bad--thats why I put it in Polish.
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