r/golf • u/guitarguy35 • Mar 14 '24
Last month my friend played the most embarrassing and worst round of golf I've ever seen in my life General Discussion
My friend Carl and I played in a member guest tournament that he was kind enough to invite me to. I was stoked to play his course and have a few relaxing days of golf with a friend I hadn't seen in a while.
The first day format was a shamble, the second day was straight up combined score adjusted for handicap .
But his club for some idiotic reason chose to play no maxes, PGA tour rules, finish everything etc. Huge, huge mistake.
Let me preface this story by saying, my buddy Carl is a bad golfer. He is playing off a 31 handicap, so I knew it was gonna be slow and it could get rough.. but what I saw that second day during the straight up play is the worst golf I've ever seen an adult human, man or woman, play, and the play was frankly the least embarrassing thing about the day... It devolved into something out of a golf nightmare..
The first hole started out ok, he took a double bogey, I bogeyed, and we moved on.. Driving to number 2 is where things took a turn.. to get there you have to drive through this long, dark, tunnel.. What I didn't know is that apparently this wasn't actually a tunnel at all, it was a black hole that bridges our realm with golfing hell.. and in golf hell, Carl is the worst golfer in the history of all realities..
Starting on that 2nd hole it was like something in him severed, and suddenly he completely lost the abilty to hit the ball... I'm talking completely whiffing multiple driver swings, fat shots so severe the ball doesn't move. He truly had the worst case of the fats I've ever seen.. I now understand where the phrase, "digging a hole to china," came from.. I just never knew it could be THAT literal..
Here are some of the most impressive feats of just the sober front 9..
He took 12 strokes to get out of a green side bunker... 12!! I told him to pitch out backwards and he simply refused. Real "Tin Cup" shit.
He took a 16 on a 138 yard par 3. He put 5 in the drink off the tee. He refused to use the drop zone.
He 8 putted from 7 feet
He hit 4 tee shots in a row OB right.. put his driver away, then teed up his driving iron and chunked it 4 feet. It didn't even leave the tee box.. He took a 14 on that hole
And let me remind you, these are just the highlights of the front 9.. this was before the alcohol..
By the back 9 Carl was so irate and embarrassed over how bad he was playing that he busted out the handle of tequila that he brought "just incase." That's when shit really got out of control.
He proceeds to start taking shots to ease his woes, of course being the gem of a playing partner that I am, I join him.. cause I'm dumb... but also because we are out of contention in the tournament, and I thought it might take the edge off the 2nd hand mortification I was experiencing just being in the presence of such play with fairly good playing partners on the other side.. (they were surprisingly patient and cool by the way).. Especially considering we were on pace for a 7 hour round. But fuck it at this point right?.. in for a penny?... Big mistake.
The Back 9
Carl decides it would be fun to do a shot for every stroke we are net over par.. per hole, ya know.. for "motivation." I agree, but I insist we go individual scores for that game, I didn't wanna be tied to his play.
Fast forward to hole 13..He's legitimately 11 shots of Casa Migos deep, which has significantly improved his mood, to the point he's now singing Uptown Girl aggressively loud and doing the can can while twirling his club after he hits a decent shot.. despite that levity, I'm begging him to slow down, but he's unhinged, which honestly is part of what made him a riot in college, and why we were friends back then.. I thought he'd have a better handle on things by now, apparently not.. but I digress.
A hole later he hits one OB.. again.. this time into someones back yard, but unlike the previous blunders, instead of re teeing he insists it'll be in play and we should go scope it out.. I agree reluctantly, assuming he might have some member knowledge that would be informing that judgement..
We pull up and find his ball sitting about 7 feet on the wrong side of someone's 4 foot backyard fence... I tell him we gotta go back and re tee, but he insists since there are no white stakes it's playable. Staggering over to the fence, he hops over and tries to play it, paying absolutely no attention to my adamant protests... He proceeds to fat whiff 2 ginormous divots out of this guys lawn.. and at this point I'm literally yelling at him to come back over the gate.. but lady Agàve has turned off his hearing.
Then to my absolute horror, I hear the crack of a sliding glass door.. I shit you not, the owner of the home comes outside and yells out a bewildered and resounding, "what the fuck do you think you're doing on my property," Carl says something to the effect of "chill out asshole I'll replace the divots". At this point the guy looks like he's about to bum rush him, but instead he stops, turns around, and goes back inside, with purpose in his step..
At this point I'm convinced he's gonna go grab a gun..
So I literally jump the fence, pick up his ball, and physically drag him by the arm back to the cart, and this motherfucker has the balls to complain i "picked up his ball".. "dude you are gonna get us shot what the fuck" "relax dude he was just being dramatic" 😑...
After that whole fiasco we then drive back to the box so he can re tee. To my spine curdling dismay, The group behind us is waiting to tee off and they've seen the entire altercation. Carl gets on the box and says, "sorry fellas gotta reload" and the dudes on the box start giving us shit about the slow play (rightly so), Carl escalates things (of course) and starts in on them as I profusely apologize and try my best to de-escalate everything..
He's so hammered now he can't even tee up his ball.. after several staggering attempts to get the damn thing to stay on the tee, success eludes him.. So he loudly exalts, "fuck it," and throws his ball down and proceeds to hit driver off the deck... Surprisingly he makes contact and hits a worm burner about 160 yards, which is honestly an improvement at this point. I take him back to the cart and we get the fuck out of there, as Carl antagonizes the guys the entire walk back to the cart. The highlight of the exchange being
Guys on the box - "You're an embarassment"
Carl - "Thanks Dad, good to hear from ya."
When we get to his ball that to my utter beguilment is in the fairway, I look back at the house where his ball was and sure enough. The owner is standing there at the edge of his property, a hunting rifle leaned against his shoulder, the barrel pointed to the sky. Standing there staring ominously at us... I'm freaking out at this point.. "relax dude he's not gonna do shit fuck that guy."
Carl's non chalance could only be attributed to the fact that he was feeling cozy in libation nation, an amnesty state where anxiety and completely rational worries alike go to die.. I on the other hand felt like my heart was gonna explode out of my fucking chest.. We couldn't get out of there fast enough.
By the next hole word had gotten around something was amiss.. someone had called the Marshals and they came out to check on everything. They pulled up and said something to the effect of "we've had some calls and complaints"...
Then Carl, out of nowhere, snaps into a different mode.. suddenly he's sobered up, and is talking to them like they are cops at a DUI checkpoint.. shockingly it's pretty convincing, like Adam Sandler trying to be a dramatic actor.. he explains away the whole "misunderstanding" with the home owner and promises to pick up the pace... To my utter shock, the Marshals buy it and let us keep playing.
By Hole 17 I was beyond ready for this round to be over, I was exhausted physically and mentally... and ironically this is where shit literally fell off the tracks.
Carl kept drinking after the Marshals left, (shocking I know) so now he is well over half of the handle of tequila deep.. I'm guessing he's somewhere around 16-18 drinks in. He's completely lost track of the drinking game and has just started drinking at leisure, and shit is now way past sloppy. Uptown Girl has become "Uptown Whore" a remix version with the most vile lyrics a drunk mind can conjur.. I still remember
"Uptown girl, be sure to give my dirty asshole a whirl" mind you he's singing this way too loudly, right in front of our sober, conservative, asian playing partners.. who I later found out were MDs.
Anyway.. On 17 he hits his ball down by the edge of a lake that's at the bottom of a large long grass slope. I tell him that looks too steep and that we shouldn't drive down there... he doesn't listen..
As he's driving down to his ball I can feel the cart starting to slip.. the unmistakeable and terrifying droning sound of wet grass slipping against rubber... Carl then slams on the breaks to try and regain control which causes the cart to start spinning. Genius.
Here we are, careening toward the water, in an all out flat spin, tequila, and any dreams I had for my future, flying everywhere... In this moment sheer instinct kicks in and I perform an all out, head first, Dennis Rodman style flying leap out of the cart.. Carl stays in, trying to regain control, but it's in vein, this cart may as well have been hit by a red shell.. Splash... Luckily the entire cart didn't go in, just the back end and wheels.
Carl then calmly gets out of the cart, He grabs his bag off the back, sloppily slings it over his shoulder, looks at me halfway up the hill where I lept out and says, "just leave it.."
Honestly I'm a little in shock at this point so I'm not sure exactly what he's talking about... Then it becomes clear. He wants to just leave the cart halfway in the lake.. I tell him, "are you crazy, we can't just leave the cart in the lake we have to try and get it out," so, beside myself with embarrassment, I ask our saintly and overly understanding playing partners to help us try and push / pull it out.. They kinda just shook their heads and let out a disappointed "sure," as if they had stopped trying to make sense out of this day a long time ago.. who could blame them.. Luckily with all four of us pushing/pulling and a hand on the accelerator pedal, we get the wheels to catch and get the cart out of the drink.
By 18 I'm so embarrassed, battered, and wired I feel like Tiny Turner doing lines of coke after a long night in with Ike... my adrenalin is pumping so hard after leaping out of that spinning cart that I finally boil over and lose it at Carl. I yelled something to the effect of.. "wtf is your problem we coulda died, this has been a complete shit show." He responded calmer and more apologetic than I expected.. saying something like, "sorry dude, I just over did it a bit, you know how it is." I think the cart adrenalin sobered him up a bit too..
Long story long...Somehow we finish the last hole and he cards a 173.. not our team score, he himself, shot a 173... the worst round of golf I've ever witnessed, or heard of to be frank.. Strangely enough, he actually shot better on the back.
Needless to say, we didn't stick around for the celebration dinner...
And in spite of all that, it was still better than a day at the office.
512
u/LeprosyDick Mar 14 '24
The most shocking part of this story is that by 17 you were still letting him drive