I have always been too impatient to appreciate golf. For me, it is a sport
that is too slow and too quiet. Besides that, no one ever knocks anyone
else down.
If you ever find me parked in front of a television watching golf, you can
be sure I must be severely depressed.
Mark Twin said, "Golf is a good walk spoiled."
So now I've irritated all the readers who love golf. Well, hold
on, because it turns out I was wrong. I just thought I didn't like golf.
Apparently, I do like golf.
We have just returned from a family reunion. After swapping news about kids
and jobs and stuffing ourselves silly, somebody announced we were going to
play golf hillbilly golf.
Maybe you've seen it. Well, you probably haven't seen Tiger Woods playing
it and it probably won't be at the Augusta National, but hillbilly golf is
making waves. The game consists of a three rung ladder about 4-feet tall
made of PVC pipe. You attach a golf ball to each end of a foot-long cord,
making bolas. Competitors, or rather sportsmen and sportswomen as I prefer
to call them, toss the bolas trying to loop them over the rungs on the PVC
pipe.
There is yelling, hollering, good-natured taunting, golf balls zinging
through the air and winding around plastic tubing. This is golf as it
should be.
There are even web sites featuring testimonials about hillbilly golf. Most
of them say it is ideal for families, reunions, campouts, and RV parks.
Some claim the game is addictive. One testimonial said, "Just got a set
four weeks ago and have played it every day since."
Poor guy probably hasn't been to work, taken a shower or fed the dog in
nearly a month, but such is the addictive nature of golf.
Hillbilly golf comes on the heels of another outdoor game that also sounds
somewhat, well, backwoods and hick cornhole. Cornhole is an outdoor game
where you throw a bag filled with "authentic corn kernels" into a
2-by-4-foot box that slopes upward toward the back and has a hole the size
of a grapefruit in it.
When I searched cornhole on the internet for specifics, the search engine
immediately asked, "Did you mean Cornell?" No, I did not, and I do not know
if they know about cornhole at Cornell but they should. Some physics person
could probably turn it into a master's project.
The attraction of cornhole is that it can be played with one hand, leaving
your other hand free for cold beverages, making it especially popular in
summer months and for tailgating.
Cornhole has even made it big overseas. A retired handyman in
Washington sent a cornhole game to his grandson serving in Iraq. A few
weeks later the entire Kirkuk air base in Northern Iraq was playing cornhole.
Before you dismiss cornhole as some hick pastime, you should know that I
was at an artist's opening at an art museum and they were playing cornhole
on the museum lawn, right next to the catered dinner with the live band.
Being an art museum and all, they might not have called it
cornhole, they may have called it "untitled," but they were playing
cornhole all the same.
Whatever you call it, you might discover that you like it.
The same way I now like golf.
