Golf with Dave and "McDuffy"

Saturday morning I got up early and headed out to the East bay to meet up with my brother for a round of golf at Metropolitan Golf Links by the Oakland Airport. The course is pretty decent, for being built on landfill and wedged between an airport and a gun range. The fact that neither my brother nor I had played a round in about 9 months, we weren't expecting much and in fact were more excited just to be getting out and actually spending some time away from everything else in the world.




We met at about 7:45am to hit some balls at the range and get a quick session in on the putting green. It actually turned out that Dave played baseball on some travelling team back in highschool with the guy running the pro shop, and even though they hadn't seen eachother in over a decade, the guy gave us a two for one rate which was definitely rad and made it even that much better since we weren't really sure how the round was gonna go. Turned out, golf is a little like riding a bike. I ended up shooting an 88 which is about average, and Dave beat me by two strokes - also about average. It was also a little weird that Dave was playing with a bent club, and still beat me. Whatever.




The most interesting part about golfing however is the fact that you never know who you are going to get paired up with. For our return to the game we were lucky enough to get some guys that pretty much kept to themselves and played the game. We'll call them "John" and "Chris" - mainly because those were their names. Dave and I were better then both of them, so it was nice that they weren't trying to give us tips the whole time. If you have ever golfed and had that happen to you, you know exactly how annoying it is because you have to end up spending the better part of 5 hours with these people. It would essentially be like having an 18 year old tell you how to drink for an entire night. Now you get it...

It also didn't hurt that one of the guys had a moustache like a Civil War era General.


Paired with the gut, it was interesting that he decided he should play from the tips - those being the teeboxes furthest from the hole (read: most difficult). Due to all of these awesome attributes I took the opportunity to nickname the guy "McDuffy." Basically because he looked like, well...what I think a McDuffy would look like.

The only thing he did that really pissed us off was at the turn when he dissapeared for about twenty minutes to change into those sweet shorts. That, and I distinctly remember him grabbing and massaging Dave on the shoulder in a "congratulatory" way, almost to say "good job" or something. I can't really remember the circumstances because i was busy picking my jaw up off the ground and laughing hysterically. Either way, it was awesome.

After the round we went to the course bar and were able to catch the end of the US/Ghana game, and use the extra cash we saved on the green fees for a couple beers and something to shmack on. Even though the U.S. lost, there was little that could have taken away from a solid morning with one of my best friends. McDuffy.