Earlham Echo

July 25, 2023

As Kyle, Quinn, and I were loosening up on the first tee a couple Sundays ago, Kyle suggested we ‘make it interesting’ and play for money. I wasn’t sure about the idea since there is nothing interesting about losing money. Winning wasn’t out of the question for me, but with the current state of my golf game, I could have just handed them some cash beforehand and saved us all some time.

I have no issue with gambling in general. I’m an enthusiastic low-wager gambler. When placing an occasional sports bet, $5 is my typical unit. When Jennifer and I go to Vegas every once in a while, I enjoy playing blackjack—but for no more than $5 per hand. Five-dollar tables in Vegas are almost impossible to find, so I end up at machines that will allow that low of a bet. Cheap? Yeah, probably. But while many folks chalk up money lost betting as an ‘entertainment expense,’ to me, gambling is only entertaining if you are winning.

But gambling within the family is kind of dicey. As unlikely as it was, did I really want to win money from my sons? They are young, hardworking guys still relatively new to the real world—paying bills and trying to save some money. Our golf games tend to get a little overly competitive anyway—did we really need to add the element of money changing hands?

My dad gambled on golf with his friends a little—nothing major—but he was opposed to the whole family gambling thing. At our Thanksgiving or Christmas gatherings, most of us would usually end up playing a card game called In Between. It was a seemingly harmless game that involved bets of nickels and dimes—at first. But as the pot grew, the bets got bigger, and soon people were reaching into their wallets for tens and twenties to pay for their losses. My dad was as fun loving a guy as I knew, but he hated this game. We would laugh as someone shelled out after a big loss, and he would inevitably tell the story of an In Between game gone awry when he was in the Navy.

“This is how it started,” he said as he shook his head. “Small, at first. Then Jones was up $1,000. We were paying him off the whole cruise!”

I considered the risks of the golf bet with Kyle and Quinn and decided it was harmless. A skin game for a dollar a hole. I didn’t really understand the rules, but I just told them to keep track and tell me how much I owed at the end.

The bet must have helped us focus because we were all playing pretty well. When three of us are playing, there’s usually at least one guy who is having an off day and sending errant shots all over the place. Looking for those takes time and drags down the round. But that wasn’t happening, so we were clipping right along.

Until the 4^th hole on the back 9. We were putting on the 3^rd green and had caught up to a group that was playing slowly. As they were teeing off on #4, a group of three young boys pulled up behind them, cutting in on us. That’s a severe breach of golf etiquette.

I’m the kind of golfer that doesn’t always hold firm to the actual rules of golf. For example, nudging a ball from behind a tree or out of a hazard without a penalty is generally frowned upon in most golfing circles. Me? I just call that ‘April rules’—mainly because it most often happens in April when I’m still getting my game together after several months of little or no golf. When the nudge happens in July? It’s still called April rules and is acceptable most of the time—unless I have a good round going and don’t want to sully my score with a sham number that I would feel guilty about later, or if I’m embroiled in the occasional serious game with the boys.

As fast and loose as I am with rules, my golf manners are impeccable—always respecting other golfers. That should be reciprocated, of course, but it wasn’t in this case, so we were a little agitated. We chalked it up to kids being kids and not really knowing any better—and we waited. The boys checked on some sports bets they had going. I’m not a big fan of phones on the golf course, but they came in handy. I joined in with a tennis bet, of all things. It was fun to follow for a while, but Novak Djokovic eventually let me down by losing the Wimbledon final. Another 5 bucks down the drain.

We thought that the ill-mannered threesome might let us play through on the next hole, but they did not. Killing more time at the 5^th tee, I decided to wash my ball. I dropped it, it rolled a short distance, and it disappeared. It wasn’t just lost under the cart or obscured by some long grass—it was gone into the abyss.

There is an animal at 5×80 that pretty much has the run of the place. Their little heads are always popping up and you can see them running through the grass, dodging carts and speeding golf balls. A friend recently told me a story about hitting one with a shot earlier this spring—and it kind of, well, died.

The critter goes by a few different names, but the official name is thirteen-lined ground squirrel (Spermophilus tridecemlineatus). That’s a lot of syllables, so most people call them squinnies—at least here in Iowa. I have seen them scurry into their burrows many times, but never had a good look at one of their entrances—until this one consumed my ball. There was a wide opening that funneled down into a narrow tunnel. I reached in, thinking the ball would be right there, stuck near the top—but it wasn’t. The tunnel, in fact, was a little wider than a ball. How far down the ball went, I’ll never know.

We were still waiting to tee off, so my mind drifted further from my golf game, to Wimbledon, and then to the squinnies. This was their revenge, I thought. To annoy the invading hordes of golfers that trample their home turf every spring and summer, they steal and collect their golf balls, moving them around with this ingenious tunnel system. I imagined them sitting around in their giant underground cavern, laughing, with hundreds of Titelists, TaylorMades, Srixons, and Bridgestones stacked to the top—monuments to their rodent gods.

My golf game tends to fade on the later holes—especially when a round gets drawn out like this one and my mind drifts to the doings of fantastical forest creatures. That’s what happened versus the boys, and it cost me some money. I owed Kyle $4 and Quinn $1.

My great Uncle Russell used to play our holiday In Between games with us. He was fairly wealthy and tended to bet big and lose big. We joked that he was losing on purpose to ‘re-distribute the wealth’ to his family members. The winnings were our inheritance, of sorts. So that’s the way I’m going to treat any future golf money games with the family. I’m going to try to win, but for every $5 I lose to them now, that’s $5 they don’t get later.