divot is quite remarkable when one is using a teeespecially when it starts about six inches behind the tee. The drivenote the automobile reference here that implies speed and distancehad landed my ball fifty feet to the left in the rough. Drive my foot; it would be better named a limp. I had topped the ball and now was stuck with a bad lie. You know you are at least mastering the vocabulary when you can use the words correctly in a sentence.

Before the first game was over I had learned a lot more new golf terms. Bunker was one of them. It is interesting that a sand pit is called a bunker. Perhaps a word borrowed from war vocabulary is not ill placed in a game of golf because one could hunker down forever in some of the bunkers that I experienced that day. However, unlike the bunkers in enemy fronts, there is no protection from the onslaught of laughter and advice that attacks one in a sand pit. Still, golf gives us another good word for getting out of bunkers, it's called a foot wedge. By the way, a friend of mine assisted me on several occasions with two foot wedges. She held her feet, heels together, toes apart around the hole when I was ready to put. I haven't found that in the golf dictionary; perhaps I should submit it as a new definition.

At the end of the day I could call my game a real disasteranother golf term that describes exactly what it says. A disaster is when players agree to award points for bad shots. For example an out of bounds ball gets 1 point; failing to get out of a bunker is 2 points; hitting the ball from a bunker into a water hole is 3 points. My first gamewell, I think I'll just skip over the disastrous score. Besides, players have to agree to score disasters before the game begins and I recall no such agreement that day.

It became apparent that hitting this little ball on the green towards the hole was a little more difficult than I had anticipated. It was time to surround myself with a team of amateurs like me. The Thursday morning golf club was born. Every Thursday you will find anywhere from three to six retired ladies on the local par three golf course that is appropriately named Hackers. We have become friends with wonderful terms like mulligan, die in the hole. chicken stick and water hazards. A ball retriever is standard golf equipment in the group. We understand the term snowman and fade has come to describe how we play by the time we near the last hole. Fish has nothing to do with birdies in our gameit is a play where we need to use the ball retriever at yet another water hazard.

We are adamant that we will improve. Our Thursday morning golf group learned that advice according to the rule book should never be given or sought and have come to respect that rule. A par which started out as the number of puts needed to put the ball into the hole once it was on the green is now celebrated when played from tee to hole. None of us has yet completed the course on par but it is becoming a goal.

Saturday I am signed up for a tournament. I was told that tournaments really sharpen the skills of beginning golfers. I doubt if my amateur status will be challenged by the event even though I have achieved some expertise in the use of golf lingo. It is my chance to begin to develop my own handicap which is quite different from being a handicap to the rest of the team. My pencil is sharpened and ready. Hope springs eternal within the human breast. Woops, I blew it again; that phrase comes from baseball.

Learn more about this author, Karin Breuer.
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