PB without J

Mr. Miyagi (the irish-american one) recently brought to my attention the need for more golf musings (since I am in the ancestral seat of the game and all that). The Sensai also indicated that he would be extremely disappointed if highly flattering remarks to himself were absent from any such anecdotes. As I must attempt to accommodate my readership... Besides, while I know most of you don't care a fig about overly-involved golf yarns, do you really want to read yet another post about the rain in Spain or Scotland/Glasgow/whereever? [For those of you who like the reflections on nearly-arctic climate, I've got a charming piece planned on abandoned umbrellas.]

Now, you may not have had the first-hand opportunity to observe the oddity of the Scottish, but trust me when I say they are very special. For one thing, they are proud of securing a world championship; that it is in Elephant Polo doesn't seem to detract from the splendour of the accomplishment though they do call it Elephant Pole in hopes that the naive will think that it is a track and field event. I've only been here a few months, but I've yet to see any Elephants in Scotland. (For those of you unfamiliar with EP...it's literal.)

And then there is "football" which they claim to have created. For the rest of the world, this is historically significant though most Americans probably scratch their heads and wonder why anyone would voluntarily confess to such an act. Whether they actually invented the sport is rather immaterial. That they are completely daft about it, is not. For whatever reason, watching a live tie (match) is provocation enough for very round men with pasty white legs to don kilts. (And I was foolish enough to think that this was merely an urban legend and move here anyway.)

Then there is that activity they thought up which has placed them continuously atop the most-hated-nation list of golf-widows the world over. By this point, I should hardly be surprised that sanity and Scottish golf don't exactly walk hand-in-hand. Then again, they caught me off guard. Minutes prior to the start of today's match I was asked if I preferred to play off mats or out of the first cut. I couldn't possibly have heard that correctly... so I took out my headphones and asked them to repeat. Yes, I was being asked if I would rather carry a mat around with me all day to hit shots off of or merely move all balls into the first cut. The fairways, they explained, were so wet that playing off them would ruin them for the winter. (Maybe the fairways are trying to tell us something... ever think of that?)

I might be in Scotland but I've still retained my reasoning ability. A quick back of the scorecard probability distribution indicated strongly that I was likely to be in the first cut anyway --on the margin, a mat would be superfluous. As it happened I hit an unusually high percentage of fairways on the day, though I quickly started aiming for the side of the fairway so as to enable the shortest walk between where the ball was hit and where it would be hit from. It was sort of like cart-path golf, just with sink-holes, boggy fairways, and bunkers-turned water hazards (and I'm not even going to start on the "winter greens").

At the end of the day, a pair of triple salchows followed by a double axel/eagle lutz had landed me atop the leaderboard. I blame my sensaishea... after all, he was the one who showed me that golf without comedy was like peanut butter without jelly. In other words, it would be a sane Scot!