Tomorrow is a golf day. I’ll be playing 18 holes. I can’t wait to see which Laurie shows up.
Yesterday, the good Laurie played golf. Good Laurie showed up early, set up her cart, marked her (clean) balls and went to the practice range to figure out which clubs worked that day. Yesterday, Good Laurie looked at the driver and pretended it wasn’t there; played eighteen with a three-wood off the tee and came in second. Good Laurie played with only six clubs and resisted the temptation to hit for the green out of two feet of rough and over what looked like the local franchise of the sand and gravel company. She kept her emotions in check and didn’t give in to the temptation to wrap her putter around the neck of the massively annoying caddy who always seemed to pop up in the middle of almost every backswing. Good Laurie tried to read the greens and walk up to the hole before putting. She rarely used really bad words in complex sentences if the putt stopped on the lip of the hole, although she might have jumped up and down to see if it would drop.
Bad Laurie doesn’t really play golf. She hits the ball. Often. Bad Laurie still shows up early, sets up her cart and marks her (clean) balls. She goes to the practice range and warms up the same way as Good Laurie. But somehow, between the practice range and the first tee, the golfer that might have been good Laurie drops down a rabbit hole and leaves Bad Laurie to play the round.
On the first tee, Bad Laurie takes out her driver, even though the last four times she’s used it, the ball
ended up in the left bunker, wedged under the lip. On a lucky day, Bad Laurie gets the ball out in one and is now at least 100 yards behind the rest of her group’s second shots. To catch up, she looks over her vast assortment of clubs and grabs the one that should go the farthest. Of course, Bad Laurie is now on a downhill lie and promptly tops a three-wood 75 yards into an unplayable lie behind a tree for a penalty point. Her chip out takes a two-foot divot and lands over the green in a non-puttable place. Not wishing to experience a repeat of the previous chip, bad Laurie takes no backswing and chips the ball forward two feet, leaving 50 yards to the pin. Bad Laurie wisely picks up, something the rest of the foursome has been advising for the last three shots.
Learning absolutely zilch from the first hole, Bad Laurie again hits driver off the tee on the second. The fairway is four hundred yards of wide-open grass. She misses all of it. This is perfectly fine since no one else in the foursome has hit the fairway either. They commiserate, wondering why the club even bothers to have fairway since no one really uses it. After several dubious strikes, Bad Laurie has turned a par five into a ten and is contemplating a return to tennis. Or knitting. When Good Laurie plays, she hits two three-woods and a five wood, lands on the green and putts in for a par or bogey. Good Laurie has a busy calendar and is not often available for golf.
Bad Laurie’s best holes are usually the par threes. This is because even if she doubles par, she only gets a six. Bad Laurie has absolutely no idea why they bother to put greens on par threes since she never lands on them. Par threes are specially constructed so that if you are in one greenside bunker, the chances that you will fly over the green into another bunker are close to 100%. They are particularly difficult because the grounds guys always put the pin hole in a crooked place where no one other than God could sink a putt longer than two feet.
The contest between Good Laurie and Bad Laurie could easily be the featured match on WWF wrestling. Good Laurie in a Barbie-pink ballerina costume gracefully dodges a flying leap off the ropes from leather-strapped bad Laurie. Bad Laurie twirls the sharply-honed studs on her black dog collar and launches her hobnail boots at Good Laurie’s silk ballet slippers, impaling them on the mat. Will Good Laurie elude Bad Laurie and triumph on the course? I’ll find out tomorrow at 9.
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