Posts Tagged ‘Vermilionville’

The Second Hole at Girard Park

I play disc golf…OKAY? It’s fun and really good exercise…but for God’s sake, don’t call it FRISBEE GOLF! That’s not cool, and it identifies you as the most hopelessly misinformed person ever. A frisbee is TOY designed to float and be easily…and safely caught. If you try to catch one of our discs, you could lose a finger…maybe two. They have sharp edges and fly like hell at amazing speeds.
We have three beautiful courses in Lafayette, but I most enjoy the one in Girard Park. It’s in the middle of town, beautifully landscaped and challenging, with holes built right into the earthworks dug during the Civil War battle at Vermilionville, Lafayette’s nineteenth century incarnation. They’ve filled in a lot since the 1860′s, but that’s not the point. It’s SAFE…no poison ivy, no poison oak, and most importantly to me, no cottonmouth moccasins.
Discs go everywhere, and sometimes you’d need a herpetologist to retrieve them on the other courses. Girard Park is civilized. We like it that way, even enjoy the walkers huffing along the hiking trail, though sometimes we have to wait before throwing. They wouldn’t appreciate a disc slicing into them, and I bet they have lawyers. A lot of them look like the type.
But remember…they’re discs…not frisbees! I was getting ready to leave one day when a church pastor asked me to show his group how we throw our discs, but when I tried with their frisbees, I couldn’t get them to go anywhere…at least nowhere near the goal. I offered to go and get my REAL discs, but by then they had decided I was incompetent. Just as well.
The principle is the same as what we derisively call “ball golf”, but with some very important differences. For one thing, you use different disks for different shots, driving, approaching, and putting, and some disks tend to veer left, others right, and still others go straight ahead…if you throw them right. Of course, you vary shots in ball golf by using different clubs…but that left/right stuff is impossible.
There are a lot of advantages to disc golf, particularly compared to that other golf people play so intently…no tee times, no memberships, only grassy courses between you and that tiny little basket with its chains…and of course, trees. Our fairways aren’t open like the other golf, and trees seem to grab disks right out of the air. I could have sworn I saw a pecan tree jump to catch mine some time back.
The Professional Disc Golf Asociation…yes, there is one…constantly tells anyone who’ll listen it’s the fastest growing sport in the country, but we never meet a lot of other people playing. Maybe it’s not all that bad, those empty courses. People really should play; it’s fantastic exercise, but if it were more popular, there might actually be tee times, memberships, and all that other crap. When we stand with friends in a morning breeze, throw well, and enjoy the sky and the mossy oaks, we think it’s perfect as it is…but it could still catch on.
No problem…new people tend to think it’s childishly easy…and THAT’S our edge. It isn’t. Most of them give up when they discover just how difficult and technical it really is. The only ones who keep coming back are those willing to make complete fools of themselves, and to tell the truth, it happens to all of us from time to time. We may blame the wind or the air, but the sad fact is…this sport is so damned unpredicatable!
When I first got interested in playing, I went to a course early one morning and asked a group if they’d mind my tagging along. One guy walked up and announced that he didn’t mind at all. He was the Gulf South Champion, had been for three years running, and I watched him wind up and cut loose with what I expected to be a beautiful thing. Instead, it flew about fifteen feet, slammed into a tree dead-on, and bounced back to where he was standing. At that point, I knew…I COULD DO THIS!
There is one mystery about disc golf I’ve yet to unravel…and that’s women players. We men wind up, engage every muscle, grunt, and throw with everything we have, and it generally goes pretty far. Women kind of tiptoe to the tee, straighten their hair, take a half turn, and casually flick the disk out…and it goes a tremendous distance like a bat out of hell. I think it’s something about the way they’re built. They seem to have a lot more momentum when they wheel around, kind of a gyroscopic effect we can’t achieve. It’s humiliating.
There are tournaments and pros in our sport…and yes, women players, more and more lately. Maybe someday there’ll be people all over the course, but right now, it’s really great, standing at the tee on a quiet morning, checking the wind, maybe glancing at that thunderstorm coming in from the south before letting the disc rip. It was a lot like that today.
The good news is the thunderstorm broke up before it reached us…and I finally, FINALLY sank a thirty foot putt. I bet I could have given that champion guy who hit the tree a run for his money this morning, but some other day he might clean my clock. That’s the way it is with disc golf. It’s part of the reason we love it.
You may ask what all this has to do with writing novels…and it’s a fair question. You’d be ASTOUNDED by the stuff I dream up when I’m playing…particularly when I’m losing. If I’m working on a chapter involving somebody really despicable and I’m way behind in the game, he comes to me full-blown, practically writes himself. It’s almost magical. God, I love disc golf!