0812261100 The day known throughout all of Christendom as Christmas Eve

On Tuesday, the day known throughout all of Christendom as Christmas Eve, I went with a friend and his son, Brad and Michael, to a golf driving range.
The golf driving range is a lot of fun, it takes all the administration and tedium out of the game and just leaves the fun part, that is, whacking the ball downrange without having to go and get it.

When I was kid growing up in rural Australia we played cricket in the summer and football in the winter. There was an interesting primary school variation on both these games that made them a lot more fun. The variations basically removed all the rules. In cricket, there were no teams. Whoever owned the bat would bat first, whoever owned the ball would bowl first and all the poor kids that could not afford either would be fielders. I always started out as a fielder. The idea was to get a turn at batting. If you caught the ball, it was your turn to bat. This is a game of cricket at it simplest and purist form. Football, or Australian Rules, was refined to its simplest and most basic level of fun. Two teams of kids of roughly equal numbers and ability would stand a reasonable distance apart and kick the ball to each other. If you caught the ball, or “marked” the ball as it is called, then it was your turn to kick. There was no score, no teams and no stopping. Sometimes, in an utterly unheard of variation on every sport, there was more than one ball in play. The golf driving range is like that – just hit the ball. Players compete against their own internal perceived, real or imagined shortcomings.
Golf is an unusual sport. The winner in a game of golf is the one who played the least. There is no way that anybody can get that little ball into that little hole, all the way over there relying on their hard-earned skill and practice alone. When anyone gets a hole in one, anybody, it is simply one of those cosmic coincidences where everything that the golfer does is utterly canceled out by everything else that the universe is does. The hole itself is only 108mm across – about 10cm. A trained soldier must fire five rounds into an area 10cm across at a range of 100m to pass a marksmanship test. It takes a specialised weapon designed and built for the purpose of delivering accurate aimed fire to achieve this. A golfer tries to do this by a method that is more or less an overly complicated way of hitting a ball with a stick.
The driving range, like an army shooting range has a variety of targets in the impact area. In the centre was a basket about two meters across that the owners must have set up in a moment of either hopeless optimism or insanity. Their idea is that the golfers simply and effortlessly hit the balls downrange and pop them into the basket, thus making the whole laborious job of retrieving the balls so much easier. I spent most of the time trying to hit the basket. It was soon apparent that I do not have the golfing skills to do this and having a military background I resorted to a tactic that would increase probability of hitting the target by increasing the rate of fire. Brad said “I have never seen a golf game turn into an aerobic workout”.

References: http://golf.about.com/cs/rulesofgolf/g/rules_hole.htm