Taste Grief, Need Friends

Bad golf, good friends, and shared poetry

‘Be the ball’: a still from the 1980 film “Caddyshack.”

By Michael Judge

When it came to golfing with his children, my dad famously said (well, famously at least in my family), “It would be easier to count the number of balls lost than the number of strokes taken.” This raw nugget of fatherly wisdom came to mind recently when I took some old friends golfing and realized the old man’s words still rang true. There I was, a 58-year-old child searching for ball after ball—more than a few lost to the rough, traps, and water hazards of the front nine.

“A good walk spoiled!” was all I could come up with, reminding my two completely bald high-school buddies that I’d “fallen while taking out the recycling and fractured two vertebrae in the lower lumbar region” not six months ago. “I also cracked two ribs,” I muttered, sipping my vodka lemonade as they taxied me to and fro in search of yet another missing TaylorMade 3.

Mercifully, my friend Scott suggested early on that we play “best ball,” meanin…