a time to golf

There’s a disc golf course just down Carlin Springs Road from our digs here in Arlington and the weather finally convinced me to order a new set of discs. I’ve had two previous careers in disc golf: the first was in the early 1980s when my high school friends and I used to play the 9-hole course at Elmwood Park in Omaha. Back in those days we played with regular frisbees and the holes were solid fiberglass, inverted cones, that kicked the discs down into small fiberglass buckets. My second career came in the mid-90s when I was living back in Omaha and I played quite a bit in leagues and tournaments in the Omaha and Lincoln area. Great leaps have been made in the sport and the holes are now much easier to finish since they’ve moved to using chains as deflectors for the basket. Sometime between my careers they built a nice 18-hole course in Omaha, with two sets of tee pads, in a lovely rolling park – many evenings were spent playing that course trying to perfect my approach shots. My alternate disc career during the 90s was while I was deploymented to Eskan village in Saudi Arabia. The massive 'camp' had thousands of villas with parks between seperate sectors, benchs, long alleys, open streets, and about a half-dozen object courses painted thoughout. Object courses are simply 18-hole sets that use paint to mark poles, or boxes painted on walls, or benches painted as the finish. Paint lines indicated hole number, tee areas and pars. We used 175 gram ultimate discs and played thousands of rounds on the differing courses; those nights may be the best memories of my time in the military. The huge difference in that set-up was that you routinely skipped discs off the ground, bounced them off walls, and tried to hooked long shots around two-story villas...it was a blast. Of course, we also had to scale walls to retrieve errant discs from the roofs of the unoccupied, and locked, villas. After arriving here I noticed a course in Bluemont Park and started thinking about getting back to the sport once this Spring rolled around…so here I go. This course is a 9-hole setup with three sets of tees and four pin placements on each hole; it also looks absolutely covered in trees so I’m guessing that accuracy will be much more important than distance. When you get to be in your 40s you understand you’re limited to ‘accuracy’ in most sporting endeavors – forget about distance and strength. (Let me correct; in my 40s everything is accuracy, not just sports. Got nothing left...) I’ll assume that the sport (and the courses here in northern Virginia) are still populated by semi-retired soccer players, liberals, hippies, former skateboarders, those that smell of weed, and all-around cool people. I should have my kit by early next week. Fore!