God may move mountains, but even He cannot stop a retired accountant from shaving two strokes off a triple bogey when the prize is a gift certificate to Applebee’s.
The sign outside St. Jude’s of the Asphalt read Annual Parish Scramble: Fellowship, Fore, and Forgiveness, which I felt was a bit optimistic given that the only thing parishioners usually forgave each other for was parking over the line on Ash Wednesday.
Father Donald was at the podium by the folding tables, wearing a windbreaker that rustled like a trash bag every time he shifted his weight. He held the microphone so close to his mouth that every B and P exploded with the force of a small artillery shell. He cleared his throat, a wet, gravelly sound, and bowed his head.
“Let us pray,” Father Donald boomed. “Lord, we ask for your grace on the fairways today. We pray for straight drives, soft greens, and—most importantly—the honesty of the pencil. Keep our hearts pure, Lord. Let us remember that vanity scoring is a sin against the ninth commandment, or at least a misdemeanor against the USGA.”
A murmur of nervous coughing rippled through the men standing around in their pastel polo shirts, desperately tucking their bellies into pleated slacks that had been sitting in the cedar chest since the Reagan administration.
My teammate was Arthur, a retired actuary whose idea of wild abandon was switching from decaf to regular after Labor Day. Arthur had spent the last twenty minutes wiping his clubs with a damp washcloth, muttering about grain direction. “Honesty of the pencil,” Arthur snorted as we walked toward the cart. “The old saying is completely wrong, you know.”
Photo courtesy Instagram
“Which old saying?” I asked, adjusting the strap on my bag, which was already leaning at a perilous forty-five-degree angle. “The one about God not being able to hit a one-iron,” Arthur said, squinting down the first fairway toward a flagstick that looked about as reachable as the moon. “It’s a theological error. God can’t hit a one-iron simply because He doesn’t play. He’s too busy trying to stop the cheating at scrambles, and frankly, He’s losing. The pencil is undefeated. Absolutely undefeated.”
He was right. By the time we reached the turn, the cosmic laws of physics and biology had been suspended, replaced by the alternate universe of the church golf tournament.
In what dimension of reality can four morbidly obese sixty-six-year-olds—men whose primary source of daily cardiovascular exercise is reaching the bottom of a Pringles can—shoot twenty-two under par?
We were paired with the Holy Name Society foursome, a group anchored by Gary, a man whose torso resembled a laundry basket stuffed with wet towels. Gary hadn’t seen his own ankles since the administration of George H.W. Bush, yet he possessed the terrifying, uncoordinated flexibility of a wet noodle.
He swung his driver with the velocity of a ceiling fan on the medium setting, producing a ball flight that defied aerodynamics—a low, humming duck-hook that bounced violently off a drainage ditch, ricocheted off a Honda Civic in the parking lot, and rolled to within three feet of the cup.
“Put that down for an eagle, Ernie,” Gary wheezed, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of a soggy glove. “Or was it an albatross? Doesn’t matter. We’re thirty-four feet out; we’re taking the three.”
Graphic courtesy Colorado Golf Association
“Did anyone actually see the ball land near the green?” Arthur whispered to me, his pencil hovering over the scorecard like a surgeon’s scalpel trembling above an open bypass.
“It hit a car,” I whispered back. “I’m pretty sure it shattered the rearview mirror of a parishioner’s sedan.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Ernie said cheerfully, already marking a four on a par five. Ernie was wearing shoes with tassels, which should have been illegal on a golf course, let alone a religious sanctuary.
By hole fourteen, the scoring had transcended mathematics and entered the realm of speculative fiction. Groups were turning in scorecards featuring numbers that suggested they were driving the ball four hundred yards through dense oak trees while simultaneously performing complex trigonometry.
One group of choir directors claimed a thirty-one under. Thirty-one! At that rate, they weren’t just playing golf; they were time-traveling. They were dropping balls into the cup from the previous Tuesday.
Arthur stared at our own scorecard, where we had managed a modest, deeply unholy four over par, mostly due to my inability to clear a modest pond that appeared to possess a magnetic attraction for Titleists. “We’re missing the spirit of the thing,” Arthur said, looking genuinely depressed as Gary’s group hollered with delight over another miraculous fifty-foot putt that definitely, absolutely, under no circumstances went in the hole.
“What spirit?” I asked, swatting away a yellow jacket that seemed violently attracted to the stale peanut butter crackers in my golf bag. “The pencil spirit,” Arthur said, his eyes glazing over with a strange, dark epiphany. He looked at his eraser, then at the scorecard. “Father Donald said honesty. But the Lord helps those who help their handicap.”
But as we packed our bags into the trunk, watching Gary hoist a heavy glass trophy shaped like a chalice, I realized Arthur was right.
We didn’t cheat, of course. We finished dead last, taking home a box of stale communion wafers and a sleeve of donated balls that smelled faintly of someone’s damp basement.
The pencil will always win. God may move mountains, but He cannot stop a retired accountant from shaving two strokes off a triple bogey when the prize is a gift certificate to Applebee’s.
