No Hazard Too Great for Golfers

The story is told about the golfer who took his wife out on a course one afternoon and ran into a problem on the sixth hole.

There was a large barn to the left of the fairway, its doors open, and the golfer’s ball bounced into the building and came to a rest.

The golfer thought he’d have to pick the ball up and lose a stroke, but his wife had a better idea. “Keep it low and you can hit it out through that open window over there,” she told him.

The golfer liked the advice, but he wasn’t able to follow it. He didn’t keep the ball low enough and it bounced off the top of the window frame, flew back, hit his wife in the head and killed her.

A decade later, having finally overcome his grief, the golfer remarried. In order to purge his bitter memories, the golfer took his new wife out on the same course.

But when he got to the sixth hole, the old barn was still there and the door was still open and, sure enough, he bounced a ball into the same spot.

As he walked over to pick it up, his new wife had some familiar advice. “Keep it low,” she told him, “and you can hit it out through the window.”

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “The last time I tried that, it turned into a tragedy.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” he replied. “I wound up with a 12!”

That story is just a joke, of course. It could never happen. Golfers aren’t like that.

Well, maybe just a little.

If you’ve ever been bitten by the bug, you know that a true golfer lets nothing get in the way of his game, not wives nor kids nor jobs nor rain nor sleet nor snow.

We don’t have much inclement weather in the Valley, but our golfers, with their own unique obstacles to overcome, have proven to be as hardy as any.

Take Elkins Ranch Golf Course in Fillmore, for example. Laid out in mountainous country, Elkins Ranch has scenery that is breathtaking.

So are the hazards.

It’s not uncommon for a golfer, contemplating a chip shot on the seventh hole, to have his concentration interrupted by a rattlesnake. Interrupted but certainly not broken. No self-respecting golfer is going to let a little thing like a rattlesnake stop his game.

A few weeks ago, golfers practicing on the putting green at Elkins Ranch had their concentration shattered by a large form hurtling through the air. Looking up, they found themselves eyeball to eyeball with a large deer that had come thrashing out of the underbrush.

Even fresh air can be hazardous. A golfer playing in a club championship at the North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village connected solidly on a shot he thought was heading into the wild blue yonder. But it ran smack into a powerful wind, twirled around aimlessly, then reversed course and came back to rest five feet from the spot it had left.

All the hazards aren’t natural.

One golfer bidding for a North Ranch club championship hit a drive that bounced off a marker indicating the ladies’ tee in front of him, flew back over his head and landed 30 yards behind him. That left him with his second shot to start a hole that was suddenly 30 yards longer.

Another North Ranch golfer had a big putt facing him on the 14th green, which borders a pond. He wanted to carefully check all the angles before taking his shot, so he stepped back and tumbled right into the pond.

But perhaps the most determined of all the area golfers were the pair who played the Los Robles Greens course in Thousand Oaks some years ago.

A brush fire had broken out in the hills surrounding the course, sending homeowners scurrying to their roofs with garden hoses while others more directly in the path fled.

But this twosome just kept playing, even as fire engines and ambulances circled the course.

At one point, one of the golfers lined up a putt while a house crumbled to the ground behind him, the flames shooting into the air.

“Doesn’t it bother you that that house is burning?” asked a reporter who approached the golfer.

“Only if it was my house,” the golfer replied. “Hey, we’ve got a tee time here and we’re going to use it. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a tee time?”

Spoken like a true golfer.