The Conservative Cat

There are eighteen sections to a golf course, each one known as a hole. Your goal for each hole is to use specially-designed sticks (called clubs) to batter a small pock-marked ball from the starting point of each hole (the tee) to a cup at the other end (the pin). There are two types of clubs: woods, which are not made of wood, and irons, which are not made of iron. A typical golf club is shown in the diagram to the left. It is divided into three parts: the grip is used to hold the club, the head is used to strike the ball, and the shaft is angrily smashed against the knee when the ball goes in the wrong direction.

Each individual attempt to move the ball is called a stroke. To execute a stroke you first stand over the ball, holding your club, and wave it (the club, not the ball) several times at the empty air. This is called addressing the ball, because similarly to addressing a letter or package, you're expressing an idea of where you want the thing to go without actually committing yourself to a delivery mechanism. After addressing, you swing the club again, this time directly at the ball. From a distance, this looks very easy, but in fact the grip of the club is several feet from the head, and due to a huge design flaw, the head is really small. As a result, the head can smash into the ground, tap only the top of the ball, or miss it completely. When this happens, the golfer immediately jumps up and down and emits a stream of curse words. Sometimes, the head of the club actually hits the ball and it is sent into the air toward the hole. This is more enjoyable for the golfer, but far less entertaining for the spectators.

To make the game more interesting, three types of obstacles are scattered across the golf course.Sand traps are pits filled with sand. When you attempt to hit the ball out of a sand trap, large plumes of sand fly up, sticking to your clothes and getting inside your shoes. The sand insures you continue to be reminded of your golf game even after it's finished. Water hazards are large pits filled with water. When your ball lands in a water hazard, you have to buy a new ball, which helps the economy. Finally, ducks are aquatic birds that are too stupid to realize that a golf course is a really bad place to raise a family. When your ball hits a duck, the duck can be de-boned and fed to a cat.

The Force management makes their tournament more interesting by providing free beer and margaritas to the players before the game. The upside to this is that the ultimate path of the ball when it's hit is less predictable. The downside is that the game takes a lot longer.To compensate for that tendency, you get another free beer if you finish before 6pm. This year the pre-game free beer was Miller Lite, a perennial Force sponsor. The after-game free beer was a new thing called Miller Chill. I can't tell you anything about Miller Chill, because any attempt to do any research about beer will trigger Bruce's speech about the political history of cold filtering, and I really don't want to hear that right now. Or ever.

The Chicago Force Golf Outing is primarily a fund-raising venture, so players could improve their score by paying $1 for the privilege of manually moving the ball one inch closer to the hole. You can buy as many of these inches as you wish. It is therefore theoretically possible that you could get a score of zero strokes on any particular hole for around $5000. Oddly enough, nobody tried this.

The next big fundraising event for the Force will be a pub crawl on October 18. Details are available at http://www.chicagopubcrawls.com. After that, the tryouts for the 2009 season will begin, and we'll keep you posted.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat