Saturday morning the temperature was around 15 degrees with a wind chill of 5. Naturally, I was at a golf course. Why, naturally? Because the name of the event was The Idiot's Open...now, it all makes sense, doesn't it? It was the annual round of golf to support Kansas City Hospice, held at Smiley's Golf Complex, and, as has been the case for the last couple years, a Channel Nine team made the cut. Jim Flink, Jere Gish and I, along with a KC Hospice board member who must have drawn the short straw, hit the links at 9:00 a.m. along with dozens of other lunatic linksters. Now, Mr. Flink and Mr. Gish are excellent golfers. So good, in fact, that, were I their boss, I'd wonder how they found the time to get so good. I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but I'd be looking back over their sick days and see how many happened to be perfect for golf. Or their story choices. Just how many "consumer reports" can Flink do about the latest in big-headed drivers. And, as for Gish, why does every story he works on end up with the suspects being tracked across some fairway somewhere? As it turned out, I also did the morning weather from Smiley's while Michelle Rooney reported on the event in her live segments during FirstNews weekend edition. She showcased the fluid, Tiger-like swing of Jim Flink. She also captured my attempts at whacking the ball. I am not Tiger-like, more aardvark-like. Frankly, I got off to a bad start as several of the other golfers burst out laughing when they saw my equipment...my golf equipment, you sick, sick blog readers. About 18 years ago, these were pretty good clubs. Now, they look like something Fred Flintstone would reject as outmoded. Of course, Flink and Gish have all the graphite and titanium stuff, and that was just what they were wearing. One guy on the driving range thought the clubs were just for comic effect. Like I could bend them or throw them up a tree and not mind. So, I started the round feeling more like Ziggy than Zoeller...more like Mookie than Mickelson...more like Twerpie than Trevino...more like Hagar than Hogan....more like Wimpy than Watson...more like...well, you get the idea.

I have a checkered past when it comes to golf...or most any other part of my life. In grade school, a friend of mine, named Gregg Brewer and I would head out to Lake Wisconsin Country Club to play. He would pretend to be pro golfer Gay Brewer and I would pretend to be pro golfer Bobby Nichols. He was pretty good and I was pretty lousy. I did perfect, at that tender age, the art of surreptitiously kicking my ball out from behind trees and other inconvenient truths out on the course. As we got older, we would ride our bikes out to the course and play on summer mornings. You could get a junior golf pass, good all summer, for about $25 and that was, often, my birthday present. For that price, I played a lot through high school. I was never good enough to be on the golf team, but it was fun just to play. Imagine my dismay when I was no longer eligible for the junior golf pass! All of a sudden, in college, the game became very expensive. So, all of a sudden, in college, I became an ex-golfer.

After moving to Kansas City, there was a period of time when a group of us from FirstNews would play fairly often. Eventually it became too time consuming and expensive to play very much so I put the clubs away and courses around the area declared a holiday. Over the last many years, I've played very little. One of my sons likes the game, so we've gone out a few times, but most of my time on the greens has been during the Idiot's Open. It is the perfect golf outing for me, as every possible excuse can be utilized. Also, since the ponds were frozen, it meant you could skip the ball across. Because the greens were so hard, shots that may have been okay in May bounced into orbit in February. You really could almost use your putter the whole way...just keep the ball rolling over the frozen tundra. I didn't even have to use my patented "Oh, here's my ball...it wasn't in the lake/sewer/bush/tree/cart of the party ahead of us...after all" routine where I let a totally different ball slide out of my sleeve onto the fairway.

It was a fun morning for a wonderful cause and, thanks to the conditions, I didn't look nearly as inept as I really am. It made me proud to be an Idiot.