September 9, 2007

ALPINE LAKE, WV — Greg Long, the 8-year member of Golfapalooza, continued to release smidges of his new book, “Memories: How I lived Golfapalooza”, which is due out to book stores in a couple of weeks. Long, a.k.a. Slick, was asked to walk through Chapter 5, which is titled, “The Front Nine” as it provides his insights of how to play the Ron Forse par 72 golf course.

Slick moved into Hole 5 remarking, ”This hole plays similar to Hole 1 when you ignore the pond that should not be in play. Always target your approach shot to the front of the green regardless of pin location. For some reason par is nearly a skin here and the green is never soft.

I have a pretty selfish memory of the 5th hole, but it’s my book. Back on September 26, 2002 during the opening round… my golf bag carried it’s first ever gallon of tequila and gallon of orange juice. It was to be a traditional series of jungle juice drinks for my 4-man Best Ball Team after my rookie season. Golfers in tournament play always appear nervous over the ball and loozers are generally well beyond nervous. So I decided to just remove that as a team problem with ‘liquor... I hardly know her’.

Anyway, Gus, Spraguer, and Dieterle were all pretty drunk early, but I was well beyond drunk by the 3rd hole. At the 5th hole, I pulled my drive left into the woods and went looking for it. I found the ball and hit it into several other trees knocking it back further into the woods. I continued to look for my ball like an idiot. I puked once. I kept finding it, kept swearing, and kept allowing the alcohol to make the ball playable.

After about 20 minutes, Dieterle and Gus come up Main Road in the golf cart yelling, ”Slick. Slick. Slick.” They finally found me looking for my ball near the Main Road. “What the fu$% are you doing?” Dieterle questioned. I replied, “Give me a second. I see my ball.” Gus replied with a drunk chuckle, “You are like 100 yards from the fairway with nothing but trees in front of you. [pause] We have bogey already. We need to get going. Hop on the back of the cart.”

I didn’t listen. Instead, I took my drop hitting 11 and played through the group that was behind us finished with a three-putt 14.” Gstan said hours later in the cabin, “What the hell happened today? You are like 26 strokes out of first place. You have a lot of work to do tomorrow.”