Never letting a rule stand in the way of a good time, our golf league allows each player one Mulligan per round. And why not? Friday night is supposed to be fun, allowing teachers to blow off some steam after a long week trying ensure that disinterested students all score above average on Ted Kennedy’s No Child Left Behind tests (I’ll make no commentary on the mathematics of this).

While I was at first dismayed at the Mulligans (I tend to be a purist) I’ve discovered that playing with them creates a new dimension of strategy. Under regular rules, a poor tee shot offers only one option: play it as it lies. You trudge to the spot where the ball landed and whack it again.

Introduce Mulligans into the equation and players suddenly are faced with an entirely different decision set. With each weak pop up and massive slice out-of-bounds, you have to evaluate the full extent of the damage: Was that last shot bad enough to warrant using your one and only Mulligan?

I rarely use my Mulligans. No mattter how bad the shot, my pessimistic nature leads me to imagine that there is another out there that’s even worse—or one that could come at a worse time. So I save my mulligan for later. And by the time I get down to the last couple of holes, I generally don’t need the do-over. I’m warmed up, and hitting fairways and greens.

Using the Mulligan requires gambler’s instincts and I don’t have them.

The primary risk of playing your only Mulligan is that the second shot might not be any better than the first. If you follow your duck hook into the woods with another exactly like it, you’re still hitting three—and now you’ve lost your security blanket.

There’s a great deal of guesswork in a mulligan, and thus, some of the more creative players in our league have created the “Provisional Mulligan.”

The Provisional Mulligan takes all of the guesswork out of the play. If you hit a weak pop just beyond the ladies tee, you immediately reload and declare that you’re going to play a “Provisional Mulligan.” If the second is better than the first, you use the Mulligan. If, however, you slice your Mulligan out of bounds, you play the original ball, and keep the do-over for later.

Yes, it’s cheating. But strangely, I don’t mind. I don’t use them, but if the other guys think it’s more fun, I say more power to them.

Fortunately, the Provisional Mulligan seems to get used on only the most questionable of shots. Otherwise, it could make for some very long rounds, indeed.

Last fall, I published this photo of a squirrel going through my golf bag. It wasn’t an isolated incident. Every time I play that course, the squirrels seem inordinately interested in my bag.

Yesterday, I was playing with a retired guy who’s a daily regular at that course. Along the way, I remarked about how friendly the local squirrels were , and about the annoying way they would climb all over my bag and go through any open pockets.

He just laughed. As it turns out, his morning playing partner has a Sun Mountain SpeedCart and Bag identical to mine—and for the past couple of years, he’s been filling his pockets with peanuts and feeding the tree rats as he plays.

“The squirrels on this course are the best fed in Michigan,” he said.

Mystery solved. The beasts recognize the bag and are looking for a handout.

Some random thought I wrote down while playing a round today. I had plenty of time, thanks to the fivesome ahead of me:

Defying mathematics, five-somes move fifty percent slower than four-somes.

I read somewhere that trees are 80% air. I wonder why my balls always hit the 20%.

Napoleon once said that he preferred lucky generals to brilliant ones. But Gary Player said that the more he practices, the luckier he gets.

Why is it that every time my ball hits a tree, it ricochets FURTHER into the woods. Left side. Right side. Middle of the fairway. If I hit a tree, the ball is gone. Just once, I’d like to get a PGA Tour break and have a tree kick my ball back into the fairway.

Courses should have benches on every tee. Busy ones should have benches at the 150 mark on the sides of the fairways.

Sixty degrees is the perfect weather for golf. Long pants, a light jacket. You don’t work up a big sweat when walking.

Someone needs to develop Canada Geese repellent and spray it around courses. Those beasts are ill tempered.

Would you be fined by the DNR if you had to kill a Canada goose in self defense?

Public courses have a lot of “features” that the pros never have to face. For example, the course I played today challenged my skills by having a different kind of “sand” in every bunker. 

The golf league that I now belong to plays loose and fast with the rules. Good-Good is the order of the day in putting; you’re allowed one roll-over with balls in the rough or fairway. On aerated greens (common at this time of year) anything within a putter length is automatic.

It’s that last that led to the now-infamous one-swing par.

The seventeenth on our course is a par three island green, like the one at the TPC Sawgrass. , at a distance of about 150 yards. K.P. teed it up, and took his first (and it turned out, only) swing of the hole.

The ball was long and left, carrying over the green and into the water. Mine was short, and I had to hit from the drop zone.

K.P. in the meantime, continued on to the green, where he dropped the ball at the point where it last crossed dry land—on the left edge of the green—and added a penalty shot. Then, since the hole was within his belly putter’s club length, he took an automatic. For a three.

Swing. Penalty. Automatic. Three.

If I cared, I think I would have been appalled. As it was, I just grinned. And from the conversations about it in the post-round debriefing room (also known as the bar), it was evident that the play would be remembered forever.

For the first time, I’ve joined a golf league.

Leagues are a big part of the golfing life in Southeast Michigan. Every weekday afternoon from April through Labor Day, area courses are busy with league play. You can see them as you drive by, stacked up ten deep at the first tee: a long line of golf carts waiting to get in play. League play on most courses begins at three, with the guys coming off the early shift on shop and factory floors. Later, they’re joined by office staffs and other 9-to-5 workers.

When I was coaching high school golf, one of the main considerations for practices and matches was to stay out of the way of the leagues. We played for free; the leagues were paying customers. That meant that my guys and gals had to tee off quickly and keep moving.

I developed a real dislike of leagues during that time. My attitude is unfair to leagues in general, but the ones I encountered were nothing to be admired. Jeans, cut-offs, t shorts and (horrors!) tank tops were the costume of the day. Many beer fueled league players thought nothing of hitting into my players, or driving their carts through a group of girls.

So given my experience, and revulsion to people who think of alcohol consumption as a primary form of entertainment, I’ve always avoided joining a league.

Still, every year for a decade, I’ve been invited to join the league at work. I know that they’re good people, but still I was reluctant. Golf for me always has been a solitary pursuit. Mrs. GolfBlogger accuses me of having an antisocial streak, and there may be something to that. I very much enjoy playing alone—it’s one of the few times in my that my wife, children, students or colleagues aren’t asking me to do something. It’s great to be in a place where no one is saying anything to me at all

Of course, I’ve never needed to join one, either. Because I teach, I’ve never had any trouble getting to a course before the leagues tee off at three. My workday is from seven to two-twenty.

But this spring I caved in and joined. We play every Friday with a regular league match for the first nine and an optional scramble on the second. Mrs. GolfBlogger is excited; I think she believes that I’m going to be more outgoing and social. But that’s not my motivation. I joined in hopes of finding some more material to write about. I’m convinced that golf leagues are fertile ground for stories; just ripe for a GolfBlogger to pick them.