There are two great sins in golf: that of playing slowly, and that of playing poorly. To commit either alone is forgivable. To commit them both simultaneously is an affront to the God of Man and Nature.

The group I fell in behind last night was so bad, and so slow that they were going to need absolution from a priest.

The guy in the yellow sweatshirt was the worst. He would take five or six practice swings, then set up behind the ball, make a strange pumping motion, and finally hit the ball fifty yards. He’d then go through a ritual of posturing apparently designed to let everyone know that this was not his usual game.

His partners then folded their arms, rubbed their chins and made knowing nods.

Not that the other three were much better. The tall one with the wild afro could hit the ball a mile—just not anywhere near the proper fairways or greens. The fat one must have had something wrong with his knees, for he moved so slowly from the cart to the ball I thought he might keel over at any moment. Red golf shirt spent so much time lighting up his menthols it’s a wonder he had any time swing the club.

All of them wasted more time being demonstrative than any group of teenagers I’ve ever seen.

With no one in front of me, I caught up to them on the tenth hole. I had played the front nine in an hour. The back nine took two and a half.

They were absolutely oblivious to the fact that I was waiting for them on every tee. Or maybe they were well aware of it, and that was the reason for all the representing they were doing.

For a while, I thought about skipping a hole and jumping in front of them. But the course layout really didn’t offer any realistic chances of doing so.

In the end, I decided to turn my outing into a practice round. I played five, maybe six balls off the each tee, then played the worst shot as my second. Even with all of those shots, and gathering the balls, I still found myself waiting.

I really wish that my local courses had rangers who were good for something other than fishing for lost balls in the woods and ponds.

With the temperature at a humid 96 degrees today I went to play at a riding-only course. I have wanted to try that particular one for some time, but like to save those tracks for just such a day—preferring to walk at all other times.

One of the reasons I hate playing cart golf is that I always seem to get a buggy that refuses to cooperate. Today, when I really could have used a bit of a breeze from a zippy cart, I had one that couldn’t outrun the two mosquitoes that buzzed my head for three holes. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I could have walked faster. If I’d had a partner, I would have walked to my ball and waited for him to catch up in the cart.

Unfortunately, I didn’t fully appreciate how underpowered the thing was until I hit the first hill—on the third hole. I barely made it to the top. The cart struggled so much that I was afraid it would start rolling backward, forcing me to bail out. I couldn’t go back—there were a couple of groups behind me, so I resolved to swap carts when I made the turn.

I should have paid closer attention to the course map in the clubhouse. The layout doesn’t return to the clubhouse at the nine. It wraps around a large lake, and each hole just seems to go further out. Indeed, I didn’t see the clubhouse again until I was on the seventeenth tee.  Worse, it got more and more hilly as I drove on.

After hole ten, I tried to use my cell phone to call the clubhouse and ask them to send out a new one. But I couldn’t get a signal. So I soldiered on.

The only saving grace was that the pace of play generally was slow. There a couple of twosomes ahead of me that were playing at a glacial pace.

Of course, none of this had a positive effect on my play. When I walk, my game gets stronger as the round wears on. Far from fatigue, I actually hit it longer and more accurately. When riding on a balky cart, I just get more frustrated, and that frustration leaks into my ball striking.

When I got home, Mrs. Golfblogger asked how it went. My usual answer on a bad day is that it at least was a good walk.

Today, I couldn’t even say it was a good ride.

This past week, I was shocked to learn that I was giving up 35 shots to my opponents over the nine hole match in our Friday golf league.

Our league’s format is match play, counting each two-man team’s total score on a hole, then adding the handicap differential. The “handicap” is based on averages of previous weeks.

Thirty five, I later learned, was the biggest differential anyone could recall. I was giving up four shots a hole because my partner was out for the week, and the numbers were based on my handicap alone.

To make matters worse, in the absence of my partner, whatever I scored would be doubled—to represent his score. That meant I couldn’t have a single bad hole.

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.