Golfing with Bob - Repost

The world recently lost a great man. Bob Loperena, Sr., my wife’s grandfather, passed away last month. He was just 99 days shy of his 100^th birthday.

He smoked a pipe and ate nothing but sugar and bacon his whole life, so let that be a lesson to you kids out there.

The family got together over the weekend and had a wonderful memorial service, telling stories and remembering his long, successful, and amazing life. Anyone who ever met him was better for the experience, and us lucky few that were related to him count our time with him as a true gift from God.

Here’s something I wrote about him in July of 2011:

Bob is 93 years old. He can't hear, can't see very well anymore, and can't walk very fast. He has his own golf cart, and when we drive up to the first tee, the starter knows him by name.

I am 39 years old. I can hear and see just fine, and I can run when I need to. I don't own my own golf cart, and the starter doesn't know me from Adam.

We step up onto the first tee box at Morro Bay on a beautiful summer morning with the slight ocean breeze making a gorgeous day just that much better. Bob has lived in this idyllic beach paradise for 60 years. I just visit occasionally.

I swing my club back and forth in large exaggerated arcs, trying to stretch the muscles in my back. Bob laughs at me and says that I'm wasting a lot of precious energy. He does not warm up.

It is the 4th of July weekend, and my family and I are in town to celebrate our nation’s independence with my wife’s family. Bob knows a thing or two about liberty, and what it takes to keep it. He was the pilot of a Navy bomber at an early age during WWII. He fought for the freedom of the civilized world, and returned home in one piece to tell about it.

His commitment to liberty has remained strong his entire life. He has been retired for many, many years now, never having had a boss. He worked for himself his whole life, free to schedule in as much golf as he could get away with. He scheduled in a lot of golf! I only manage to find time for golf when I’m on vacation. I don’t play much.

It’s time for us to tee off on the 480-yard par-five. I'm up first. I square up with my driver and let it rip. My backswing comes way over my head with the club shaft coming parallel with the ground, and my follow through comes all the way around so the club's shaft is vertical behind my back. It's a picture-perfect amateur’s swing. My ball takes flight and rockets out away from the tee box. As I admire its trajectory, it defies my wishes, slicing to the right, leaving the airspace over my own fairway and ending up coming to rest 270 yards away under a small tree on the other side of the cart path. Bob laughs at me and says, "Boy, if I could hit the ball as far as you do, I'd be unstoppable." He takes his driver out of the bag and shuffles up to the box. His backswing barely gets more than 10 degrees behind his legs, and his follow through is non-existent. He hits it 100 yards. It goes straight up the middle of the fairway. 

We hop in Bob's cart and drive to his ball. He gets the 3-wood out of his bag and hits it again, 100 yards, straight up the middle of the fairway. He keeps the 3-wood handy as he gets back in the cart, knowing he'll need it again. We drive straight up the middle of the fairway to his ball, which he hits again, 100 yards, again, right up the middle of the fairway.

We then take a sharp right turn off the fairway to find my ball. My ball is under a tree and the tree is between my ball and the green. The smart move is to hit a short sideways shot back onto the safety of my own fairway. Not always one for the smart move, I opt to try and knock down a 3-iron, under the tree, at a slight angle to the green, making up some ground and possibly getting to the edge of the green for a chance at birdie. I let it rip. I am an idiot. My ball skips off the side of the tree I was under, and hits the neighboring tree square in the trunk, sending my ball ricocheting backward at a 45- degree angle onto my own fairway. I have lost 50 yards with my second shot. Bob chuckles and tells me that I’m going the wrong way. I thank him.

We drive the cart away from the green toward my ball. I really get ahold of my 3-wood on my third shot and hit the ball almost 250 yards again, slicing to the right again, landing almost pin-high, but to the extreme right of the green, almost on the tee box of Hole 2.

Bob hits his fourth shot 100 yards, straight up the middle of the fairway.

Bob hits his fifth shot 70 yards, onto the green, 5 feet from the pin.

I chip my fourth shot all the way over the green, landing near, but luckily not in, the sand trap on the left side of the green.

I re-chip for my fifth shot, onto the green, 17 feet from the pin.

I putt my sixth shot to within 6 feet of the hole.

Bob easily makes his 5-foot putt for a bogie six.

I miraculously toilet-bowl my 6-foot putt into the hole for a double-bogie seven.

Bob has beaten me by a stroke on the first hole. This continued all morning.

He never hit the ball more than 100 yards at a time the entire round. I got ahold of one drive on Hole 13 that I swear went 320 yards. Big deal. He beat me by 11 strokes.

Bob shot his age. At 93 years old, he shot a 93. I don't want to talk about my score.

Bob has shot his age every year of his life since he was in his 60's. If you aren't a golfer, suffice it to say, that is something that all golfers – including the pros - wish they could do.      

I have had the pleasure of getting beat by the old man for quite some time now. Bob is my wife’s grandpa, and a fantastic Great Grandpa to my boys. When I started playing golf with him, he was in his early 80’s and he beat me by 20 strokes or more every game. I’m not getting any better.

He teaches my boys to putt whenever they slow down long enough for him to hand them one of his ancient wood-shafted putters and show them how to line up to play the break of the game room carpet. Maybe they’ll be good.

On this Independence Day weekend, when I reflect on my many blessings as an American, getting to spend time with Bob is on my top-ten list. He is one of the people in my life that I hold in the highest regard.

He has taught me a lot about the importance of controlling the golf ball over the years, and one day I might just start listening.

He has taught me much more about the importance of liberty over the years, and I have hung on every word.

He has never needed to lecture me greatly about either subject. His actions, his happiness, his success, and the story of his life do the majority of the talking for him.

Thanks, Bob. Happy 4th of July!

We’ll sure miss you,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Golf Ball Car Stop

Our house is pretty good-sized, at two stories and over three thousand square feet. We need that much space to raise our three boys. Actually, three thousand square feet is the bare minimum space in which my wife and I are willing to attempt to contain our three little tornados of joy. Three thousand square feet per kid would be a lot better, but no one wants to clean that much house. We have fantasized about building a barn in the backyard to keep them in, but it turns out the county frowns upon that sort of thing, not only from a zoning perspective, but also from a child welfare point of view. Go figure.

Even if we were allowed to build a barn, we wouldn’t have the room to do it. Our three thousand-plus square foot house is built on a lot that is roughly two hundred square feet. In order to accommodate the house and still have a backyard at least large enough to turn around in, the builder conveniently made the “three-car” garage just big enough to comfortably fit one mid-sized sedan, if you angle it in. So, naturally, we park the giant SUV in the garage.

After I sanded the first few layers of paint from the top of the garage door wood trim, and deflated the tires a little, we were able to squeeze the Ford Expedition into the garage. When the front bumper was within thirteen inches of the back wall of the garage, the garage door was able to close, missing the rear bumper by about three inches on its way down. It was clear that we would need some sort of indicator for my wife to be able to know when she was far enough in, but not too far in. To make things easy, I got out my big cordless drill and drilled a hole through my finger. After I stopped the bleeding with toilet paper and electrical tape, I managed to also drill a hole through a golf ball, which was actually my original goal. I hung it on a string from the ceiling, so it would contact the windshield directly in front of the driver’s face. Drive in until the golf ball touches the glass, and you’re there. What could be simpler?

Well, if you are my wife, I guess a lot of things might be simpler, because the golf ball was obviously not a good solution. I knew right away that we might be in trouble with the concept when my mother-in-law saw me installing the golf ball and asked, “What the hell did you do to your finger?” Then she added, “Aren’t you worried that the golf ball will crack the windshield?”

Hmm… Well, when the ball touches the windshield, the front bumper of the three-ton SUV is about a foot from the living room wall, so if she’s coming into the garage fast enough to crack the windshield with the stationary hanging golf ball, I think we’re going to have bigger problems than minor glass repair…

“Shouldn’t be a problem.”

It turns out that I really didn’t have to worry about that problem at all, because unbeknownst to me at the time, my wife was never planning on actually hitting the golf ball at all. She likes to drive up close to it, but not actually touch the windshield to it.

When I questioned this method she said, “Well, I get close enough to it.”

“Well, maybe, but when the ball is touching the windshield, the rear bumper is only three inches from the door, so if you’re more than three inches from it, the door is going to come down on the car.”

“Well, I get closer than that.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

Do you know how you could know for sure? HIT THE BALL!!

“I’m just worried that if you don’t hit the ball, you might be too far away.”

“Oh, relax. The door has never hit the car.”

That may very well be the case, but I have gone out into the garage and seen the ball inches away from the windshield, and gone to the back of the car to see the door so close to the back bumper that you couldn’t have slipped a playing card between them. How does she do that? Why does she do that?

Well, I still have no idea, but my wife and I switched cars a while back, and now I am finally in charge of parking the Expedition correctly in the walk-in closet cleverly disguised as our garage. It was going great for a while. I would drive in, snuggle the windshield right up to the ball, and get out of the car, happy in the knowledge that the door would come down ridiculously close to the rear bumper, but at least not on it.

Until yesterday. Yesterday something went horribly wrong. Yesterday the Expedition was parked safely in the shoe box garage. The golf ball was resting exactly where it should have been; on the windshield, directly in front of my face. I loaded up the boys, hopped into the driver’s seat, smiled at the golf ball, and turned the key in the ignition. Now, nothing bad happened with the garage door or the rear bumper, but it turns out that at some point between parking the car and getting back in to leave again, one or more of the boys had been sitting in the driver’s seat, playing with the switches and knobs.

As soon as the car sprang to life, all sorts of new things were happening. The radio was blaring a Spanish channel, we were signaling for a left turn, the high beams were on, and much to my dismay, the windshield wipers came sweeping across the glass. The main wiper blade teed off on the golf ball like a three iron, but instead of heading for the green, the string from the ceiling sent the ball in a wide circular trajectory, coming right back around to bounce off the windshield high on the passenger side. It was spinning its way back for a second ricochet off the glass as the wiper blades were coming back down to their home position. I frantically grabbed for the wiper controls on the turn signal lever, but it was down lower than it should have been because we were also turning left in this imaginary midnight Tijuana rainstorm. I fumbled for the controls as I watched the string get caught by the passenger-side wiper blade, and as I accidentally wrenched the wiper speed control knob all the way in the wrong direction, I saw my golf ball get unceremoniously torn off its ceiling mount, string and all, by my wiper blades which were now slamming back and forth across the glass on the highest setting. The boys were hooting and hollering in the back seat as I sat quietly and watched my golf ball get whipped back and forth across the windshield at 800 MPH.

Hmm…

Maybe my wife had a point. Is it possible that she too was once subjected to the old Mexican Hurricane gag? Did she hold out on me about her reasons for never quite reaching the golf ball?

Hmm…

Probably not. But I can tell you this: When I put the new golf ball up, it was three inches closer to the living room wall, and now I just drive up close to it.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Golfing with Bob

Bob is 93 years old. He can't hear, can't see very well anymore, and can't walk very fast. He has his own golf cart, and when we drive up to the first tee, the starter knows him by name.

I am 39 years old. I can hear and see just fine, and I can run when I need to. I don't own my own golf cart, and the starter doesn't know me from Adam.

We step up onto the first tee box at Morro Bay on a beautiful summer morning with the slight ocean breeze making a gorgeous day just that much better. Bob has lived in this idyllic beach paradise for 60 years. I just visit occasionally.

I swing my club back and forth in large exaggerated arcs, trying to stretch the muscles in my back. Bob laughs at me and says that I'm wasting a lot of precious energy. He does not warm up.

It is the 4th of July weekend, and my family and I are in town to celebrate our nation’s independence with my wife’s family. Bob knows a thing or two about liberty, and what it takes to keep it. He was the pilot of a Navy bomber at an early age during WWII. He fought for the freedom of the civilized world, and returned home in one piece to tell about it.

His commitment to liberty has remained strong his entire life. He has been retired for many, many years now, never having had a boss. He worked for himself his whole life, free to schedule in as much golf as he could get away with. He scheduled in a lot of golf! I only manage to find time for golf when I’m on vacation. I don’t play much.

It’s time for us to tee off on the 480-yard par-five. I'm up first. I square up with my driver and let it rip. My backswing comes way over my head with the club shaft coming parallel with the ground, and my follow through comes all the way around so the club's shaft is vertical behind my back. It's a picture-perfect amateur’s swing. My ball takes flight and rockets out away from the tee box. As I admire its trajectory, it defies my wishes, slicing to the right, leaving the airspace over my own fairway and ending up coming to rest 270 yards away under a small tree on the other side of the cart path. Bob laughs at me and says, "Boy, if I could hit the ball as far as you do, I'd be unstoppable." He takes his driver out of the bag and shuffles up to the box. His backswing barely gets more than 10 degrees behind his legs, and his follow through is non-existent. He hits it 100 yards. It goes straight up the middle of the fairway.

We hop in Bob's cart and drive to his ball. He gets the 3-wood out of his bag and hits it again, 100 yards, straight up the middle of the fairway. He keeps the 3-wood handy as he gets back in the cart, knowing he'll need it again. We drive straight up the middle of the fairway to his ball, which he hits again, 100 yards, again, right up the middle of the fairway.

We then take a sharp right turn off the fairway to find my ball. My ball is under a tree and the tree is between my ball and the green. The smart move is to hit a short sideways shot back onto the safety of my own fairway. Not always one for the smart move, I opt to try and knock down a 3-iron, under the tree, at a slight angle to the green, making up some ground and possibly getting to the edge of the green for a chance at birdie. I let it rip. I am an idiot. My ball skips off the side of the tree I was under, and hits the neighboring tree square in the trunk, sending my ball ricocheting backward at a 45- degree angle onto my own fairway. I have lost 50 yards with my second shot. Bob chuckles and tells me that I’m going the wrong way. I thank him.

We drive the cart away from the green toward my ball. I really get ahold of my 3-wood on my third shot and hit the ball almost 250 yards again, slicing to the right again, landing almost pin-high, but to the extreme right of the green, almost on the tee box of Hole 2.

Bob hits his fourth shot 100 yards, straight up the middle of the fairway.

Bob hits his fifth shot 70 yards, onto the green, 5 feet from the pin.

I chip my fourth shot all the way over the green, landing near, but luckily not in, the sand trap on the left side of the green.

I re-chip for my fifth shot, onto the green, 17 feet from the pin.

I putt my sixth shot to within 6 feet of the hole.

Bob easily makes his 5- foot putt for a bogie six.

I miraculously toilet-bowl my 6-foot putt into the hole for a double-bogie seven.

Bob has beaten me by a stroke on the first hole. This continued all morning.

He never hit the ball more than 100 yards at a time the entire round. I got ahold of one drive on Hole 13 that I swear went 320 yards. Big deal. He beat me by 11 strokes.

Bob shot his age. At 93 years old, he shot a 93. I don't want to talk about my score.

Bob has shot his age every year of his life since he was in his 60's. If you aren't a golfer, suffice it to say, that is something that all golfers – including the pros - wish they could do.

I have had the pleasure of getting beat by the old man for quite some time now. Bob is my wife’s grandpa, and a fantastic Great Grandpa to my boys. When I started playing golf with him, he was in his early 80’s and he beat me by 20 strokes or more every game. I’m not getting any better.

He teaches my boys to putt whenever they slow down long enough for him to hand them one of his ancient wood-shafted putters and show them how to line up to play the break of the game room carpet. Maybe they’ll be good.

On this Independence Day weekend, when I reflect on my many blessings as an American, getting to spend time with Bob is on my top-ten list. He is one of the people in my life that I hold in the highest regard.

He has taught me a lot about the importance of controlling the golf ball over the years, and one day I might just start listening.

He has taught me much more about the importance of liberty over the years, and I have hung on every word.

He has never needed to lecture me greatly about either subject. His actions, his happiness, his success, and the story of his life do the majority of the talking for him.

Thanks, Bob. Happy 4th of July!

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


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