November 7, 2007

By Slim Randles

Some things aren’t allowed to go away, no matter how much a person might want them to, and no matter how much sense it makes to do away with them. It was that way with Doc’s golf tournament.

Last fall, to raise money for coats for kids who needed them, Doc talked two farmers out of the use of their pastures and set up the only 18-hole golf course in history that was created in an hour and a half. Each of the 18 holes had a hole (personally dug by Doc with a shovel) and a flag by the hole (a steel t-post personally pounded in by Dud) and a tee-off spot (personally tee-off by Herb Collins). But that was all the course had. If there was grass on the fairway, it was because the cows missed a bite. The whole course was hazard. The tenth hole alone had two rock piles and a manure sump to negotiate. The second hole required people to clear a prairie dog town or lose the ball forever to the abode of confused and terrorized rodents.

Well, everyone had fun, and the whole thing was won by Delbert Chin, owner of the Gates of Heaven Chinese restaurant, who came in with the low score of 312.

Doc wasn’t really excited about doing it again, but first one, then another of our locals pestered him until he relented and set out a whole new course this year that included the elementary school playground and the town’s sewage treatment lagoons.

Twice as many people signed on to play this year, and Doc admits that next year’s course might have to take in the gravel quarry just east of town.

“The hardest part about this tournament,” he told the boys down at the Mule Barn truck stop, “is figuring out what par should be.”

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