On one good leg, scores will swell

There is no way you can walk into a pro shop with a Captain Ahab-like limp without having to explain yourself.

So when I checked in recently to play my first round of golf since tearing a calf muscle in my right leg, I underwent the usual line of questioning.

And being the standup guy I am, I answered honestly.

“What happened to you?”

Torn calf muscle.

“What were you doing?”

Playing baseball.

“What?”

In the Spokane Indians’ Fantasy Camp baseball game. The S-R is a sponsor. We have our own billboard.

“So, were you sliding into third or something?”

No, I was jogging out to the first base line at Avista Field for pregame introductions. Now give me the keys to my cart, so I have somewhere to stash this plastic protective boot the doctor “suggested” I wear.

“How can that happen?”

Blame it on age. Or maybe it was the rubber-cleated PONY shoes I pulled out of the softball duffel bag that had been collecting dust in my garage for the past 15 years. So, does PONY still make baseball shoes?

“How old are you again?”

Obviously, a lot older than the people in our marketing department thought when they asked me to take part in that fantasy camp gig.

“And how smart are you again?”

Not very. My cart, please.

And with that, I saddled up – alongside my son, who earned the role of cart driver by default – to experience golf on one good leg.

We made a quick stop at the range, where I learned I would, indeed, be able to swing a golf club. And where I also learned I would have to make some dramatic adjustments to the already suspect swing I normally use.

With a bad right leg, weight shift becomes nothing more than a rumor. You set up with all of your weight centered on your left foot, take the club back making sure you keep it there and then make a desperate lash at the ball, realizing full well that your bum right leg will follow as you spin wildly to the left. You then abort all thoughts of a nice high finish and quickly ground the head of your club so you can use if for support.

Oh, yeah. And you aim even farther left than normal, because that kind of swing can put a new level of “right” on a golf ball that even I didn’t know existed.

Not exactly what Butch Harmon would recommend, I know. But you do what you have to do.

I made it through the first few holes with my modified swing with a par, a couple of double bogeys, an “other” and two lost balls, and was feeling pretty good about life.

But then my son noticed that the ankle below my calf was starting to puff up again, and suggested I put on the protective plastic boot my doctor had given me.

My son works in the medical field, sort of. He claims he’s a histological technician. I have no idea what that means, and whenever I ask him to explain what it is that he does, exactly, his only explanation is, “I save lives.”

If that’s the case, he’s severely underpaid, because he certainly had no problem letting me spring for his greens fees.

Still, I trust his judgment on all things quasi-medical, so I strapped on the boot and proceeded … to lose four more golf balls and shoot my first triple-digit number since the 1968 Iowa district golf tournament – which might have placed, come to think of it.

Adding insult to injury was the exchange I had with my son when we noticed hundreds of tiny black bug-like specks on the green we were playing. A member of our foursome explained they were baby frogs that had made their way from a nearby pond and then baked under the hot sun before being able to retreat back to the water.

“Sounds like a tough way to die,” I said. “But, then, any animal that small probably doesn’t have a brain big enough to experience pain, right?”

To which my son, the histology technician, replied: “You’re calf’s hurting, isn’t it?”

Ouch!

I wonder if they make plastic boots to protect egos.