Tuesday, September 12, 2006

I love disc golf. Back in the late 90's, some friends at college told my wife and I to grab a frisbee and meet at a particular tree on campus. When we got there, they mapped out for us an insane series of stunts to run a frisbee through. This became our golf course. Among the feats we were to achieve, we had to land the discs in a small sandbox, hit a huge knob in an old campus tree, pass through a playgound tube, and generally attempt to avoid nailing students in the head along the way.
We even had the "front 9" and the "back 9" laid out with a diagram. Eventually I graduated from the frisbee to a finders-keepers official style disc I acquired on a trip to Georgia.
For the "Folf"-unaware, disc golf entails throwing a disc down a course into a basket (pictured, although not my throw shown here; my throw would probably not be visible). You play the game a lot like regular golf, although you should lose a lot fewer projectiles. :D You track your throws like you track your strokes in golf; the fewer the better.

I'm starting to increase my list of played courses, and was able to try out a newer set of 18 holes at Farragut State Park recently when our church held a campout there. The original course is very rugged, and I managed to turn disc golf into an extreme sport by chewing up my arm with a tumble down a mountain. Ok...maybe it was a hill. The course isn't called the "Wreckreator" for nothing. I managed to pull out a +3 (amateur) on this course, one shy of the lead (I'll get you, Adam!!!). The new 18 holes are known as "North Star", and are much shorter and open. I managed to pull within two of the lead on this one, blowing a shot at the title on the 17th hole. (Again, Adam...)

I'm playing just about every other day at work now, as well. The college I work for has a 9 pin course right along the edge of campus. All the trees have their branches trimmed up quite high, so it is like throwing a disc through a field of erratically-placed poles. I swear that tree bark has some kind of magnetic relationship with plastic.

Last score anywhere: Par.
Favorite hole I've played: The Water Tower