Day of Purpose #10

Today we remember the duel in the sun from 2005.

On the Firecliff course at Desert Willow, it was a team match: Sandoval and Hernandez against Angelo and Deboe. The match was played straight up, with no strokes given.

That was the first problem. On one side, we had two part-times, Sandoval and Hernandez. These guys are both better than average athletes, but they play golf only a few times a year. Sandoval takes divots the size of pie plates (and that’s with his driver) and Hernandez did some serious sand-moving on Desert Willow that day (we have it all on video). On the other team we’ve got David Deboe, who sports a single digit handicap and knows more about swingweights and forging methods than the head guy at Taylor Made. We’ve also got Ted Angelo, the only member of our twelvesome who’s a member at a private course. And for good measure, it’s not just one private course, but two.

This match should have been a landslide. The Sandandez team should have gone down quicker than a white guy in a heavyweight fight. Anboe should have won going away. What really happened is that, according to the official records maintained in my files, Anboe won by one lousy stroke. And you should have been there the day it happened to see how much jockeying there was about the scores. Pencil erasers and epithets were flying. Ted was questioned about his ability to do simple arithmetic. Deboe was called a son of a motherless goat by one of the Sandandez fans. The hooligans in the stands were restless and there was bloodshed in the streets of Belfast that night.

In the end, I think everyone agreed that the match was a draw, but for team Anboe, it was a crushing loss, from which one of the participants has not yet recovered, since he won’t be joining us in the desert this year to defend his "title".

Have a good evening.

Montecore