Sometimes you go searching for fun and find it.
Other times, fun finds you out of the blue.
The latter happened to me on a rare blue-skied afternoon during these recent “May Gray” days. I was on a run at a park and had slipped into a meditative state of inattentiveness when I was nearly skulled by a booming tee shot.
No, some knucklehead was not hazardously hitting golf balls. Rather, it was a game of Frisbee golf — properly called disc golf — that I had crossed paths with.
More precisely, I had inadvertently crossed the impromptu fairway and a drive to make Rory McIlroy proud — a drive that reminded me of a Frisbee I saw fly a full 100 yards in the Rose Bowl Stadium in 1975 in the inaugural Canine Disc World Championships as Ashley Whippet raced like a four-legged comet from one end zone to the other to make a dazzling high-jumping snag — caused me to duck, lest it catch me squarely in my canine teeth.
This was actually the second tee shot from this twosome that came my way. The first one did not buzz my bill-hatted head; it took aim at my shoetops. Specifically, it landed on its rim and a cross-breeze held it upright as it rolled like a wheel off its axel for a bonanza of extra distance.
Unfortunately for “Lennie” — my imagined name for the thinner of the pair because he and his bigger companion “George” brought to my mind the dual protagonists in the novel “Of Mice and Men” — I had not yet realized they were playing disc golf. Instead, I thought it was an escaped toss. Hence, embarrassingly for me and aggravatingly for Lennie, I intercepted the Frisbee thinking I was doing him a kindness.
More aggravating for Lennie, I threw the disc back to him — and thus backwards up the fairway and away from whichever tree or light pole was the designated hole.
More embarrassing for me, my toss resembled a tiny UFO piloted by a drunk alien. Had there been a sand trap, it would have landed in it.
I retrieved my errant throw and made a gimme-putt-of-a-toss to Lennie who had walked closer. Only then did I realize they were playing disc golf and I had ruined his monster drive. I apologized; Lennie graciously said none was needed; and all three of us shared a laugh.
If I had to guess their ages, I would say George and Lennie were both in their late twenties — or perhaps about ten or twelve, for both were wearing baseball caps backwards and both were barefooted. I know this for certain: if you are barefooted in the grass with a ball cap on backwards, especially if the sun is beaming bright and warm, you are without doubt having fun.
A short while later they switched from disc golf to playing Frisbee catch while running pass patterns as in football. When I ran by George made a toss to me. Thank goodness for my bruised ego I caught it, but once again my return fling flew like spit into a headwind.
Somewhere in Camarillo I could hear my old Star colleague John Grennan, a scratch disc golfer, laughing at my ineptitude.
Laughing at my own ineptitude, and silently cursing it too, I pleaded to George: “I need a mulligan!”
Reaching back to my Wham-O boyhood, I turned and coiled and uncorked a tennis-backhand-like fling that sailed straight and far.
Ouch-O adulthood! My triumphant toss brought a new embarrassment: Fun found me, but so did a slightly tweaked back.
Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Fun shows up out of the blue | Woodburn
Reporting by Woody Woodburn, Columnist / Ventura County Star
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