Mark and I Shred Boondocks. Also get shredded.

disc wound level 9 ninja

Wow, fuck me. I just returned from Boondocks and I am bleeding. Yep, that's my leg, and welcome to Boondocks. I won't blog the course because I already have earlier. Look it up, Renfros. I'll just give you a quick recap of the day. Mark and I played 3 rounds.

I was telling Mark that I think it's a bad idea to "Christian-ize" the forest. Like the trees, hills, shrubs, earth doesn't want an ideology pressed upon its soil/soul. Now most any forest will accept disc golf (as long as you will give discs in return), due to its low footprint, but you can't go into a natural area, into eons of life and death and life (folding, unfolding like lungs) and hang up something like this...


a noose and a cross, on a disc golf course?

WHAT THE FUCK?

Round one I came out the gate putting like a demon, ching-ching-ching. WTF? The last few days I couldn't putt the disc into Oprah Winfrey's shoe closet, now I am banging in everything, including this bomb:


Yes that went in. Ching.

Mark is rocking hole 6 here, a beauty, since you can go high hyzer crazy or try to shoot a narrow low gap. Mark lasers one up the teeth.

(If you blow this photo up [click] you will see Mark's disc flying right at the basket)



Round one we come out the fields, and we are in a groove, -2 and -3 entering the thick forest. The woods jump up and grab Mark a bit and I continue to putt well. Round one over.

Sean -6 Mark +1

Round two Mark drops this DRIVE on hole 2. Damn, Mark. That be a birdie. I continued playing well, getting all my birdies in the forest. I do love tech, as you know.



Sean -4 Mark +5



Damn Sean. You have one sweet-azz forehand. (Great photo, Mark. Maybe a future career as a D golf photographer?)

No bogies for me so far today. Mark got a little tree-y.

Let's move on to round three, where we got our asses kicked a bit.

Sean +2 Mark +2

The next two photos will sum up the round nicely.



Mark not happy.



My disc not so happy.

A weird round. Mark was all over the place, dropping incredible birdies and then 5's, a 6. He would drive a hole and park it, then drive into a Heart of Darkness. He was leading by FOUR strokes at hole 17...and we ended up tied. I hacked it up myself. So, Boondocks got us this round.

Can't wait to see many of you in Cincy! Seriously.

I play better in the woods I have learned. Better in the woods. I hope Cincy has woods.

Sean

Doubles @ Pusch Ridge at the Hilton El Conquistador

So I have not been playing a whole lot of disc. Why, you may ask? Because most days it is 105 and I have no friends. The two things might be related, and they might not. However I decided to go up and play Friday doubles at the Tumbleweed Open here in Tucson. The Tumbleweed is played yearly on a ball golf course at the Hilton El Conquistador resort, which the tournament rents out for the weekend. Everyone gets to drive the carts, buy beer from the beer girls, fix your divots, play on extremely well landscaped terrain, and feel like we think our fathers might have at some point in their sad lives. It's an appealing draw.

You know I'm not usually one for playing disc on ball courses. You lose the trees, the biggest natural obstacles, and open holes are usually boring holes. Distances are way off. A couple courses (one in San Diego and one in the Chicagoland area that I believe Leonard played) just put a disc basket on the side of every green and call it done. That is of course depressing and won't make for a good experience, since you can drive a golf ball typically 2x to 3x farther than you can throw a disc--unless you use the new explosive xx-step, see youtube videos to be provided in a future post for more detail, which adds at least 150' to everyone's drives and makes you feel like the man). But this one isn't just played in the fairways. It's actually a credibly good course.

Why don't you play singles, Ander, you may be asking. The answer is that it's pricey ($75 for the weekend just for greens fees), time consuming (fuck, playing so slow, jesus, it drives me nuts mostly), you have to get up every morning at 6am to make it out to your tee time, and classes start Monday morning so I gots things to do. Why play doubles then? Well, none of you bastards ever wants to play doubles, and I really like doubles, especially on new courses that you haven't played.

So I show up to the doubles. It is raining insanely on the way up and cars are off the road. In the span of 8 minutes, the temperature drops 36 degrees. I take some photos but the photos don't give you the sense of what the monsoon rains are like here. But this is Tucson, and the rains often just evaporate, no matter how serious they are, so I keep going. I get to the course and they are playing but, because this is a ball golf course, the powers that be are not allowed to let us on the course if there's lightning strikes in the area. So we get weather delayed even though it's looking clear.

There are some serious badass players here. Some wore their own matching outfits:


Wait. Is that Brett Favre? I thought he retired. In case you can't see the logos, homey is an ASU fan. Not good. But then on the other side of the pillar is a familiar face sporting the three of clubs:


Hello Jeff Homburg! Segedi and I used to play pretty regularly with this guy in Ames, Iowa. He's a serious player. He's ranked nationally and plays a whole lot, as he's a pro. His putt befits a pro. Really it was the first putt I ever witnessed where you're watching it and wondering how he got that consistent, and you can see why he buries you almost all the time. Now we have all seen the videos of course, but he is a very serious player and I am glad he is still alive.

To be fair, I outdrove the hell out of him in a tournament in Ames for the long drive contest, though he won the whole thing, of course. I won a small bag which I sported every time I played with him, even though it only held four discs. He did not seem intimidated. Those were the halcyon days of Segedi requiring his composition class to follow him around on the disc golf course as he administered their final (seriously). Anyhow, Homburg is also a very serious chess player, and Segedi will remember well our discussions with him apparently featuring the esoterica of soil. So I go up to him and say, hey, Jeff, I used to play with you, what's up, etc., and inevitably I ask him about soil. He seems nonplussed, and goes on to reveal that he is in fact an archaeology PhD, who was doing something with soil at the time, and etc.. He lives in Tucson now (!) where he is teaching part-time at the University of Arizona. Interesting. Dude has always liked to talk. I don't mind that because he's good and you can learn shit from him. There are other dudes I play with here who also like to talk. I should also add that Homburg helped me jumpstart my car one time. I like the guy, but he's a strange one.

What is it about disc golf that attracts these dudes? Often they have not led successful lives, it doesn't seem, by the traditional societal measures. Maybe that's not fair, but the lion's share of people I remember playing with (I remember these guys because of this, probably, which explains the memory thing) seem to have fucked a lot of things up in their lives. Not that I can claim to have not fucked a lot of things up. But unlike ball golfers who seem all yuppified and clean, even if we want to smack most of them most of the time because that shit doesn't mean anything either, disc golfers, man, what a crowd. There's these hilarious lesbians from New Mexico here who are super entertaining. And one guy I know who's good, and a good guy. And some other dudes I recognize from the Lemmon Drop where I totally forgot to turn our scorecard in and just left with Sean and got drunk. I hope they don't remember this.

So why don't we go to the course instead of me holding forth.

A lot of the holes are something like this, with a spectacular background, beautiful foliage, big shots required, baskets hidden underneath trees or around bunkers (all bunkers are played OB; many greens are played OB too in fact, which adds to the challenge):



Some of these are successful holes, but not all of them. Probably this course has a little too much open space on most holes, and plays to hyzer shots for righties too often. More tech, as Sean would say, is desired.

*

This is a much better hole, probably all of 250 feet but downhill significantly, well on the right, with the fairway running away from the basket:


There's also real possibilities of going in people's really nice backyards on a lot of these holes. I didn't throw anything into a yard. I can't say the same for everyone playing.

Shortly before this hole, we got stopped by a cop who asked us if we were having any trouble. We spent a few minutes trying to tell him that we're allowed to use the course, it's a tournament, you know, before he explains that, no, has anyone been hassling us. Besides him? No, apparently there were reports of golfers being shot at with BB guns on hole 8. We haven't seen this, no, but later in the round, lo and behold, there's some asshole kids on a rooftop just by hole 8 clearly behaving poorly. Arizona is not a state you want to do this in, folks. People have guns. A lot of guns. In fact AZ just passed a law that makes it legal for you to be packing--concealed or not--in bars and restaurants. That's good. U of A has a no-guns policy and there are signs everywhere. Maybe you saw the bit on the Daily Show about this? A bunch of dudes showed up to a Town Hall Meeting with Obama packing AR-15 assault rifles. Jesus Christ.

Anyhow. How about some putting:


Shown is Trevor, my doubles partner (it's random draw), almost making a sixty footer. My drive got us here, and I miss it too. I actually only make a couple putts. He just drops about everything within 30 feet, happily. I almost put in four 80-100' putts but they clank and they clunk and they do not stay in. It would have been nice to contribute.

Also my partner spends much of the round attempting to give me Percocet.

Also the novelty of putting on actual greens is not to be understated.

Also I do not take any Percocet, but I do buy a number of beers from the drink cart. The novelty of that is pretty rad, and stays rad, and goes a long ways.

As a result of the beer, perhaps, the other team on our card has some trouble with a disc in the cholla:


Let me warn you: this is really really nasty stuff. Once you get off the light rough, the deep rough will fuck you up. You can't even see it in the cholla here but you can see the hand trying to get it out with a stick.

Here's another good hole. Probably 340, but uphill, across a huge ravine. The green to the left of the basket is OB:

*

My partner and I are playing pretty well. He's carrying us more than half the time, but I'm helping out as I can. He's a local pro, and his putting at least shows it. I have to figure out how to get this kind of snap and spin on my putts so they hold the line that these guys' putts hold. You've seen the videos. For me it's going only okay. Anyhow.

This is hole 12 or so, one of the best on the course in this discer's opinion:


What you can't easily see is that it's a peninsula green. Water behind. Water to the right. A shitload of water in front. And not water you're going into to get anything at all. The bunker's OB. The basket is on the green. It's about 290'. My partner throws a nice forehand that skips off the green and rolls down to the right. Uh oh. I'm going through my bag trying to figure out which disc I can legitimately lose. I throw a pro Starfire, after Sharpieing my name and # on the back of it, and promptly overthrow it on a turnover route, so that it hits pretty decent but then rolls into the bunker.

Upside: my partner's shot is dry. I almost but not quite nail the putt. We take par here. There are a lot of pars on this course. Many fewer legitimate opportunities for birdie unless you can throw 400'+ or reliably hit 60'+ putts. (Hole 16 is a stupid exception: it's 200' straight ahead across a fairway with nothing in the way whatsoever; presumably this is the hole for aces, but it's just kind of a giveaway. WTF.)

Here's another winner hole: bigass downhill hole across a world of hurt. Down about 80 feet, I'd say, so it's definitely doable to throw it over, but you gots to chuck it.



However the likely effect of doing so is that you end up hyzering into the ground with this result:


A good golfer fixes his divots. I fix my divot. We will par this hole. You get sick of parring holes except that par is a pretty good score on most of these.

We'll interrupt this round for a look at what just came via UPS. Yum. Or I think probably yum. Will try it tomorrow. Vegetarian, I'll have you know, though obviously not vegan.

On the whole our round is going fairly well. I doubt we're going to cash, since we're not birdieing that many (and I find it horrifying that birdieing is spelled that way but it looks like it is). But we're beating the other dudes we're playing with.

Some of the baskets are kind of funky.


And some of the foliage is too. This is an agave, I am just about sure. The desert plants are much more interesting than the midwest plants.

Then there's the stupid hole 16. But we won't talk any more about that.

So we'll close with 18, a real nice finishing hole. A legit sort of par 4 except it's not really. Big downhill, plays to the right, about 700'. You have to land it on the left to get a shot down toward the basket, but the bunkers on the left are OB, the green over there is OB, so these are legitimately good fairway bunkers, and this is a nicely designed golf hole.


We put both our drives in different bunkers, which sucks. And what are the chances. But whatever. Here's the second shot down to the basket:


which resides behind the tree. We end with a bogey on this hole thanks to the OB. And we end with a 55, which isn't bad, but it's hardly a hot round. We exchange info, a dude in the parking lot offers me a Newcastle which strangely I turn down. I don't end up with any Percocet. But I'll definitely say that this was an enjoyable experience.

The course gets only a 2.75/4.0 for me, which is even a little bit of a stretch. It's not a great course. There's pretty much no way a disc golf course on a ball golf course is going to be great, I think. But this was better than the others I've seen, and offered some challenge. The experience of playing it is still worth it. 3.5/4.0 for the experience aside from my somewhat lackluster play.

As always, playing these makes me want to be more serious about my game, which has not been improving.

I'll find out tomorrow if we cashed or not. I can't stand sticking around for the ceremony usually unless I am real sure I am in the cash. Will I play the singles here next year? Very doubtful. The doubles? Probably. Eventually I'm going to be hooked up with somebody awesome, like Ken Climo, and win this fucking thing. Probably not for a while however.

Minneapolis Chapter of the Order Hosts Leonard

The Minneapolis Chapter of the Order of the Jags hosted a mini-disc event this week, with Leonard “I’ve-been-spending-an-hour-a-day-average-on-disc-since-Madison” (actual quote) Blackburn in town on vacation and Prospective Jag Mark Ehling always eager and at the ready to join in.

On Wednesday afternoon Leonard, Mark, and Eric (no T-Town on this one) played Bryant Lake Park in Eden Prairie, which has become the go-to course of the summer for Mark and Eric (playing it about 6 or 7 times thus far).

No photos of note (see past blog on this course for hole-by-hole visuals and analysis), but here is a Cliff’s Notes of how the round shaped up.

* Leonard had the fewest number of double bogeys (1). Mark and Eric had two.
* Leonard also had the only birdie of the day (Hole 10).

However, Leonard never led at any point during the round, and, after 9 holes, it was Mark at +5, Eric at +6, and Leonard at +7.

Eric then cruised to 5 straight pars to take the lead by one through 14 holes, with Mark up to +7 and Leonard at +9.

Eric had already lost two rounds to Mark this year at Hole 18 and the last four holes have given him fits generally all summer.

Sure enough, Mark ended with two pars and two bogeys, Leonard with four bogeys, and Eric with three bogeys and one double for a final score of:

Mark: +9
Eric: +11
Leonard: +13

Overall, this was one of the 2 or 3 worst rounds Leonard has played in the past 3 years. His drives were off (on several occasions Eric outdrove him, which is not normal). However, Leonard did have some impressive long putts, a few from the PBS (Patented Blackburn Stance) in the woods, that clanked metal but didn’t ring in.

Mark, as always, was very solid putting and throwing pretty long drives in general, with the occasional 1 in 8 that shanked far right on him...though still traveling quite far.

One note: Eric had by far the worst shot of the week (Rob: No, you still hold the Gigli Title for '09). It happened on the drive at Hole 17, the glorious 542 foot “cliff hole.” Basically, any drive can go 250-300 feet from this hole….assuming you don’t hit the ground first. Which Eric did at the edge of this teebox:


The disc shot up in the air 20+ feet, and, fortunate for Eric, rolled down approximately 85% of the hill (which has 114 steps), to enable him to save double and only lose one stroke on Mark and Leonard who missed their par putts.

On Thursday, the Jags cruised out to Cottage Grove to play Oakwood Park, which is T-Town’s home course, about 1.5 miles from his house.

Note: T-Town had only played one round thus far in 2009.

Eric estimates Leonard had played this course about 3 or 4 times prior, while Leonard claims only once or twice. Eric's records indicate Leonard last played it in on September 14, 2002.

Ander has played this course a good 4 or 5 times, and Mark Neely, T-Town, and Eric got in a round at the onset of Neely’s resurgence in August 2007.

Things did not get off to a good start for Leonard at Oakwood – testing out one of his news discs (a Surge?) that got caught up in a tree, which he tried to retrieve with his Gatorade bottle.

With no official, handsome Ander scorecards for the course we made do with some nifty graph paper Mark happened to have in a notepad in his bag.

Leonard’s bad luck continued at Hole 1, an easy birdie hole that none of us birdied, with Leonard getting a double and the rest of us getting par.


Hole 2 reverses course with the pin straight ahead. The last time Ander played this course it may have been pre-shrub/tall grass/tree cutting. It’s now a simple shot, playing a bit longer than the previous downhill hole.


Hole 3 we jagged up – having previously played the pin that is for Hole 18 the last 5+ years by mistake after they revamped the course around 2003/2004. We decided to play it at the end of the round so as not to get behind a stampede of other Jag Quartets that were piling up behind us.

Hole 4 is one of the longest on the course. The pin is straight ahead, well past the big round beautiful tree on the right of the fairway. The woods on the left is treacherous. Mark had a crazy long drive and saved par while T-Town and Eric had their first bogeys of the day (T’s actually a double).


Mark continued his great play by notching a birdie on Hole 5, which is a straight shot up into the woods, slightly complicated by a few bushes in the middle of the fairway. T-Town got back the stroke he lost to Leonard on hole 4 in the early battle for 3rd place as Leonard’s drive sailed right in the woods for a bogey.


Now, the woods.

Here is where the game began to change, although our spirits did not. Even though he began the wooded excursion by chopping his first 3 shots on this short hyzer hole (following the path, below), Mark remarked that this was a course in which the holes in the woods all had a point to them – lots of character etc. Leonard was the only jag to par Hole 6 and Mark doubled.


Hole 7 is a not too long slight anhyzer, with the pin about 35-40 feet up the slight hill in the background. Mark, the Woodsman of the round, chopped his way to a 4, while the rest of us got par.

Hole 8 is a doozy – VERY long with a very narrow fairway (it is straight back, but not really visible from the tee). It is this hole, some seven or so years ago, where T-Town had hit his disc golf peak, but then lost his favorite driver in the (now dried up) swamp in the foreground. I don’t know if he ever replaced the driver, but his game has never quite been the same since. Mark impressed on this one, getting the only non-double among the bunch (4).


Hole 9 is very birdie-friendly hole, but only Mark achieved this feat. (With Mark it seemed to be feast or famine in the woods).


Through Hole 9 (though remember we skipped Hole 3), the scores were:

Mark: +2
Eric: +4
Leonard: +6
T-Town: +6

Not amazing scores, and the tough holes were yet to come.

Eric got on the board with a birdie at Hole 10, a short and straight hole, but with enough trees to make it interesting.


Hole 11 is pretty tough, though Mark had the best anhyzer of the bunch. The pin follows the path, up a hill to the right, and then sits about 70 feet down the base of the hill on the other side. T-Town was up one stroke on Leonard at this point in the match (Leonard and Eric doubled this hole).


Hole 12 has a lot of trees for your chopping pleasure. Eric took the right path, though the pin is basically straight ahead of the left path. This is one of the few holes (of the summer) where Mark’s putter failed him, ending up with a double, and Leonard’s par was the best of the group.


Hole 13 is probably the third or fourth hardest hole on the course, and quite long. The pin is at the very end of the path, slightly to the left, but the fairway is pretty narrow throughout. Our average score for the group was 5.0 on this hole, with T-Town providing the triple and Mark impressive with a long putt for bogey.


We’re back out of the woods for a brief moment on Hole 14 – the pin is tucked away on the left near the end of the group of trees. Eric got his second birdie of the day here (first ever in his career on this hole), with Mark and Leonard notching a par. T-Town continued to fade after a valiant effort through 11 holes with a bogey.


Hole 15 requires a very straight drive, which Eric and Leonard were able to pull off and sink short par putts at the pin at the top of the hill back inside the woods. T-Town and Mark bogeyed.


Heading into the Hole of Death, the scores were:

Eric: +7
Mark: +8
Leonard: +10
T-Town: +13

Hole 16 is indeed the Hole of Death. Eric has probably averaged over 6 strokes on this hole over the 10+ rounds he has played this course. The average for our group today was 5.5, with three doubles and a quadruple bogey courtesy of T-Town. You basically need to just follow the path straight ahead, but there is a notable slope to the fairway, and enough trees to make this one just plain nasty.


As you can see, neither T-Town (shades) nor Mark (towel) wanted to show their face on this hole…


Hole 17 brings us back out into the open, with a longish hole and the pin sitting just beyond the 3-4 small bushes straight ahead. Leonard continued his feverish march towards the top of the pack with the only par in the quartet. But was it going to be too little too late?


We used to play Hole 18, as Ander may recall, to a pin straight at the top of a steep hill, just off the parking lot. Turns out that is the pin for Hole 3, and Hole 18 is on a slope over to the right a bit. We averaged 5.33 collectively on this hole, with Mark trying to make do with a drive that sailed a long, long way right, essentially playing the fairway on Hole 4 on his way to a triple, while the rest of us doubled.


Our return to Hole 3 was anti-climactic, with three pars among the leaders.


And thus, the final scores read:

Eric: +12
Mark: +14
Leonard: +14
T-Town: +22

Though Eric doesn’t look all that happy, for some reason, even though this was only his 4th win in 19 attempts against Mark this year.


Also, for the record, 2009 marked Eric’s best yearly winning percentage against Leonard dating back to our first rounds in 1998. By year:

1998: 2.0% (1-49)
1999: 11.4% (5-39)
2000: 0.0% (0-9)
2001: 11.1% (2-16)
2002: 0.0% (0-12)
2003: 31.0% (9-20)
2004: 0.0% (0-4)
2005: 0.0% (0-5)
2006: did not play
2007: 14.3% (1-5-1)
2008: 12.5% (1-6-1)
2009: 36.4% (4-7)

Josh's homemade basket

My friend Josh Foster made this sweet homemade basket out of "stuff lying around on the farm" ... I submit to you in lieu of hearing about the Minneapolis disc exxxperience.


Playable, it appears:


I find this somehow inspirational in a small way. This man is serious, and/or seriously bored. Disc is scarce in Idaho.

"It is what it is" in PERU, INDIANA

Went up to Peru, IN 2day, with a couple of my disc homies, Jake (quickly learning, quickly getting better) and Cory. (Cory is Iraq war vet just home. He's kinda strung tight. VERY athletic, VERY long D golfer, tons-of-game crackles off him when he throws. This dude laser-aced 2 holes in the last 3 weeks at home course McCulloch, one a fucking impossible ace, a shot from some strange god, on a course not exactly ace-friendly to strange gods, or anyone.)

Our man Mark N. has ignored me all summer so I had to get new disc friends. Mark works for the CIA. He is the una-bomber, BTW.

I was on all day. One of those quirky/odd times where you get bounces, park everything, rock drives, do stupid stuff and pretend you always throw that way. Like bouncing off tree limbs and disc drops below basket. Dumb lucky things.

As Cory said (an overall longer, stronger player than me, though maybe not as strategically keen): "Fuck"

First, we played Maconaquah Park. (This review site give this course 3 stars. Really? You suck. It is 3.5 to 4 [esp in in long tee position]. It is NOT 3 stars. No way.)



I was at one point -4, then blarred up to -1 finish. The joke of the day--a good joke, and when voiced out loud went over well--was, "Dude, you just got Maconaquah-ed." We all got Maconaquah-ed repeatedly.

For example, Jake took a snowman. Etc.



Jake puts that one in the creek. So? Creek is near dry today. He pars.



Cory rocks hole 3, big-ass turnover. He sucks it up a bit, but does par. Cory usually birdies or pars, period, unless he goes nuts with his power. Today he actually was looser than I have seen, but still a force. Kind of scary chaos, but ends up pretty near the fucking basket when all is screamed and done.



If you don't remember this course, this should help you. Fuck. How bad-ass is this hole? Way up that mountain-ass hill.

And much of the day went like this:



***

We went over to the man of D golf, to Pieradise. Oh wow. Dude just lives in a disc golf preserve, that's all. Envy.

I went -8 but don't get excited. He had the short pins in. I've never played these pins, and, since I have played medium and long pins, I would prefer anything but the short. I used my putter on 4 drives today. Ugh. It did allow for a 27 hole course, but coming off Maconaquah to this was a let-down.

Alen Pier is a god in my book. He had amazing discs for sale, as usual. He had a bunch of Rocs with wood embedded in the plastic, etc.

His "spiderweb" baskets are basically the best ever made, as every player knows.

Cory bought a bunch of crazy discs. Jake bought his first bag (what a moment!). I bought a sweet shirt (will unveil later) and a new disc. Ander, how does this disc fly? A TL? The best player at our home course told me to buy this disc for my game. WTF?



You know you love Pieradise. So groomed! (Cory missed this birdie putt)



Dude, Alen is too nice. I mean his farm is a D golf mecca. The shit. Now he adds long poles to help you get your disc out of the trees. And these are not just eye candy. I used one today; his trees catch discs. Just a cool guy.



I will end this post at hole # 18, where the course, uh, ends. I drop a little forehand, a little tech, L-to-R shot, right under 200 feet, on a short hole (again, pins in short position today, I'm not yelling here. I'm just saying, I'm just saying...ACE.)



S