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.

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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:

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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.