O Kaposia!

So Eric O and Mark E and I played some disc today at Kaposia, still one of my very favorite courses, in south St. Paul. I'm up in Minneapolis for early Thanksgiving for a couple reasons, one of them being disc golf. Overall I think I prefer Thanksgiving to Christmas pretty much all around, not having kids. There's the weather situation, too, to think about. You can pretty much guarantee that we'll be playing in snow, if at all, if I'm up for Christmas. But Thanksgiving is anyone's guess. Maybe, maybe not. The Cities are on an epic drought, so it was all dry, though evidently snow is forecast for tomorrow. Low of 34, high of 50. Light wind, often seemingly in our face, whichever way we turned. Very pleasant weather.

Kaposia is one of four epic courses in the Minneapolis area, along with a few other good ones. Kaposia is the big daddy of the region, though, surely the first pro course in the area. It's 24 holes now, after its original 18 had to be pulled back to 9 because of (according to Leonard?) somebody finding toxic waste on the back 9. The new 24 is excellent--I remember the original 18 well, and have played a version of this 24 before, but not this exact 24. 2 holes from the old back 9 have never been brought back, sadly, most famously the hill-to-hill hole, which I once 9ed. (You threw from a high elevated tee across a valley to an elevated green with a ton of possibilities to roll discs away.) At any rate, 2 pleasant rounds.

My iPhone died pretty early into the round so I have few photos. Here are 2:

 

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Round 1: Ander +11, Mark +20, Eric +32. As you can see this is not an easy course. Admittedly it's maybe not quite as hard as that. I 5ed hole 24 to end poorly on an otherwise solid round (several of these holes are legitimate par 4s; the +s are not from par, but from 3s). Eric's worst round, he said, in several years. 

Mark had to head out to Important Bidness, but not before we had lunch at a random little burger joint that was hilarious and delicious. Ostermeier and I went back to attempt the beast again.

Round 2: Ander +15, Eric + 24. Not exactly a barnburner of a round there, though Eric and I were close through 9, then we started separating. 

Highest score per hole: 6 (all of us threw at least one 6). Lowest: 2. Total birdies by the group, round 1: 1 (Ander, on the first hole). Total birdies by the group, round 2: 2 (both Ander, holes 17 and 18, both part of--sort of--the original 18). No discs lost but one forgets about the leaves. We don't really have those in Arizona.

Makin love--out of nothin at all.

The Shot of My Life (Kaposia, Hole 13)

A little over a month ago, Mark Ehling and I got in “one last round” as a duo prior to a) the onslaught of snow we feared might be ahead in the coming weeks and b) Mark’s first child being born (Soren, nearly 3 weeks ago).

The round was intended to be at Blue Ribbon Pines in East Bethel, Minnesota (I will do a blog on this course at some point from our September outing there – a phenomenal course; one so remarkable, in fact, it might just be the tipping point course to get Sean to permanently relocate to the Twin Cities should he ever play it and the other 4-5 brilliant courses here).

After driving the 40 minutes up to Blue Ribbon Pines we discovered a tournament was already underway, so we drove back to the Cities and decided to hit the once glorious, but under renovation for years, Kaposia Park course in South St. Paul.

Kaposia was the go-to course for T-Town and myself under the tutelage of Leonard circa 1998-1999 as he introduced us to the game (and where I lodged only a 4-56 mark against Blackburn through 2003).

For those who did not play the course back in the day (Ander has several times and I believe Andy has once, back during his Iowa days), Kaposia used to be the granddaddy of the Cities courses. Its 18 holes were a perfect mixture of wooded and semi-open holes, a few long holes, and a signature “peak-to-peak” hole on which one could land an ace or a snowman as your disc risked rolling down a steep cliff on approach after approach.

Well, around 2002 or so they had to shut down the back 9 holes at Kaposia due to some toxic waste or something of that sort. They then added another 9 and later 12 holes in another section of the woods, many of which were only so-so, which brought the course rating down from a 3.75 / 4.0 in my book to about 3.0 or 3.25 tops.

But Kaposia over the past year has settled into a half-new 24-hole course that is actually pretty darn good again. I’d say it's now a 3.5+. Most of the original back 9 have now opened up, with the exception of the once signature hole (#14), the Psycho Clown hole (#15), and Hole #17.

But the point of this blog, in addition to updating the former Kaposia jags as to the state of the course, is that I landed the Shot of My Life on Hole 13 (par 3, 234 feet) during that round a month ago. (The hole is listed as Hole 12 at the outdated PlayDG.com, which still has the course from its mid 2000s interim 18 hole version):

http://www.playdg.com/courses/?s=MN&c=kaposia&h=12

Interestingly, my shot at issue was preceded by one of my worst drives in recent years – about a 25-footer straight into the ground that hit an exposed root to deny me even a skip.

That left me with about 200 feet to the pin, with plenty of trees between us.

I got out my yellow Eclipse (which tends to anhyzer, but I can throw pretty straight when I’m tossing well) and tried to heave it along the right tree line, which I did successfully. I had assumed at some point it would hit one of these trees and plop down to the ground as I worked towards bogey or a long-ass par….but, near the end of its journey, it started to hyzer back….right into the basket!

(Here is a perspective shot of the distance from where I tossed -- Ehling is waving his hand standing at the basket way down the path):

My reaction was one of shock and belated joy. If I had thought there was even a 5% chance my 2nd shot could go in from that distance, I would have been leaning back and forth under my watchful eye to coax it on into the basket. Instead, I was sort of casually watching it fly…until it hit chains.

I was composed enough to correctly tabulate my score on the hole, however:


Ehling, meanwhile, simply lost it. In a good way. He jumped several feet off the ground, flung his ball cap about 20 feet across the fairway, and came running over to give me a couple of high-ass fives, shouting “Oh my God! Oh my God!” every step of the way. It was all he could talk about for the next half dozen holes and he ennobled it the “Best shot I’d ever seen,” though, for me, that would still be Alabama alum Eliot’s ace at Inver Grove Heights circa 2005.

True to form, I used the momentum from my Shot of My Life on Hole 13 to….go on and get an inglorious 7 on Hole 14, en route to a 91-95 defeat to Ehling on the 24-hole course.

But, to date, it is the Shot of My Life.

Footnote: Pending any rounds we get in with Ander in a month when he comes up to Minneapolis, I ended up 7-24 against Ehling this year.