PLAYING A SPONGE BOB SQUARE PANTS GOLF BALL AT A WATER HAZARD

This is a weird one. My Dad and I were playing a round of golf. He’s aging with poor eyesight and I’m mid-fifties, overweight, and prematurely arthritic, especially in my upper back affecting my golf swing, but we went anyway. We were going to have a good day out and just have a ball, so to speak. Speaking of balls, I stopped by the local Wall Mart and bought a bunch (emphasis on bunch) of balls so that we wouldn’t have to waste time, energy, and frustration looking for lost balls, of which we expected many.

We’ve played this course forever. It’s in the area I grew up and close to where Dad is retired. There is one specific water hazard which invariably sucks even the best hit balls out of the air swallowing them into oblivion. For our entire 50 year history of playing there, Dad has always used an old, ugly ball—one that he’s not afraid to lose—to play this hole. He says he has a friend that won’t do that. The friend says that if you use an old ball to play a water hole, you’re just expecting to lose it, which you probably will. He feels that you should use one of your best balls to play across water. That way, the player will be more conscious of making a good shot to save the expensive ball. Who knows if he’s right, but he may have a point.

My Dad, however, at this hole, this particular time pulled out a Sponge Bob Square Pants ball. Now I first have to ask, where does one get such a ball? And then I would ask, if one had such a ball, why would one show it in public? I don’t think Dad even knows who Sponge Bob is, or where the ball came from. He just looked at the ball and figured it’s one he could afford to lose. It being a Sponge Bob ball, I would have to agree.

Now for those who know the very least about Sponge Bob, which is what I know and would definitely like to keep it that way, they know he lives at the bottom of the sea, he being a sponge and all, I guess. Being a Sponge Bob ball, one would figure, and it turned out rightly so, that it would have an attraction to water, and it did. Dad teed it up, swung and, “bloop” Sponge Bob had returned to the bottom of the water where he belonged. Dad wasn’t going to try again, but I teed up one of the new balls and coerced him into trying again. So he swung, and once again it headed for the drink, but with a different spin, I suppose. Because this time when it hit the water, it skipped. We thought that was pretty miraculous but it still didn’t have the distance to clear the water. It then, skipped a second time and to our complete surprise, ended up on the far shore in a playable lie. Back slapping and high fives were shared and we headed to the cart path to continue play. Later on, he single skipped another ball across a small water hazard onto playable ground.

After the day was done, we ended up losing only two balls--one that I lost in the woods and the Sponge Bob ball into the water.

So I guess there is one solid lesson we took away from this day of golf. No, it’s not as Murphy knows, If you are running short on balls, you will lose a lot of them. It’s not even the converse of that which is if you have a bunch of extras; you will miraculously come home with most of them.

What we learned is, if you happen to mysteriously pull a Sponge Bob golf ball out of your bag, tee it up at a water hazard and it will find its way home. You won’t even have to try, it knows the way. So let it.