ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

How you perform on the first hole of golf is typically quite telling for how the rest of your round is going to go – at least that’s what they say.

A semi-retired business consultant from Betoota’s exclusively-leafy Owens Woods gated community should’ve listened to them – whoever they may be.

Michael Dollarhyde hadn’t played golf for about a year but agreed to play this afternoon with some old friends from school.

It ended after the second hole.

Teeing off from the first, the 56-year-old sliced the driveway out of bounds. He didn’t even see where it landed.

With some help from his mates, he found the ball deep in the rough so he elected to take a drop beside the fairway as the rest of the party laughed.

From there, Dollarshyde overshot the green by a long, long way where his ball came to a halt on the 4th green just behind the first.

“I thought, ‘Fuck it, it’s just a loosener,’ All I had to do was the try to keep my leading arm straight and my head over the ball.”

After finally sinking the last putt for a triple bogey, Mike and the fellas drove on down to the second tee roughly 100m down the hill.

“Dale [friend] said, ‘How about you have first go, Mike. Looks like you’ll be having a long day,’ before him and the boys started pissing themselves. Well, fuck you, Dale. At least my wife didn’t run off with a real estate agent.”

Lining himself up for the drive, Dollarhyde tried to remember all the tips his coach had given him some 40 years earlier.

But that was to no avail.

Mike sliced the ball even worse than the first tee shot, almost forcing him to put his Big Berth over his knee and hoik his bag into the nearby creek. He then stormed off.

“Fuck golf and fuck anybody who fucking plays it, I’m going to the pub.”

More to come.