Team Play

Baker City....this will be a short paragraph. Rather than explaining to the Golf Channel that we'd fallen from T1 last year to T16 this year, and blaming it on a) Tiger's outside life, b) my partner's personal relationship issues or c) medical issues beyond our control....I quickly admitted that we didn't play well enough to win. That cut the interview short and you probably missed it. Still won back our entry fee, though, and had more fun than any other group of eight guys ought to. Well worth the 630 round trip miles in the Mazda, thank goodness Glover was there to help.

"The Magic..." Eric asked if I'd help coach Connor's basketball team of 10's and 11's this summer, but forgot to mention that he'd be gone for three of the eight games. We had game one last week, and yesterday I was solely in charge on my own. In order to protect the fragile egos of the young players, the scoreboard gets turned off when one team achieves a 20 point lead. We didn't make it to halftime with a scoreboard last week, it went dark one minute into the second half last night. Unfortunately, rather than building self esteem for the team that is behind, this tells them immediately that they have no more chance at winning...and they stop defending. I tried everything I could to slow our kids down, but it is awfully hard to tell them to pass on an open lay-up. No final scores are posted, because, once again, it might hurt the fragile young egos to know they'd been blown out by forty....but they all know they've been blown out by forty. So I guess it makes the parents feel better, they can say that their kids hung in there and only lost by 22.

Bluebery Harvest: We have so many blueberries this year that our normal team of five field workers is not enough. I'm always behind, sharing them with others, and looking for someone to join the team. I think "bumper crop" is short for "let's just drive the truck through and bump off as many as we can." I'd expect we'll pick upwards of 12 gallons this year, about four gallons ahead of last year's pace.

And how are these activities connected? They all require teamwork. Coaches step in when others go on vacation. Kids enjoy the dickens out of speeding up the court and actually FINDING an open teammate for a lay-up. One person simply cannot harvest all my blueberries....and playing golf on a team is the only reason I still play. Judy and I get to play in four more team efforts before the summer ends. Knowing that Billy Schlager, in Baker, will pick me up when I hammer a hook into the cow pasture brings a relaxing smile to my face. We're all competitive, regardless of the rules for shutting down the scoreboard, but it is so much more fun to compete when I kow that there is someone to share in the failure and success. More laughter. More stories. I'm compiling a list of basketball team comments and stories, generally because those heard on the golf course are too risque for the library's porn filters....and I'll share those next week when we've had game three.

To say nothing of the team of experts that has guided this health journey for four years.....and supportive members of my personal team, like Jillian, Glover, my parents, Carrie Ellen and the countless others that zip me text messages these days. "Just wondering how you were doing..."