THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 27, 1996 TAG: 9603270022
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LAWRENCE MADDRY
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
I GUESS YOU read in the newspapers that Muffin has come out of the closet and gone into the oven.
Muffin is Muffin Spencer-Devlin, the golf pro who proclaimed recently that she is a lesbian.
She immediately received a lot of heat from homophobes and elements of the Christian right when she announced her intention to kiss her lover the next time she wins a televised tournament.
I have no problem with her announcements. My quarrel with Muffin goes way back - to her mother, who must have had her head in the microwave when she gave an innocent child that name. Wonder if she has a sibling named Bagel?
But my real complaint - politically incorrect no doubt - is something else that Muffin said. It was a remark which, to use another baking term, ruhlly frosted me.
What she said was: ``No more living in the shadows. No more awful lies.''
Until Muffin said that, I had always assumed living in the shadows with awful lies was what golfing was all about. And if it isn't, I don't want to know it. I've invested 40 years in the game and am too old to change.
My association with the grand old game has been of the deep shadows variety owing to the peculiarities of my Uncle Seth. Uncle Seth taught me to play.
And he died before I could exact revenge.
Revenge for the dollars wasted, to say nothing of briar scratches, bug bites, poison ivy rashes, sprained ankles, and stout limbs of trees pushed aside by my relentless uncle that lashed back across my neck.
Uncle Seth played the game about as poorly as anyone I've known. He was the tall and nervous sort. Played the course at a gallop with shirttail flapping, even when addressing the ball. Incidentally, he did just that, speaking to it as though it were human.
``Hold still, ball!'' he'd say, bouncing around just prior to the backswing.
Then the ball would fly from his club in a wide slice, making the ``thwocking'' sound of a batted table-tennis ball as it struck first one tree and then another - way off the fairway where the wild things dwelt in the shadows.
And he collected them. Wild things, I mean. His golf bag contained only three clubs - more than three he considered unsporting - five iron, niblick and wood-shafted putter.
But his old golf bag had a zippered pocket on the side where he kept half a dozen empty matchboxes for his specimens.
I suppose that, having never won a trophy at golf, he accepted the centipedes, beetles, millipedes, ants, roaches and crickets he collected as substitutes. There's no doubt they enhanced his appreciation of the game.
As we trooped through the underbrush looking for his ball, his eyes were always focused on the ground. Not for the Titleist or Wilson alone but for any interesting insect underfoot.
``Look at this, son,'' he'd say. ``It's a chinch bug . . . a blissus leucopterus.'' In seconds, he'd pluck it from beneath a leaf and drop it into one of his matchboxes.
His collection of bugs - pickled and bottled in alcohol - was proudly displayed on a small shelf in his garage. He spoke of them the way golfers do when they've broken 80, or won a tournament:
``Now this one I got at the public course in Augusta, Georgia. Found it crawling on a sapling sprouting from dense undergrowth. It's a buffalo treehopper. Look at those big wings on him. He's aceresa bubalus.''
Uncle Seth died about 10 years ago. He passed along to me a total inability to hit a golf ball down the middle. But, alas, I failed to catch his intense interest in insects. I still think of him, now and then, when tramping those areas of a course where Deep Woods Off is most necessary.
After a golf outing a couple of years ago, I was having my hair chopped in a fancy hair styling place in Norfolk. My stylist alarmed the ladies present by halting the process to apply tweezers to my scalp.
``Look at this. It's a tick that was on yowah head,'' she exclaimed in horror. The customers, with black sheets tied at the neck, all turned in their chairs to stare.
I examined the wiggling thing between the the tweezer tips. ``Actually it's a dermocentor variabilis,'' I replied.
Uncle Seth would have been proud. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY/The Virginian-Pilot
by CNB