Beware The ‘Redundinated Golfer’: He’s got money. He’s got time. And he’s got a game to match.
Beware the ‘redundinated’ golfer, especially if the new-to-no-work golfer wears a soggy, old school bandage on his left knee. It’ll be the same guy bragging about buying secondhand golf shoes on the Internet. “Don’t have to break ‘em in, do I?” he’d say. “Some eejit already did the hard work for me, didn’t they? Now I get to wear ‘em, don’t I? Niblicks, too – very hard to find new-looking, broken-in, secondhand Niblicks.”
This bloke, let’s call him Dave, because that’s the name his parents settled on when he was born. He had a Srixon glove, Oakley shorts, a Nike shirt and studded TaylorMade golf cap. It surprised me; I didn’t know TaylorMade had a studded cap in their range. As it turns out they don’t – Davo Redundancy put the studs in himself for reasons I was too nervous to ask. They were proper studs, too … the kind you see associated with bikies, or Mardi Gras. Given his confidence, those studs could have been the number of holes-in-one he’d nailed. But they might also have been in memory of the roadkill he’d hit and eaten, or skateboards he’d wrestled off five-year-olds. Who knew? Maybe they were representing the number of people he’d hit with darts at his local pub.
Of all this time spent inventing a past for Dave, I should have been thinking about the game of golf at hand. He was an attention vacuum; none of us could keep our eyes off him.
I mean, we hadn’t even got to the first tee and he says, “I haven’t played in ages because I’ve been working. Well, not really working. Not like I used to when I was into it. I’ve been working so that it doesn’t look like I’m working but not so much that they can sack me, right? Just enough so they realise they probably don’t need me. Then it took them about a year to work out the best way to get rid of me.”
He’s got a smoke hanging off his lip – like Andy Capp – and he’s happy as hell.
“How do you spell good times? That’s right, baby. R-U-D-U-N-D-A-N-S-E-E,” he laughed.
“That’s what I got, baby. And, I got an extra year’s payout in my package because I played ‘em good, it pumped the value up about this much.” His hands flew out to ‘big fish’ size. “Not to mention the car and the parking space they had to pay out – in cash. Yew!” And as he pokes his tee in the ground he’s singing to the tune of Honesty, by Billy Joel – “Redundanceeeeee, is such a lovely word. It’s how my boss says, Dave, thank you-oo-oo-oo.” He then lined up at right angles to the hole and proceeded to hit a cricketing-type of pull shot over mid-wicket, which just happened to be the middle of the fairway and well past anything the rest of us had hit.
Redundancy Dave didn’t even watch where it landed. “When I hit it that good, I don’t need to look,” he said. He then made a huge show of cleaning the face of his groove-less driver with a brush designed to clean grooves. “You know?”
I had no idea.
I wanted to know. I needed to know. Such confidence, such bravado. “Six figures landing in my bank account tonight!” No wonder he was so happy. And he played so well. Two birdies and a lip-out in three holes, 14 points in five holes, a steady hand while putting, no yips when chipping. He was awesome. “Out of work, off the treadmill and awesome,” as he described it.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“Well,” he started. “You know how I got these shoes off the net?” I nodded, thinking it was a bit weird to buy someone else’s golf shoes. “So, they’re comfortable, right? Well, I’m heading down the road of inventing or investing in a machine that wears in people’s golf shoes for them before they wear them.”
“Rightttt…,” I said.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t ya? Just what the machine might look like.
“So am I,” he said. “Any ideas?”
“None,” I said.
“Interesting. I can outdrive you and outthink you …,” he laughed.
Argh … Just what do you do with a guy so arrogant? So cocky? And playing so much better than you?
He’s got time. He’s got money. And he’s got the game to match.
He’s got the mind of a six-year-old boy, but the scorecard of a 40-year-old US PGA Tour veteran.
He’s the Homer Simpson of the club golfing world – very dumb and very lucky.
Well, there’s nothing you can do, really. For this is the nature of the redundinated golfer.
All you can do is somehow, in your superior intelligence, convince him to buy the post-round beers. And I did. Finally! Something positive out of this demoralising round. But just before he hands me my beer, Davo Redundancy ‘one-ups’ me one last time.
“You want to, don’t you?”
“Want to what, Davo?” I asked.
“You want to know what it’s like to be me. You wanna be inside me. You want to get what’s inside of me, inside of you!”
I drank my beer and made a quick exit.
