As always, ITB is dominating the sport of golf on all levels. Webb Simpson is having a successful year playing blades on the PGA tour, the Broughton golf team won the 4A state championship, a Broughton freshman won the state title, and I made it through my weekend round without breaking a club or losing more than 5 balls. ITB residents are proudly showing their support for these accomplishments, by wearing their exclusive ITB Insider™ golf shirts.
Churchill's and golf, that's what ITB does.
In exchange for this shirt, they said I'd get to do a daily ITB segment on 99.9 The Fan. I'm still waiting for their call.
I’m not surprised Broughton won the title. ITB has always dominated the Country Club sports, mainly golf, tennis, and the Raleigh Party (staying drunk for that entire weekend is a sport for us). I don’t know why they even bother playing the tournament, especially when they hold it OTB. However, those long drives allowed former Broughton golf coach Phil Ratliff to display his legendary driving and coaching prowess. They should at least be considerate and hold it at the Club or on the future 18 hole course I’m planning for Fred Fletcher Park. Note to ITB Bishops Park residents: I suggest selling your condos now, because they’re going to be taken by eminent domain within the next five years. Just move to Five Points, it’s a closer drive to The Point/Churchill’s anyway.
Shockingly, Myers Park finished third in the tournament. I was sure that with the exception of Quail Hollow, all of their golf courses consisted of cow pasture fairways and astroturf greens. They must have snuck on to Quail Hollow at night to practice. I’m actually concerned about letting Myers Park compete in future tournaments. I just don’t trust those Charlotte bastards. I can easily see them taking a 5-iron and Nancy Kerriganing one of Broughton’s star golfers. I’ll look into getting them banned from future tournaments.
More importantly, I’d like to again congratulate the Broughton golf team for a successful season and championship. You can support the golf team, and just be an overall ITB badass in general, by wearing one of these.
Since I grew up on a golf course, I’m obviously including some golf stories in my autobiography, tentatively titled “Saved By the Beltine: How William Needham Finley IV…..” (still working on that last part). An exclusive excerpt is below:
Divots
Forrest and I were serving a two week ban from tennis lessons for playing Home Run Derby instead of working on our drop shots. If you’ve never taken tennis lessons (stop reading this book), Home Run Derby just consists of you hitting tennis balls as hard as you possibly can so they fly over the fence and hopefully hit an S-Class or luxury SUV in the parking lot. We typically could only get a few shots off each day during the times when the instructor was busy working with the talented kids, who eventually became professional tennis players. Finally the day came when Forrest and I were so jacked up on Fun-Dip and Coke that we couldn’t resist swinging for the fences on every ball that came our way. Long story short, we were forced into taking golf lessons the next day. I was ok with this because the tennis instructor wasn’t one of the hot ones. She rocked the John Daly haircut and was pushing 200. Definitely not something you wanted to spend 3 hours with every morning. I still think Forrest had a crush on her though.
Would you want to take tennis lessons from her?
So we were fine with moving on to golf, until we got to our first lesson and found out we couldn’t play Home Run Derby with our tennis rackets and golf balls because we might “seriously injure someone”. The golf instructor was a kid in college trying to become a golf pro. We could tell he was kind of a dork because he was never hungover during our lessons and he took things very seriously. He quickly found out that me having to be still and concentrate on so many aspects of a good golf swing did not align well with my natural ability to constantly be in motion and not pay attention to anything that people are telling me to do.
As I took my first shot, a decent sized chunk of grass went flying further than my golf ball. I was about to continue with my next shot when the instructor told me to repair my “divot”. Since Dad refused to take me golfing until I turned 25, I didn’t know what a “divot” was at that time. I just stared at him blankly then took another whack at my second shot, sending about a foot of turf well past where my ball landed. His face started to get red as he took my club from me. For some reason he acted like I was supposed to repair the trail of Bigfoot sized tracks I was leaving behind with each swing. He said I was only allowed to putt for the rest of the round so I “wouldn’t be a hazard to the course”. The guy didn’t even want to try to teach me how to hit my ball further than the grass, which is exactly why my short game is horrible today.
After the first nine holes I realized we were great at lying about our score, throwing our expensive clubs after hitting a bad shot, writing curse words in the sand traps with our clubs, and making “divots”. After the lesson, I heard him saying something to my Mom about how he “isn’t paid to follow spoiled kids around and fix the grass”. Actually, that’s exactly what he was paid for, which is why we never saw that kid at the Club again.
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