Manakiki Golf Course does not treat well the golfer who has not swung a golf club for about six months. The course has not been changed drastically by the hand of man since its construction according to the plans of the legendary golf course designer Donald Ross.
My first trip to Manakiki, which is east of Cleveland and now owned by the Cleveland Metropolitan Park District, which maintains the Emerald Necklace that surrounds Cleveland, providing recreation, education, and picnicking opportunities for millions, was decades ago. I played golf with three friends every Sunday morning, arriving at another Metropark course, Sleepy Hollow, before sunrise to lay claim to one of the several open starting times between 6 and 7 a.m. and finished 18 holes of golf by 9:30, at the latest, without a power cart, something unheard of nowadays.
One of us decided that it would be fun, for a change, to play Manakiki, which was a much farther drive and would require us to leave home all the earlier to get to the course at about 5:30 or so. On the appointed Sunday, I woke up at 4:30, making sure to wake up my lovely wife, took a shower, and got on the road. Clouds blotted out the stars in the middle-of-the-night sky. As I drove, raindrops began to splat against the windshield, which ordinarily is not a good sign; but for a true golfer, this was not necessarily a bad sign. After all, golf umbrellas are huge; and a little precipitation is good for horticultural growth and discourages fair weather golfers. The closer to my destination I drove, the heavier the rain pelted what little I could see of the roadway lighted by my metallic-blue-and-rusted '68 Nova's headlamps.
Arriving at the course, splashing through the rivulets of water racing across the winding entrance roadway, I saw only one car, lighted by the single overhead light in the parking lot, a familiar Chevy Impala. I parked next to the gold Impala, slid across the front seat of my car, alighted from it, and pushed my way into the back seat of the Impala, laughing about the rain coming down, just as lightning brightened the early morning sky, followed by a cracking crash of thunder ... so very close ...
The rain was now a full-fledged gully washer, complete with thunder and lightning. As golfers are prone to do when confronted by a summer thunderstorm, we waited, discussing how the storm would pass through, except that the sky failed to brighten the closer the clock moved to the announced time of sunrise; and no other cars had pulled into the large expanse of asphalt being pelted by sheets of rain, torrents of water racing in unseen channels toward the sewers.
And we wondered why nobody else had pulled into the lot. After all, people worked at the course. Somebody had to wake up and come to open the clubhouse and the snack bar and the pro shop. There was the groundskeeping crew, who needed to be there to groom the course for us. They should have been there already.
And the rainfall continued pouring unabated from the heavens, as if Mother Nature directed the golfing landscape be given a break from the duffers and hackers who would destroy the luscious tracts of fairways and greens and trample the natural forest setting in search of wayward-flown golf balls. After uselessly coaxing the thunderclouds to part momentarily and the lightning to cease, powerless to effect change in the natural order, with great reluctance, we ended our wait, the sky no brighter than when we arrived.
Posted by Bill at May 20, 2006 11:14 PM