Arbuckle 2021 was held last week at three Northern California courses - Tilden, Corica South, and Yocha Dehe. Ron Braun, the bad bad man from Motown, won in a walk. He was a steady "grinder" throughout as Stanley Pesick put it. Seldom spectacular but never bad. Solid.
A couple of his holes in particular stand out. On the first day at Tilden on the par 5 thirteenth hole, his tee shot ended up, quite unluckily at the base of a tree stump. Rather than bemoan his fate he played his next three shots down the adjacent fairway; first, chopping out; then striping a three wood; which set up a 100-yard approach that he nailed; leading to a one-putt green and a bogey that set the tone for the rest of the event.
Straus, for his part, had stayed in contention by playing quite well on the front nine of the last day, but inexplicably, his game collapsed on the back nine under Braun's grinding pressure. "I'm mystified" he wailed after the round. "I had it and then it disappeared, why?"
Pesick had an even more enigmatic week. He started, on the practice round, by firing a personal best 78 at Tilden. Yet by the last day, he could barely hit the ball. Yips, look-ups, sculls; you name it, he did it. He actually pulled his game together and nearly parred the impossible 18th; but that's golf -- just when you're ready to abandon the game, the golf gods sneer and say "not so fast old-timer". He'll be back.
The Cat was MIA, but he too, will, we trust, return.
Golf as we know tests so much of a person's character and sporting ability. It clearly presents a stern assessment of one's natural hand-eye coordination. But it also forces the player to stay in the moment but focus on the next shot; the next chip; the next putt. But most of all it helps one look inside their soul. The greatest distance one must overcome in the game of golf is the six inches between the ears.
I saw the following quote from Kurt Vonnegut - it is absolutely appropriate to those of us who keep going back out to the fairways and roughs; bunkers and greens.
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you,’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘ I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘Win’ at them.”
First tee at Yoche Dehe is 160 feet above the fairway. 
Gorgeous Northern California day. 
Look closely those two dots are Ron and Stan
