Or: The Day a Goose Stole My Ball
One of the genuinely great things about golf is that you are outside. You are in nature. Real nature. Not the Instagram version with inspirational quotes and soft piano music. Actual nature, with bugs, heat, smells, and animals that do not care at all about your scorecard.
And I am not trying to get all PBS about this. This is not a Nat Geo special about ecosystems collapsing or coral reefs turning into chalk or whatever horrifying thing we are all supposed to feel guilty about this week. I just mean that when you golf, you see some cool stuff.
Over the years, I’ve seen some things.
I’ve seen turkeys at Disney that were roughly the size of golf carts. Plenty of deer. Bald eagles. Hawks. Owls. Raccoons in the middle of the day I am SURE had rabies! I’ve even had to stop play and let an eight- or nine-foot alligator casually walk across the fairway at Lake Buena Vista. That thing didn’t rush. It didn’t acknowledge us. It just crossed left to right and disappeared into the water like it owned the place. Which it probably did.
You give that situation a wide berth and move on with your life.
But this story is about a goose.
This was somewhere in Michigan. I don’t remember the course anymore because a lot of those forested Michigan tracks blur together in my memory. What I do remember is that it was a par five. A long one. The kind with a creek sitting about 260 or 270 yards out in exactly the spot where decent golfers get into trouble.
Normally, that creek is not my problem.
On this day, however, I managed to hit one of my better drives. Not perfect. A little left to right. But playable. The ball came to rest just short of the creek, safely in the fairway. A small personal victory.
As I walk up to my ball, I notice a few geese hanging around. You know the type. Loud. Territorial. Absolutely committed to pooping everywhere and moving for no one.
One of them is standing maybe four feet from my ball. I stop. I wait. I assume it will eventually move. It does not.
Instead, this goose walks over, picks up my golf ball in its bill, walks about two steps, and drops it directly into the creek.
I am not exaggerating. I am not embellishing. This happened!
The goose did not panic. It did not flinch. It did not apologize. It just looked at me for a moment, then went back to being a goose.
Now, could I have reacted poorly in that moment? Probably. But I’m not a savage. I did not chase the goose. I did not throw a club. I did not attempt to retrieve the ball from moving water like an idiot.
I dropped another ball and moved on. I did not count the stroke.
The goose stared at me like it had won. And it had.
That’s Snowman golf. You enjoy the scenery, accept the chaos, and understand that sometimes the course itself decides you’re making an eight today!