How to Turn an Eagle Attempt into a Life Lesson
Last summer I was back in Michigan for a wedding or some family function. The exact reason doesn’t matter. What mattered was that I found myself back at Maple Lane.
Maple Lane is the beat-up muni in Sterling Heights that holds an unreasonable amount of emotional value for me, despite having very little actual golf-course beauty. It has trees. Lots of trees. Hence the name. Trees I have personally bounced golf balls off for decades. At one point, I’m pretty sure we wished Dutch Elm Disease on a few of them out of self-defense.
This story is not about shooting an eight. Even though life is great with an eight.
This is about a six. A truly awful six.
If you play the white course at Maple Lane, there’s a ridiculously short par four on hole three. I mean short. From the forward tees it’s maybe 265 yards. That’s barely a par four. It’s like the course designer woke up late that morning and said, “Eh, close enough.”
I’m playing with rented clubs that have clearly lived several hard lives. Dented. Scarred. Looked like someone used them to change motor oil at some point. I tee it up anyway and take a swing.
I absolutely hammer one.
Well… Snowman hammer. Slightly right, but still perfect. Ball lands on the green.
Par four. On the green. In one.
This is, without question, my first real eagle attempt in my entire life. I’m playing with my cousins and my younger brother, and I walk up to the green with actual swagger. Real confidence. The kind you should never bring onto a putting surface.
I do that stupid pointing thing you see on TV. You know the one. Point at the hole with some random number of fingers, and one eye closed like a F’n Pirate! The putt is long. Probably sixty feet. Maybe seventy. This isn’t a tap-in situation.
I hit it. Four feet.
Not four feet from the hole. Four feet total. Danny DeVito short. Embarrassingly short. I might as well have handed the ball halfway and apologized.
There goes the eagle.
Now I’m sitting at about sixty-six feet for birdie, still pretending everything is fine.
Second putt? I absolutely smash it past the hole. Twenty feet by. No subtlety. No touch. Hit it with all the grace of a dump trunk on a dirt road.
Third putt? Short again.
Fourth putt? Past again.
At this point, I’m now standing over a ten-footer for double bogey on a hole I hit in one.
And in true Snowman fashion, I drain it. Dead center. Like I meant to do that the whole time.
Flat putt. No break. Basically the salt flats of Utah. But I’ll tell the story later like it was clutch.
So that’s a six. A five-putt par four.
Now here’s the thing. I don’t go around telling people I five-putted a par four. I tell them I drove the green. I tell them I had an eagle putt. I leave out the part where I lost all control of my fine motor skills.
That’s Snowman golf.
Ridiculous inconsistency.
Moments of greatness immediately followed by frustration (and often beer).
And somehow, that six still feels worse than most eights.