Golf to work

So think of a passtime other than cooking, reading or watching TV that you like so much you do it voluntarily in your free time. Golf, for example.

Imagine if you could golf to work. You’d pop off the front nine and bam! you’re magically transported from your home to your office.

Then at the end of the day you hit the back nine, on your way home.

Before dinner you notice you’re out of olive oil, so you can chip/putt a couple of holes to the grocery and back.

Real golfers will golf in the rain. I know people like this. Now imagine that you can golf in the snow.

(I won’t even get into the part where golfing to work is cheaper than driving or taking the bus, or makes you skinnier, or (on days when traffic is really bad) is faster.)

I don’t mean, by the way, that this is like driving to a golf course on the way to work or the store or whatever. I mean that, as soon as you step out your door, you’re playing golf. Like you live on — not “next to” but ON — a golf course. Actually, it’s better than that. Imagine if almost every public outdoor space were a golf course. Like that. Parenthetically, think how much fun actually golfing for recreation on a Saturday would be if the world were a continuous golf course. You could wake up at any hour in any weather on Saturday and go outside and tee off directly on your front stoop.

Even if you don’t golf to work every day, eventually you’ll kind of get obsessed with it. On a day when you don’t golf to work, you’ll think, “damn, I should’ve golfed to work today.”

I have a coworker who lives in McMinnville, about 40 miles from Portland. He has a good excuse for not golfing to work. That would be like hitting 18 holes before and after work. But if you really love golf — and the more you golf to work, the more you’ll come to love it — eventually you’ll think, “gee, it would be sweet to knock off 36 holes every day.” You’ll even start fantasizing about some really difficult, exclusive links around the Chehalem Mountains that would be awesome to hit twice every single day.

September is the Bike Commute Challenge here in Portland. In 16 years in Oregon, I’ve never had a September that wasn’t perfect weather for golf.

(Forgive me if I mangle golf lingo in this post, I’ve never actually played golf.)