Ode to the Blades

About six months ago, I made an impulse buy to get the Mizuno MP-20. It was a gorgeous club. Absolutely smatteringly gorgeous. If I could take out a golf club on a dinner date and movie and not be viewed as an absolute mental patient, I would.

Yes, when I played it, yes, I was expecting myself to struggle. And Lord did I struggle. The face of the mp20 is tiny. It’s daring you to improve. So I went to the range, again and again, trying to craft out my skills like a samurai going to training.

But getting better at doing something wrong is still basically a $hit way to go through life, isn’t it. I didn’t have the confidence looking down on it. I loved the thin topline. The face was another matter. When you caught it right, there’s no feeling like it.  I am not sure if its the hype of copper plating or what not, but there is a stark difference in flushing the MP20 vs my MP54. The problem was, I was flushing the MP20 one out of five attempts while the MP54 was, meh, around 3 out of 5. Big difference when faced with a 6 iron into the greens.

So finally, after another round of bad irons 2 weeks back, I decided to finally say a (temporary) goodbye to the MP20s and move back to my 54s. At least on the long irons. I couldn’t bear to remove the shorter irons because the set looks so good. DAMN IT! When we need to break up with a girl, we need to break up with a girl! What’s wrong with you, man?

Anyway, we headed to Sg Long. Sg Long is now infested with what I call “Ang Moh Infestation”. Ang Moh = Westerners. We were nicely waiting for our turn on the first teebox behind 2 flights of Westerners, when another flight zoomed in and passed us and squeezed into the tiny space between our flight and the next. We were like, “Oi, WTF? We were here, you need to queue lah! <Chinese expletives because Malaysians are too nice to curse in something the Westerners understand>”

The AngMoh got out of his cart like John Wayne with his testicles the size of Brazil and sauntered to the tee box and told his ‘organizer’ who looked a little like a shorter Don Corleone and said, “These guys are telling us to queue.” He didn’t even bother looking at us, this western son of a b…ig woman. Our inability to scold these western vermin is the reason why we got colonized in the first place.

Anyway, Don Corleone walked to us and said, they booked it through the app and told us, we should try it. Please note these guys look like octogenarians with one foot in the grave and the other foot in a sandbunker. So it was weird to see a great grandfather explaining to me they have an app to do booking. So I said, well, you are in the club and the marshal says its our turn to tee off. And he shockingly said, no, the marshal doesn’t know shit. The app knows everything and they have already paid and booked for it.

Notwithstanding this moronic explanation, and just the general air of superiority these guys went through everything and the undermining and belittling of the marshal, I asked the marshal and the marshal just muttered these westerners were ‘always like that’. He sounded like a man constantly abused mentally and defeated in his early Marshalling days and now he is just a shell of a man looking to get out an abusive relationship.

He helpfully suggested us to go to the back 9 and tee off behind another group of Westerners. This group of Ang Moh wasn’t part of the Mafia gang gathered on the front 9. When they asked, they spoke in Australian accent. So technically they weren’t Westerners. They were Easterners. So they are fine. And they were way more polite than those yahoos on the first tee.

So off we went on the back 9 of sungai Long. After the usual misses, three putts , a few duffed shots etc, I ended up with a respectable 44 with 3 pars. Could have been better, but could have been worse.

Back 9 came.

Started with a chip in birdie. Then parred the long par 5 with regulation on. Long par 3 bogey, then par 4, just a bad approach but saved bogey. Then I went on a tear of 5 pars in a row including the final hole with an approach of 180, then chip and sank in the 8 footer. It was probably the best display of 9-hole golf I’ve had in maybe the last 5 years or so, to get a +1 , 37. Final score was 9 pars , 1 birdie and a couple of double and the rest bogeys for 81. Again, I missed out the mythical 79, but hopefully I am getting close. If I were to analyse, I would say, the front 9 par 5 12th, with a 135 to the hole for regulation on and just messed up my 8 iron with a big push. Then on the par 3 14th, pulled the devil out of my 8 iron again behind a tree and ended up with a double. Then a very simple 80 meter on the par 5 18th with a sand wedge and I completely went under it and it only went 30m.  Frustrating. Those were the strokes that would have led me to the glorious 79.

My 8 irons were the MP-20. For the 54s, I never hit a bad shot all day. This included a few glorious 6 irons into the green, and 5 irons zipping to the flag.

I gave this analogy to my partner as we walked up the final hole. Going to the MP20 was like having an affair with a younger, more beautiful woman while being married to your wife. This is purely from non-experiential point of view, to give this disclaimer. So you feel awesome going out with a younger girl looking like Scarlett Johansson. However, after a few months, that feeling wanes and you wonder, why Scarlett doesn’t cook like your wife, or enjoy a simple Saturday night out with the kids, without the parties; or stop spending on useless crap in the most expensive places; or just stop dressing like her skirt is disappearing from the Thanos snap; or that annoying high pitch voice that constantly seems to ask for you to be nice to her; or those vacuous conversations about nothing that does not have any brain activity involved etc.

And you go, damn, I wish I was back with my wife.

That’s basically the analogy with my MP-20s going back to my 54s. My 54s is the comfort. It doesn’t look that good as the 20s, but it was like slipping back into your comfort drink, or an old pair of slippers. Once in my hands (except for the worn grip), and looking from it from the topline, you go, “Oh yeah, my old friend, it’s great to see you again.”

This feeling is for this round. Knowing how we play golf, who knows what will happen in the next?