“No incompetence in existence can hold a candle to experienced incompetence, and that is the deepest cut of all.” — Tom Kelly, “The Season”
You might think I’m crazy, but now that I’m chasing little white balls across fairways and into the woods, sand traps and briar patches, I’ve decided golf and turkey hunting are similar.
You may say, “Holt, that is twisted thinking.” Bear with me a moment. Golfers in North Carolina venture outside each spring because the weather is finally suitable. Turkey hunting occurs in the spring because that’s when it’s lawful.
Both activities require special equipment. Consider the multiple turkey calls, seats, camouflage clothing, expensive shotshells, sighted shotguns, snacks, drinks, books, boots, videos, et al, needed by a turkey hunter. A similar outpouring of money might pay the monthly food bill for the residents of Haw River. Compare to the accoutrements of serious golfers — the latest woods, irons, head covers, putters, gloves, shoes, caps, tees, sweaters/jackets, $3 apiece golf balls, bar tabs and, finally, golf lessons. Then think of the $3.50-a-gallon gasoline burned on trips to courses and practice ranges and the turkey woods. Add greens and cart fees and hunting-land lease fees.
But forget all that. What makes golf and turkey hunting alike is that success or failure is all on you and nobody else. Neither golf nor turkey hunting is a team game.
Sliced your wedge out of bounds after a career 280-yard tee shot? Who else made that Kmart swing? Flushed a hot gobbler out of a tree after he’d answered your yelps for 30 minutes and you destroyed an entire morning? Nobody’s fault but your own.
Ah, but there are also those moments God reaches down and touches us. A 50-foot putt on the 18th green disappears into the cup like a rabbit diving into a burrow and you win the match and the money. Or you decide to stop calling to a gobbler who answered once from a quarter-mile away, and 45 minutes later he walks up to your decoy, turns his back to you and makes his fatal last strut.
Or this, which really happened. After getting home at 2 a.m. from a newspaper job, I fell asleep against a tree the next morning beside a Caswell County field. I’d called to a gobbler with hens at dawn, but he liked his company better than a hen in the holly bush. At 11:30 a.m. I awoke with a start to the sound of cackling hens. The boss gobbler had forsaken his girlfriends, ran to my jake decoy and chest-bumped him; I bumped him with a load of No. 6 shot. He weighed 23 pounds and had a 12-inch beard.
Turkey hunting an obsession like golf? Funny you should ask.
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