Ever go golfing? If not, you should try!

Some time last year, my wife and I discovered this amazingly fun game called Albatross18, an online golf MMO on the free to play/pay for extras business model. It's called Pangya! in Korea, where it was developed, and is a really great anime-styled golfing game, complete with special power shots, RPG-element stat building, and more. So, we got hooked, and so did my brother-in-law.

My brother-in-law driving with a putter. Yeah, you heard that right.

Shortly thereafter, we decided that REAL golf would be HELLA FUN, and found the local driving ranges, including Haggin Oaks Golf Complex. In addition to being one of the largest and oldest courses in town, it's also the only one with a 24-hour driving range during the spring/summer/fall months. Needless to say, being the night-owls we are, we got hooked. Big time.

Out of the four of us who normally go (my wife, her brother, our friend, and myself), I was the only one who'd ever done it before extensively--I took golf in college. Yeah. Funny, huh? So I at least had some semblance of a clue of what to do, and we all stepped up, and proceeded to suck horribly. Even me.

Note I said I "took golf", not "completed the class". I ended up dropping out of college to get a job to fund the band. Probably not the BEST idea, but it worked in the long run.

We went golfing at least a couple times a week, throughout their 24-hour period for the season, and learned a few things:

1) Golfing is harder than it looks.
2) It's perfectly possible to snap the head of a driver off of the shaft merely by striking the ball--not the ground even! (Yeah, I still need to replace that club...)
3) My brother-in-law and I have some amazingly wicked slices... Depressingly so.
4) Some people have the most HILARIOUS golf swing on the planet, and still somehow manage to hit the ball.
5) Golfing is MUCH harder than it looks.

Now the seasons have changed, winter has come and gone, and spring/summer is upon us again. So is 24 hour driving hours. Thank. Effing. God.

On our first night out, we all did pretty well. Much better than I had expected, actually, after not playing for about half a year. Of course, playing Albatross18 in the off-season, and my bro-in-law and I tweaking on Tiger Woods '07 on the Xbox 360 over the past month may have helped. MAY have helped. We believe it did.

I've gone out with different configurations of them since that first night, and after a year of wondering "What in the f*ck is wrong with my swing?!?!?", I'm finally starting to figure it out! I'm putting less muscle into my swing, and driving just as far. I'm hitting the ball squarely much more regularly, and getting a much better flight arc than before (most of the time).

And the slice? Well... It's still there, but now let's say it's becoming less of a slice, and more of an "exaggerated draw"... Works for me!

So what's the point of this post? Well, really, mostly just so I can say I've updated in the past few days. That, and saying that oddly enough, golfing is turning out to be really fun! I definitely suggest to all of you to give it a good go, and see if it's something you enjoy. Especially if you have a 24 hour driving range in your area--it's an amazing night out when it's just cold enough to where you don't notice you're working up a sweat until you stop swinging, it's quiet, dark and light at the same time, and the place is pretty slow, people-wise. All in all, it's a great workout, it's massively fun, and relieves stress like crazy.

When you're not constantly shanking balls into the adjacent 1st fairway.

*blush*...