Free Sports in Hell by Rick Reilly

asked Anita to tell me about the time she, a 120-pound skinny safety tech, carried a full-grown man down the mountain.
    â€œWhich time?” she replied.
    We all piled in eight Suburbans and started the drive up. We passed “the chicken gun,” the legendary weapon that fired chickens into the cockpit of a Boeing 727 to see whether a flying bird could crack an airplane window. (Frozen, yes. Thawed, no.) We passed airplane fuselages, old boats, all flavors of abandoned cars, small buildings, a helicopter, and an ersatz hardware store, all in the middle of nowhere. It was like driving through Hiroshima the day before the A-bomb hit. Everything we saw was doomed.
    They dumped us out and had us hike a half hour to the first tee. That’s when I knew one of the two older guys, Chris Ritter, was in trouble. He barely got to the top. He was exhausted.
    The view was thrilling. The idea that we were going to play down it? A little terrifying. There was a small wooden platform hanging off a ledge somebody had built.
    â€œWhat’s that?” I asked.
    â€œThat’s the tee,” Dennis answered.
    That thing? It was hardly big enough to pee off. It couldn’t have been four feet wide and three feet long. You couldn’t knit off it, much less hit a full driver.
    Dennis handed me two crappy balls and took me to the other side of the pinnacle, where a couple of guys were hitting practice shots that would land God knows where. I’d never seen a golf ball fly that far, and I’ve covered John Daly. “You’ll never hit a golf ballfarther in your life,” Mike Stanley had said the night before. But he said if you didn’t hit it high on your first shot, you were going to give away hundreds and hundreds of yards. You could be on that mountain all day. I completely topped the first practice one and thinned the next one. I saw a rope in my future.
    â€œWhat’s par?” I asked.
    Under the old rules—where you had to hit it where it lied and you played to a normal, tiny golf hole—par was about 50. Now, with the fifty-foot re-tee rule and the thirty-foot-wide hole with a twenty-foot-high flagpole, it seemed to be about 16, which happened to be the same exact par on any hole played by the late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill.
    Soon they were handing me ten yellow balls marked with a big “2” and the year “07” and saying, “OK, let’s start.” It was 6:30 A.M . and it had to be eighty degrees already. Let the story begin: Into Thin Error.
    Primo went first, naturally, because his name is Primo. When it was my turn, I was shaking. The platform seemed even tinier as I stuck my tee through my piece of carpet and into my piece of Styrofoam. I radioed my spotters.
    â€œYou guys ready?”
    Only Tony answered. Perhaps Jason and Matt had found a way to suck cactus juice.
    I set my borrowed driver up to it—you don’t think I was going to wreck my
own
clubs?—and made possibly the most in-she-barrel swing of my life. My head and hips hardly moved forward an inch. As a result, it went straight as Amy Grant and really high. Why don’t I do this all the time?
    Can I just tell you how fun it is to hit a golf ball 800 yards? I felt like Tiger Woods after a trip to A-Rod’s medicine cabinet.
    As predicted, Caleb hit the best drive—off a tee stuck in a broom. Dennis’ was long, too. The two Albuquerque guys seemed worn out already and hit lukewarm shots, though they didn’t fall off the platform. The grocer just cold-topped one. It dribbled fifty yards, all downhill, until it hit a rock. It meant his spotters weregoing to have to climb all the way up to it—a good twenty-minute hike, at least. And it meant he’d surrendered 750 yards. Sucked to be him, I guessed.
    And then it was time to go.
    Chris Ritter turned to his spotter and said, “Where’s the path?”
    â€œNo path, man,” the guy said.