Free Sports in Hell by Rick Reilly Page A

“You just go straight down.”
    He had a look on his face like he’d just seen Keith Richards naked.
    I couldn’t blame him. The mountain was all rocks and razor-back ridges and the promise of a big hard sun coming soon.
    Those first few steps were all loose shale, so people were already falling on their butts. The only way to get down it at all with any speed—and speed was important, since the temperature was supposed to hit 103 by noon—was to ski down it. You know when you’re skiing and you get stuck on a really steep cliff face and all you can do is make hockey stops, left then right, until you can finally point your skis downhill again? That’s all I did. Hockey stops straight down for 400 yards, with my Nikes substituting for Rossignols.
    It was about then I met my official scorer, who somehow was getting down it without a problem. She was an engineer named Aubrey Farmer, the girlfriend of one of Dennis’ spotters. She looked about twenty-five, athletic, brunette, in hiking boots. She liked mountains, golf, and blowing things up for a living. In other words, the perfect woman.
    Suddenly, we heard a “fore!” and we looked backwards 200 yards, where the grocer was topping it again. After a few minutes, he found it again and yelled, “Heads up!” Only this time, we just kept walking. We were right in his line, so I knew we were safe. This time he shanked it right. His spotters’ heads sagged. There was only one channel for all eight teams, so you could hear everybody else’s problems. “Uh, that one wasn’t good,” the grocer said over the radio. The last we heard him, they were still looking for it, which meant he’d be hitting five and we still hadn’t hit our second yet.
    It’d been a good half hour since I hit my first shot, so by the time I got to the ball, only Tony remained. The liver demolition boys had set off on another half-hour hike farther down—negotiating ledges and steep drop-offs—to the place where they guessed I might hit it. And when I found it, I had a new problem. When you’re on a mountain face, it’s almost impossible to find a place flat enough where you can swing the club without hitting a rock or a cactus or falling forward to your death. At last I whacked it again and sliced it right. And about three minutes later, Matt radioed: “Dude, you won’t BELIEVE where your ball is!”
    When I got there, they were pointing at something under a bush that grew out of a rock. Then I saw it. My ball was encircled by a rattlesnake. Just the body. The head and the tail were under the rock. Maybe it decided my ball was an egg? From the girth of it, we all decided it was big, maybe five feet. I stood ten feet away, happy to let it hatch and raise my golf ball for the rest of its life. Good luck to them both. Matt, though, kept taking my 5-iron and poking at it. I ask you, in the name of all that is holy, why would he do that?
    â€œHey! Knock that off!” I whispered in a panic.
    â€œWe gotta get the ball,” he whispered back. “One-shot penalty.”
    I looked at Aubrey to see if this was true, even in this case. She nodded.
    Was that something you wanted on your tombstone?
Died saving a stroke
.
    And now comes a sentence never heard on
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: Matt finally nudged the golf ball away from the venomous reptile and threw it to me
. I switched to a different one. Nobody likes snake juice on their golf ball.
    Off they hiked again. I waited twenty minutes. It was just such an odd way to spend a day—like the Von Trapp family playing golf as they escaped through Switzerland. Tony said the third shot was crucial because if you mauled it, you could get over a cliff and then it could run down the mountain like snowmelt.
    Tony went about 200 yards down from me and told me to hit itright over his head. Hell, it was straight downhill. I could FALL that far. I hit a