The Rivalry

Golf pencil drawing of a Battle on The Links

Third golf pencil drawing in a series

I f done the right way, competition is nature’s way of bringing out the best in us.

It’s what keeps us evolving and growing.

There’s nothing worse than your best buddy feeding you crow, but you become a better player because of it.

If you don’t clobber the SOB first.

I grew up in a small farming community, and while I’m proud to say that my best friends from high school are still my best friends, to an outsider, it must be pretty uncomfortable.

We are absolutely vicious to each other. 

If you’ve never spent time in a chicken coup, first timers are often dismayed at how they behave to one another.  A couple of them will suddenly pounce on another and begin pecking.  Then the one that was just pummeled with stand up, roll it’s shoulders, spit on its hands, leap on another chicken’s neck, and beat the stuffing out of it, usually calling on a couple of cronies to help out.

It looks awful, but it must feed some chickeny psychological need, because they all do it, and none of them seem the worse for it.

That’s what we do. Not physically, egad, but verbally; When we get together, we hammer each other unmercifully.

It’s beautiful.

The Spoken Word Professional Wrestling Comedy Hour

• Butch will make an observation, which I’ll comment on by cuffing him on the back of the head.
• Then Foo’ll be reminded of a story and will try and tell it, but Porter will start interrupting him with cutting remarks because he knows it drives Foo nuts.
• Butch, still reeling from my witty retort, will leap at Porter off the top turnbuckle.
• Porter will catch him in midair and give him a verbal bodyslam that leaves Butch quivering on the mat.
• I lay into Butch again, with laughter that’s the equivalent of an elbow smash.
• Then Foo will grab a chair out of the audience and whack me over the head with it.
• Then Porter tags Foo and lays the boots to me.
• Butch, being a little dim, will try that turnbuckle thing again, but this time, Foo grabs him and whips him around the ring, clobbering all of us.

It always ends up in heaps of laughter, several times a day. We’d all take bullets for each other, and of course, we never speak like that to people whom we don’t have 30+ years of history, camaraderie, laughter, tears, and brotherhood, though Porter keeps trying.

I have visions of the lot of us in our 80’s, sitting on the veranda of a nursing home. I’m the one with a full head of hair, and we’re hollering at each other, hiding each other’s dentures and ointments, making life difficult for the staff, and laughing uproariously about things we did 70 years earlier.”

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