Course report from Lakewood King, WA. Aug 3rd, 1998.

Through a freak of traffic patterns and compulsive driving, I arrived at Lakewood King disc golf course yesterday afternoon shortly after landing at the airport.

It's an 18 hole course on a city park. The park has a couple of ponds that are never factors in the course, and is as well groomed as the Lombard 9, with more trees. The course is really hilly - much more than anything we play - and that turns out to be a significant factor in playing. Lots of the baskets are on the ridge of a hill. Miss an easy shot and all of a sudden you're 40 feet away. I would guess that if this course were as close as Joliet, we'd be really torn as to which to go to on Saturday mornings.

It took me a while to find hole 1. Once I did, I ran into a group of 5 folks who invited me to play with them. They teed off, they weren't too impressive. The hole was on the slant of a hill (surprisingly tough to get used to), so I went a bit high. The wind picked up my disc, it curved around behind a tree, and one of the guys said "dude, you went over the fence".

Fence?

I made my way down, back around the trees, and found an incredibly overgrown lot full of old cars covered with thorn bushes. My disc was nowhere to be seen. I was doomed, because it was the only driver I brought with me, and I really wanted to keep playing. So I climbed the fence and started hunting around. No luck. The rest of my group left, and I kept hunting. It was a pretty surreal experience - towards the front of the yard, there was a lot of noise from the residents, and I was trying to avoid being noticed while crawling around old trailers and getting thorns stuck in my shoes. After about 20 minutes, I had found nothing and gave up. I went back to the course, thought about where my disc had really gone, went back, climbed the fence, and searched much farther out, and promptly found a black cyclone, a white polaris, a yellow jaguar, and my driver. Neat.

I go back, replay hole 1, no fence involved, and attempt to find hole 2. Weird, can't find the tee, but I can see the basket. I ask some guys in the parking lot who are just finishing up, and one of them invites me to play along with him as he's up for another round. Cool.

I replay hole 1 again. No fence. We move on to hole 2, turns out that the tee is part of the parking lot, painted onto the curb. Yeah right.

So, anyway, we played the 18 holes. I threw fairly badly, not unusual for a new course, and hills were tricky, and ended up with a 69. No more lost discs, no major snafus. Lots of insight about how to play hills, due mostly to mistakes. Very very bad putting. We passed my earlier group somewhere around hole 15, neener neener.

One very interesting note - the guy I played with turns out to be one of the lead designers at Wizards of the Coast. He's the guy behind slivers,licids, and the en-kor. So that was very cool. I'm meeting him tonight at Wizards after the conference, and we're off to play some other course.

-r'm