There are a lot of days on the sports calendar that I look forward to.
Super Bowl Sunday, Marathon Monday, Opening Days and of course, those first two Mondays in February. I’ve always thought that nothing can really top the Beanpot.
But now I’m starting to think there may be one day that can.
Mel’s Day.
It doesn’t bring the participants fame and fortune. It’s not a bloodthirsty competition. It only involves three people, and while it has a bit of a tradition now, we’re not talking 50 years.
It’s just me and two friends, Brett Winterson and Jeremy Parker, going to a place called Mel’s Tee-Off. We usually play two rounds of mini-golf, race once or twice on the go-kart track, take some swings in the batting cages and maybe even hit the video games up a bit.
I know, it’s not exactly a decathlon. And it certainly isn’t as if any one of us is physically exerting ourselves.
But if you look past the goofiness and grabass, it really is sports in a pure kind of form.
We start the day off with a round of mini-golf. Historically this has been a crapshoot, with any one of us capable of taking the first round, which is played on the difficult course. The one thing we can always count on is one of us really sucking. I mean, it is a guarantee that one of us will shoot about 20 over par every year, and every year it’s a different guy.
But the horrible play leads to some fun moments. This year, we spent about 30 minutes trying to recover a ball floating in the mini-pond that lies off of the lighthouse hole. We tried using rope, rigging up a hockey stick, all to no avail. Hell, we even tried throwing rocks at it to push it closer to the ‘shore.’ Never recovered that one.
I’m pretty sure I won the first round this year, but I’m really not positive. I do know that, as usual, it rocked.
We follow that round up by hitting up the go-karts. These aren’t any go-karts either. Each one is painted like a NASCAR driver’s car, which, in New Hampshire, has to be a pretty big draw. Not being NASCAR fans, the three of us usually look for either a car with a beer company’s logo, or a black car (since there are no pink cars).
Over the years, we’ve done a remarkably good job of turning the race into a subtle demolition derby. Despite the yearly warning that ‘if you bump another car, you’re out,’ we beat the crap out of each other. Crashes may attract fans to NASCAR, but they attract us to go-karts.
This year again was no exception, as one of us (it wasn’t me, hahahaha) spun out of a big collision and ended in the wall, meaning he had to sit there like a little kid and wait while one of the attendants faced his car the right way. Nothing is better than lapping your friend as you point and laugh at him, maybe even throwing in some big swerves to rub it in a little more.
From there we move from a couple video games to the batting cages and play another, just as fun, round of mini-golf.
Now I know all this seems not that exciting to you, or not that out of the ordinary. But by now, it’s tradition. We started this excursion in seventh grade. Since we were all in the band (Brett and Jeremy were/are good musically, I was a crappy drummer), we had to play at ninth grade graduation. We decided that the three of us, with a ride of course, would head to this Tee-Off place afterwards and just have a little fun. We had such a blast that day that we’ve done it ever since.
We did it on the same day the next year and the year after that, and it’s never stopped.
It’s a little different now. Brett and Jeremy live together in California, while I’m still holding down here on the East (a.k.a. the Best) Coast. Since we’ve left for college, we have had to change the schedule a little. Now, it’s not a beginning of the summer thing. Instead, when August rolls around, in the couple of days before the first one heads back to Cali, we head up to Litchfield. We don’t need a ride from one of our moms (or Jeremy’s older sister Jess) anymore. We may even need to take a day off from work. But nothing can stop the anticipation.
It’s sort of a walk in the past with two brothers.
Nick Cardamone, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly sports columnist for The Daily Free Press.