Has anybody seen the Jorgensons on the course?

These warm, humid days of June remind me of the evening I was standing in line with my fellow Grade 8 grads of St. Paul’s when one of our golf group rode his bike up to where we were standing and let me know that my friend had just shot 78. It was shared with such enthusiasm and warning that I felt it was somehow a message to me that I wasn’t the only one of us ‘going low’ these days and that I better get my act together.

One of my best friends back in those days (we’ll call him Jack) was the central figure in a story about breaking 80 for the first time that, to this day, causes us to laugh until we cry.

There was a code back then as to what kind of a milestone round actually counted. You couldn’t have been playing by yourself, and it also couldn’t have been one of those rounds where you headed out, played a couple holes and returned to start over because you didn’t like the numbers on your card.

Jack announced to us one day that he had finally shot 79. The big round had happened a couple days ago. We all looked at each other.

None of us had played the afternoon that Jack was talking about so we asked who he had played with, expecting to hear the name of some older junior golfers, or one of a handful of guys in their twenties who didn’t mind playing with young teenagers like us.

Jack had a strange answer; something we weren’t expecting. “I was with myself and I hooked up with an older couple. They were in their 7’s. I think their last name was Jorgenson.”

At the time I was employed by our head pro in the club storage area and I quite literally knew the names of every single member of our club. Jack had picked the wrong guy to try and slide one by. “Jorgenson? Are you sure that was their name?” He countered with a pretty lame “Yeah I think so. Something like that.”

I wouldn’t let it go, “what did they look like?” I asked him, like I was some smartass prosecutor leading him like a lamb to the slaughter. “I don’t know. They were old. Grey hair. He was pretty tall.”

In my mind I am going through every single senior golfing couple who plays on a Tuesday afternoon, the day in question.

I’m eliminating women who were 9-hole ladies because they had their league on Tuesday morning. It must have been an 18-hole lady playing with her husband.

But there were no last names in the roster even close to Jorgenson. I later checked the tee time book and saw nothing that helped.

We eventually stopped talking about it. Jack knew we were doubters. He felt OK with letting it die. And so did we. We had all moved on to the next milestone. A couple years later he came clean and admitted that while he did play well that day, his real score was more like 81 or 82 but that the Jorgensons really did exist, and had given him a few putts and signed his card. I admired him for coming clean all on his own.

To this day, when Jack talks about playing well I ask him if he was playing with the Jorgensons.

It instantly causes us both to laugh. And usually ends with him saying, “You’re brutal!” What goes around comes around.

Especially in golf.