There are all sorts of things I used to do, things I really enjoyed doing, that I never do anymore.
Yes, that too, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.
I used to love playing baseball. I never played on an organized team, but I was pretty good at bat and in the field. The last time I played was 30 years ago and before the game was over, I pulled both of my hamstrings.
The only real organized competition I did was in bowling leagues, which is sort of ironic. The first time I ever tried tenpins, I didn’t bowl my age — and I was 10. Eighteen gutter balls out of 20. I got better, though, and by my late 30s I had achieved averageness. I bowled in two different leagues, 1986 in St. Louis and 1987 in Colorado.
The St. Louis league was a thrill for me. It was the only league I ever participated in that didn’t provide handicap points for lesser bowlers. Each team was required to have one member with an average lower than 160. My average was 154, one pin less than the average adult male league bowler in the United States.
I had the same average a year later in Colorado, and I had an all-time best game of 222 with six strikes in a row. But that was the last year I bowled.
I started playing golf in my early 40s and shot 135 for 18 holes. Not quite as horrible as my first try bowling, but still pretty awful. My goal was to break 100, which I did before I turned 50. Then I learned that only 10 percent of casual golfers ever broke 90 and I actually did it by shooting 83 on a fairly tough course in California.
When we moved to Georgia in late 2010, we bought a house in a community built arounmd a golf course. It was an easier course than the ones I had been playing, but I played often enough to keep improving. My next goal was a lofty one — to break 80 — and I finally did that, shooting one round of three-over-par 75.
I had to stop playing about eight years ago, mostly because of problems with my lower back. In fact, there really isn’t anything athletic I can do anymore. As recently as four years ago, I was still walking five or six miles a day, very good exercise for a man n his 70s, but even that is past now.
Before the calendar turns over to 2027, I will be 77 years old. No longer an athlete, but hey, I have some wonderful memories.
I seem to recall playing a very random freeform pseudo-tennis in the street in front of your house in the mid-1960s. (Not my favorite sport: serious depth-perception issues). I was apparently way better at bowling than you were, but never got much below 90 at golf. But yeah, after decades of golf, bowling, and motorcycles, I’ve got bad rotator cuffs on both sides, not doing THAT again anytime soon. So it goes. Get all the walking in that you can, it helps a lot at this stage.