A Fish on the Golf Course of Life
Original absurd, satirical and funny fiction. Influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut, and Norm Macdonald (all lovers of SEO).
While waiting to buy an alcoholic slushie, Garth Lims practised his golf putt. He had just realised that next to him in line was Greg Norman, aka the Great White Shark, so he was trying to attract the sporting icon’s attention. Thus began, on the wild plains of a Las Vegas casino, the golfing form of a mating ritual.
For many Australian golf fans, meeting the Great White Shark is a religious experience, like a Christian meeting Jesus. The only difference is Jesus didn’t eagle the 18th at the ‘Blue Monster’ to win the Doral-Ryder Open in 1990. That Sunday, Jesus didn’t even make the cut. So any fan would have accepted Garth asking for a selfie or autograph, or gushing and confessing his love, but they don’t know Garth.
Garth Lims had an impressive job (the name of which escaped him). He had sky-dived, bedded plenty of women (five), and divorced (a ‘mutual decision’). He also hit a very crisp iron. The point is that Garth was his own man, accomplished in a hundred different ways. He was not about to ingratiate himself like some fanboy and be embarrassed before the Shark.
But the line progressed fast. A bachelorette party left the queue to take pics in the gaming pit where fortunes were made and lost. Garth was running out of time, so he abandoned the subtlety of the imaginary putter. It was time to dust off the imaginary driver with the GoldX400 iron shaft.
Garth told the man behind him to move and took a wide stance. The imaginary club’s takeaway was stable, but Garth forgot to account for the eleven alcoholic slushies he had already consumed. When the invisible clubhead reached the top of its orbit, Garth blacked out and awoke with his lips on the Great White Shark’s left shoe and his hairy (and exposed) arse twerked in the air like a good boy waiting to be spanked.
By most metrics the plan was a success. Greg Norman heaved the unsteady Garth Lims to his feet, picked up his hat and handed it back. He then asked if Garth was okay and waited for a response. Garth wobbled on his feet like a boxer after eleven alcoholic slushies. Now was his moment.
“You… you think you’re pretty damn good don’t you, Norman?” he said.
Norman tried to steady the drunk man, but Garth smacked his hand. The contact rang so loud that the departing bachelorette party turned to take immortal pics. A security guard stepped closer.
Norman then tried to calm the man, but Garth was so embarrassed he took every word as an insult. What followed was a cascade of thoughts in Garth’s mind common to many Australian men during an ego crisis, and within nanoseconds he was thinking of the ANZACs.
Garth’s mind was parachuted via a C17 to the Canberra War Memorial. There he gazed upon the Unknown Australian Soldier, the Eternal Flame. Greg Norman is no hero compared to the men and women who serve. A sand bunker is child’s play compared to the frontline. When Garth’s eyes opened again, he shook his patriotic head at all five to six blurry Greg Normans before him.
“Well… ‘Shark’,” he said, “The guns at Gallipoli would have chewed you up, mate.”
He wasn’t done. Garth then saluted the ANZACs and mouth-trumpeted The Last Post.
And that first major fifth pierced the sound of coins clinking in the trays and rose above the nearby nightclub’s thumping bass and bounced off the giant breasts of the bride-to-be. It was a beautiful moment in that city of perpetual sin. Unfortunately, the moment was cut short by Garth sobering up enough to realise that this man was not Greg Norman and probably never was.
A reliable refuge for Garth during times of excess intoxication has always been the blackjack table. A fact no one knows - not even Garth himself - is that he has never lost blackjack. The odd hand drops here and there, of course, but the ledger, as if subject to some strange gravitational pull, inevitably orbits back to green. It’s one of the universe’s many inexplicable oddities.
For the next hour, Garth sat at a higher stakes table tossing chips like they were chunks of bread to ducks by a pond. He gave no thought to the dealer, the cards, the other gamblers. The game played itself while Garth, drinking bourbon now, glared two tables away at that fake Greg Norman.
This loser was an imposter. The iconic Greg Norman white-blonde hair: it was a wig. The branded Great White Shark hat, polo shirt and shoes - the shoe Garth kissed - were fake. Garth felt a surge of resentment in his gut as he relived this deception. His jaw clenched so hard a filling popped.
But a hand gripped Garth’s shoulder from behind so hard that it cut his ruminating seconds before Garth realised he may bear some fault for being deceived. Yes, the costume was near perfect and the wig looked real but come on… Greg Norman is close to seventy years old; this man is no more than twenty-five. Greg Norman is lean, yet this man is morbidly obese. Finally, and this speaks to Garth Lims’ consumption, Greg Norman is white...
“Howdy Partner,” said the man who grabbed Garth’s shoulder.
If that man had only waited a mere sixty seconds then a lot would be different. Sixty seconds and Garth sees the imposter’s obvious differences and with it his own folly. The resentment vanishes. Sixty seconds and Garth remembers who he is. He chuckles, apologises to the young man. Sixty seconds and he quits drinking, signs a petition to stop seal-clubbing, gives a kidney to charity in an envelope. Sixty seconds: something the universe never gives a man like Garth Lims.
“This table hotter than a two-dollar pistol or colder than my ex-wife?” asked the man.
Garth turned like a carnival clown, enabling the man to gaze upon his bloated face. Drool skied down Garth’s chin. His eyes, half closed, blinked in odd patterns as though his eyelids were curtains operated by tiny Garths signalling in morse code for help.
“Whoa, someone’s having fun.” The man grabbed his friend. “Bert, check out this guy.”
A second man appeared to the right of the first. Garth wiped the drool and tried to focus.
Both men had the same white-blonde hair, the Great White Shark polo, the branded watch. The man closest had the reddish-lobster skin, but he was only five foot three, barely taller than Garth who was sitting. These men held their wide brim hats before them like sheets in a police lineup, with Garth, safe behind the glass of his own intoxication, trying to pin what was going on and who to blame.
The answer was less mysterious than he might have guessed: Las Vegas was home to the annual Greg Norman Impersonator Invitational. This golf tournament is the biggest annual event for Greg Norman impersonators, with tips, prize money, and side-gigs (party appearances, stripping for the younger impersonators), making up more than half of most impersonator’s salaries. Posters outlining ticket and meal prices and shuttle bus options littered the casino. Garth had seen these posters. These men were impersonators, not imposters.
Staring at the two men, Garth soon caught on. He said, “Listen… Norman.” Okay, maybe Garth didn’t catch on. “You wouldn’t last one minute on the Kokoda Trail, not one minute.”
The closer man asked if that was the case. It was, Garth said, so the man broke Garth’s nose with his spray-tanned forehead. As Garth slipped from the chair, the man caught his shirt collar and held him up. He struck Garth on the left cheek, temple and jaw so many times his hand went bust.
This both short and short-tempered man was American, so he was unfamiliar with Australian World War Two campaigns. That’s why he misinterpreted Garth’s Kokoda Trail reference. That’s why, when he was wrestled away by four other impersonators, he kept shouting, fainter and fainter as he was dragged to the exit, that his wife loved the Kokoda Trail, that he took her there every night for hours, and that, if anything, she was too quick for him.
Garth missed the explanation. He was busy lying unconscious, blood pooling on the green felt next to the giant stack of black chips.
And while unconscious, Garth Lims paid a quick visit to the spirit realm.
There, in this desolate void with no horizons, sky or ground, he screamed but there was no sound. The void itself squeezed his now bald and slimy head, like a suffocating garbage bag. The universe had shrunk to his own doomed skin, which was all he had. But then, in the distance, a giant emerged. This towering figure approached to cast its judgement and give Garth’s soul a purge.
For millennia, human mythology has referenced this giant. It is depicted in caves in Australia’s Tanami desert. There, 45,000-year-old ochre and kaolin clay paintings depict a giant casting judgement with a ‘footed-spear’. On the other side of the world, Inkan ruins of mossed stone show the same figure. Julius Caesar’s journals include descriptions of the giant’s wrath, while Plato claimed the giant used a ‘vine-staff’ (what the Aboriginals called a ‘footed-spear’) to strike entire worlds into oblivion, thus creating the sparkling night sky: each strike a failed world, a practice. To the Celtic Pagans, however, the giant would soon return to our realm to cast its final judgement.
The Celtic Pagans believed the giant would return when the constellation Pakicetus reigned on ‘the darkest night’. The prevailing theory among astronomers is that the Celts were referring to Stonehenge (a famous astronomical marker) on the winter solstice. The theory was tested.
Viewed from the Heel Stone (Stone 96) on the shortest night of the year, Pakicetus is visible, though not via a straight line. Astronomers fixed the constellation at the apex of a parabola using a forty-five-degree loft (roughly a pitching wedge). They then applied modern astrometrics to rewind or fast-forward the night sky to determine the date of the Heel Stone and Pakicetus’s peak alignment - when the Celt’s expected the giant’s return. The answer was the 4th of March 1990.
On that night, the constellation Pakicetus, which is the name of the ancestor to the modern blue whale, was most aligned. That was also the day Greg Norman won the Doral-Ryder Open at a course known as the ‘Blue Monster’ (aka blue whale, aka Pakicetus). What’s more, Norman won with a twenty-two-foot chip - twenty-two being the number of stars in the constellation. The Celtic Pagans would therefore argue that this giant walks among us. So, like, it’s time to wake up, people....
On his hotel room floor, Garth’s eyes sprung open. His heart pounded so hard his ribs felt like they might bend or snap. Then he propped up on an elbow, coughed up blood and collapsed.
In the dream, the end of the giant's spear (or staff) was longer than Garth’s entire body. Its surface felt like a cold mortuary slab. Standing nearby in the void was everyone Garth had known or loved. He feared their disappointment and judgement too but was not at all prepared for their deep indifference. He awoke the moment he was crushed and forgotten, turned into a star in a cloud.
In the hotel room, his clothes were hanging from the curtain rod. The polo shirt, tan slacks, underwear and two socks were all ironed and on separate hangers. He rose unsteady to his feet and recalled - what felt like ten minutes ago - organising his Sunday best. He was so excited, so how did he get here? Garth stepped forward into his own vomit on the carpet. He cut cheek throbbed. Then, in the corner, he eyed his golf clubs. If there was anything left in him to break, it broke then.
Outside, the sky was dark. The Greg Norman Invitational, which Garth now recalled was the purpose of his Las Vegas trip, was still hours away. He could wash, rehydrate, sleep a few hours, but why bother? Why not let this be the time? No one will notice a missing impersonator. Just give up…
So Garth showered, changed into a plush dressing gown and collapsed on the bed. The air conditioning was set to full. The cool air kissed his face as he switched on the television, and the screen filled with blue, open ocean, waves tapping a white boat in the rhythm of home, of the womb.
The show was called Nothing is Reel. Garth had selected a channel at random, and the fact he found an Australian fishing show at this time of night in America seemed like a sign.
The title text swam off screen like a fish and the shot cut from the water to the host.
Greg Stingers, the host, wore a hooded singlet of reflective green common to competitive fishing shirts. His muscular arms were basically sleeved though, given the thickness of hair that ran uninterrupted from his palms to his neck. The hair was sandy white, bleached by decades of sun and salt.
“G’day mates,” he said. “I’m your bloody host, Stinga. But nuff-a-that, let’s go fishing.” He cast the line with a maestro’s deftness and force. “I love it out here,” he added, more than once…
It was not long before a mosquito zing came from Stinga’s rod. The host of Nothing is Reel announced that a little something-something had taken the bait, and the fight commenced.
The rod-tip arched like a cobra as Stinga leaned back to pull and tire the catch. Then he caved forward and twisted the handle so fast his fist blurred. As the line shortened, the catch became more defiant as if it knew its fate, understood the stakes. The epic fight bled into the ad break and lasted until, with one mighty pull, Stinga dragged in the biggest snapper he had ever seen.
Next to the flapping snapper, the host heaved from the effort. The cameraman zoomed in on Stinga’s face. Stinga laughed a good clean laugh, wiped away sweat with his own hairy arm.
“Now that's what I call a fish,” he said.
The catch managed to cheer Garth up a little, enough to turn and see the sun rising yet still believe that whatever was coming next would not be too painful or would at least quickly end. But then he saw the smile vanish from Stinga’s brick face.
“Ah shit,” said Stinga, peering out to sea. “I shouldn’t have said that. Listen, I acknowledge this,” he pointed at the snapper, “is not what everyone would call a ‘fish’. ‘Fish’ is a subjective term.”
Stinga, host of the postmodern fishing show Nothing is Reel, apologised to those who would not define what he defined as a fish as a fish but, figuring they wouldn’t be appeased, he kept going, explaining how he didn’t mean to cause offence by calling what he called a fish a fish and that all definitions of fish should be accepted, just not his (of course), and that what sits outside ‘The Fish’ defines the fish-discourse and those who control the fish-discourse create the truth of fish (power equals knowledge). Anything could be a fish, really. He quoted Foucault - a lot - and this was how the pilot episode of Nothing is Reel continued until the host, now in tears, stared out to what he called the sea on what most would concede was the most beautiful day ever.
“What is a fish?” he asked. Stinga was more exasperated than the snapper on the boat floor. “What even is a fish anymore?” he continued. “Am I… a fish?”
Maybe a postmodern fishing show was a bad pitch. They were in it now though, so the cameraman held the shot steady against the rocking boat. Stinga stared down the lens.
“I used to fucking love it out here,” he said. Stinga had piercing blue eyes, eyes that one balmy night helped him lose his virginity, eyes that rescued him from trouble more than once, eyes of the world, eyes made of the ingredients of this world: the same stuff as the stars in the night sky.
“I used to fucking love it out here… love it.”
Stinga dived into the water and swam away. The screen went dark. A black and white memorial photo of Greg ‘Stinga’ Stingers (1968-2023) appeared. Amazing Grace played, sung, as per Stinga’s written will, by one of those wall-mounted Billy Bass ‘fish’.
By this point, Garth was kneeling before the television with his palm on the screen. Tears fell uninterrupted. After the credits the screen died, and in that darkness, Garth saw his own reflection.
His face was bloated, swollen, drooping and cut. Like caked makeup, he wore the ugliness of his soul. He ran a hand over his crown. His hair once grew wavy, the colour of fire, of life, but had since receded and endured chemical death from the constant dye. He now wore it off-white, cut to the style of the latest public image of Greg Norman. Daily he hunted the Woolworths, the Women’s Weekly for new photos of Greg, all to wear another man’s face, yet there was his own staring back.
“Maybe I’m just a fish,” he muttered. “Maybe I’m just a fish on the golf course of life.”
The screen came alive with an ad for a legal firm specialising in workplace lawsuits. The bright colours and screaming lawyer stole Garth’s attention enough to stop him pondering the stupidity of his previous remark. Sixty seconds: sixty seconds was all he needed, and all he never got.
The woman, inches from Garth’s face, asked if he had ever suffered a workplace injury. Garth screwed his body until his golf clubs came into view. The woman said workplace injuries can be fatal.
“I’m just a fish on the golf course of life, nothing more, and I never will be.”
In the legal advertisement’s glow, Garth offered a deathrow smile and got dressed to play.
The Desert Marvel golf course was home to the twelfth annual Greg Norman Impersonator Invitational. The Marvel is a pristine 18-hole course right outside Las Vegas. To the South is the Mojave National Preserve with its famous Joshua trees. To the East, the Grand Canyon. Entry for the day is $50 USD. For that you get two drinks, seating, and access to the cardboard photo op. Why not place your head on the cardboard body and take a snap arm-in-arm with the real Great White Shark?
Broadcasting the event was KTNV Las Vegas. They interviewed excited (drunk) spectators and filmed the competitors entering the clubhouse, inside which dozens of Greg Normans moved about in different states of undress.
The clatter of golf spikes and velcro rips reigned as the competitors in the locker room tried to psyche each other out. Nothing was off limits. The impersonator with the biggest penis stalked like a cheetah in his hat, sunglasses, shirt, watch, glove, socks and spikes but no pants or underwear. Like a windmill he spun his cock to put the others off, but it backfired. When it was time to dress, his spikes tore his pants to shreds and he was disqualified for not meeting the dress code.
Aside from the giant-penised Greg Norman impersonator who was disqualified for the third straight year, there were other aggressive operators.
While Garth sat with an odd smile and hands in his lap like an off-duty monk, a man he had never met stomped over and shoved his torso into the locker room wall. The attack brought to mind the giant in Garth’s dream and the final (deserved) judgement and Stinga swimming out to sea.
“Just so you know,” said the attacker, “I took my wife to the Kokoda Trail for four long, sweaty hours last night. And after, well, I called her premature. What do you have to say about that?”
Garth was sure he had never met this man, yet he felt unbounded empathy towards him. The realisation of his own spiritual growth caused Garth to stand up and hug his attacker. He held the tiny stranger tight against his chest and whispered, “I think we are all just fish on the golf course of life.”
The impersonators teed off in fours and soon Garth’s group was at the first tee. The first hole was a long par four lined with palm and Joshua trees. Horseshoe bunkers hugge the 200, pothole bunkers were a threat at the 300, and sandtraps either side of the slanted green made the approach a round-maker or round-breaker. This is where Greg Normans come to die.
“And now, at the first tee,” called the announcer, already bored, “it’s Greg Norman.”
Those in the metal bleachers clapped and cheered in chorus. Some had novelty beer cups between their legs as they hollered, and these cups were covered in little Greg Norman facts. Greg Norman is Australian, for example, or Greg Norman is the reincarnation of an ancient Celtic god here to judge the unworthy. Another one was: Greg Norman likes eggs (these facts were not checked).
By the time it was Garth’s shot, three white dots coloured the fairway: three easy approaches for three golfers, more relieved than happy. Again, the announcer called Greg Norman to the tee.
Garth stood next to the tee marker leaning on his driver. He was thinking of the first time he ever hit a golf ball. His father had taken him to the park with a bucket of stained balls. He didn’t like to walk, so Garth was told to tee off near the car. It didn’t matter there were houses that direction because Garth was rake-thin and the houses were like teeth in the distance. But that first shot (ever) Garth crunched it beyond the first row of houses. A window shattered so he and his father fled.
At the Desert Marvel, Garth stabbed the tee in the soft grass and stared beyond the fairway to the desert and all of time. This would be the first shot in a new life.
But golf is a strange sport. It requires one hundred percent focus for distilled moments. Your performance - your fate - is made or ruined between thoughts and only understandable afterwards, in analysis. Golf is thus less like an endurance race or game of chess and more like Russian roulette. Garth was familiar with this notion (the analogy was his own), and indeed, when he adopted that wide stance, his mind cleared. There was now no room for thoughts of fish or life or the past.
Garth’s swing was fast, his contact clean. The crowd watched the ball fly.
The force generated by the rotation of a golf club is a thing to behold. Enough force is created not only to carry the dimpled ball hundreds of yards but also to shatter into dust every mistake you’ve ever made. One good connection and the world becomes free of pain, and you - that hell-bound soul - are similarly freed. That’s golf. That’s just a single good strike, and they come around from time to time, often enough, in fact, to sustain the most fickle forms of life.
Garth’s strike went four-ten. The ball dribbled onto the slanted green, slowed and began orbiting the hole. People in the stands rose to their feet. They shielded their brows and watched the circling white dot aided, much like the stars once struck at the driving range of the gods, by gravity.
And Garth, frozen in his follow-through, completed yet another of his own regular gravitational orbits. The ball inched closer and Garth recalled (for today) that he was not just some fish in the whatever-he-had-said, nor was he just a Greg Norman impersonator. No, he was the great grandson of a fucking ANZAC and the greatest golfer of all time. He was Garth ‘Limsy’ Lims.
Profitron contains absurd, satirical and funny short fiction and prose. Literary influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut and Norm Macdonald. That’s all we have time for, folks.
I enjoyed this Luke. Have you thought about submitting to a golfing magazine? Or something like Esquire perhaps?