I haven’t had much of a chance to write anything recently because I’ve been too busy. In the last few weeks I’ve played in a golf competition, a park golf competition, a basketball competition and this week I’ve got a volleyball competition. I’ve had basketball training every weeknight for the past few weeks. I’ve also been writing two essays for uni, on top of my usual uni workload. Oh yeah, I’ve also been working. Busy, busy, busy….

The park golf tournament I played in was for the education staff in my town (teacher, principals, school staff, board of education staff). There were about 30 people in the competition. Park golf is a bit like a cross between real golf and mini golf. The rules are basically the same as golf, the holes are shorter (from about 35m to 100m), and you only use one club and a ball about the size of a baseball.

Here are some photos:













It’s a very popular sport for older people. You can get outside and have a nice walk, socialise with your friends and play a sport that isn’t very physically taxing. Last time I played was in a competition in Kushiro. There were about forty players, and I finished second. A few of the pros (you know, those guys that have the expensive clubs, all the best gear and accessories, play everyday) were a little annoyed that I showed up with no park golf experience and a borrowed club, and was still able to comfortably beat them. This time, I decided that I would aim for a mid-field finish. There was an individual competition and a team competition (average score from the four players in the team). I figured that the best plan would be to play well enough to help the team, but not well enough to take the individual glory.

Everything was going fine until about the eighth hole (a par for of about 65m). My team was pretty bad, so I easily had the best score, but it still wasn’t outstanding. I stood up to take my tee shot, aimed straight at the hole, smacked it beautifully and watched the ball cruise down the middle of the fairway, onto the green and straight into the hole. A hole in one. Whoops. Everyone around me was cheering and I was pretty happy too. A hole in one in park golf is not the same as a hole in one in real golf, but it’s still a pretty hard thing to do. I would say it’s like holing a fifty meter chip shot in real golf. It’s not easy, but its definitely possible. Anyway, this kind of ruined my plans of a midfield finish. I put in a fairly half-assed effort on the second nine, but still ended up finish fourth (only 3 shots behind the winner). My team finished sixth. At the after party and presentation, everyone was impressed my play (and, of course, my hole in one was the highlight of the tournament), but nobody seemed annoyed, so it worked out well in the end. Maybe next year I’ll actually try to win… heh heh heh.

Yesterday I played in a basketball tournament. It was a yearly tournament for public officials in two districts in Hokkaido (this means it was a pretty big event). There were proper referees, shot clocks, NBA rules, team managers and waterboys, the whole nine yards. My team finished first in B grade last year, so this year we were put in A grade. There is a massive difference between A grade and B grade. B grade is made up of mostly hacks who are there to have a good time. A grade is full of semi-pro teams, who train throughout the year, have coaches and managers and take basketball very seriously. Ou team plan was summed up nicely by our team captain’s pre-game speech. It went something like this, “Umm. It’s ok if we lose, because that means next year we’ll go back to B grade where we really belong. Go team!”. Inspirational stuff. It was a knockout competition, so if we lost the first game we were out (this was fine with everyone - the arena was in a town about 3 and a half hours drive from my town and nobody wanted to wake up early again the next day to drive there again). My team consisted of about 4 players who had played before, one player who was athletic but hadn’t really played, and two people who were strictly there to warm the bench. Considering the other team was full of regular players, we did a pretty good job. The final score was about 60-45 (we lost). Everyone enjoyed the game. Except for me, of course. About 2 minutes into the first quarter I pulled my left thigh muscle sprinting down the court, then about one minute after that I pulled the right one. I guess that’s what you get for not playing basketball for a long time, then trying to play at 100% from the start. Actually, I told a little lie. It was an enjoyable game, even though I couldn’t run and could barely jump for about 37 minutes of it. I scrapped my way to 18 points and took a nice charging foul (a Jenkins specialty, hah hah suckers!). Everyone (including the refs) were really surprised (and impressed). Actually, it was the only charge that I saw in four games played that day, and I have to say it’s much nicer taking a charge from a 60 kilo Japanese guy than a 100 kilo Aussie fatman. Overall, it was fun, and it was especially refreshing to play in a game where:

1) There were no abusive parents in the crowd shouting at the refs and the bench.
2) The refs were quiet, instead of acting like circus ringmasters.
3) None of the players criticised the referees (except me, once or twice, but I was shouting in English so nobody understood what I was saying anyway)
4) None of the players tried to start a fight

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sore today. Can hardly walk. My legs hurt. But this gave me some time to finish off one of my essays, a 3500 word research article critique. Some guy proposed the idea that children aged between 1 and 2 are predisposed to learn more nouns than verbs. I had to analyse a bunch of research papers that were written on the subject. It turns out that in some languages (such as Mandarin and Italian) kids actually learn more verbs than nouns in their early years. Exciting! Actually, I finished writing it last week but spent the last few days cutting it down from 6000 words (a task that really, really sucks). Now that its done, I can focus on getting better for my volleyball tournament this week (I don’t think it’ll happen, but we’ll wait and see).