What is your worst golfing experience?

The Masters are this weekend, so everyone’s telling golf stories. However: The only good golf stories are bad golf stories. No one wants to hear about that time you eagled on the 12th hole and then had a pleasant lunch after the 18th. There is nothing interesting about finishing a round with more balls than you started. Find me a human who wants to be regaled with tales of how you got your handicap so low, and I’ll show you a country club that lets you in without a shirt or shoes.

You know what people do want to hear? Stories about that time you drove the golf cart into the lake, or when your uncle accidentally hit your cousin in the butt with a golf ball on the fairway, or when you swung a golf club like a baseball bat.

To get things going, the SB Nation staff is going to tell you the worst things we’ve ever done on golf courses. Please tell us about your bad (and funny) golfing experiences in the comments after this article. We want to know everything.

I took golf lessons in middle school, there was a boy I liked in my class, and we were playing for real for the first time. We were walking and I tripped and fell down in front of him, and, coincidentally, I took up tennis and never played golf again.

My dad loves golf more than he loves his family, presumably. He forced me and my sister to take golf lessons after school when we were very young. One time my mom was driving us to the course while I was in kindergarten and I got in a fight with my sister because we were both cranky and didn’t want to go to golf lessons. Like, we really hated golf lessons. It got so heated that I scratched my sister across the face and left a permanent scar under her eye. It was traumatic for all parties involved ... the blood ... so much blood.

So I need a crude diagram for this.

This was on the 18th hole of Reasonably Priced Southern California Golf Course Because Hell No We’re Not Taking You To Something Nice And You Can Only Have ONE Hot Dog Pines. My younger brother is maybe like 130 yards off the green in the middle of the fairway. My father is standing parallel to the ball with a golf cart in between them.

Anyways, my brother just skulls the hell out of an eightf iron or whatever, and the ball takes the strangest physical route I’ve ever seen. It goes forward for 10 yards or so ... and then it BOOMERANGS AROUND THE GOLF CART AND HITS MY DAD SQUARE IN THE FACE.

The 10 yards is important, because it gave my dad enough time to see the ball and duck. “But the ball still hit him,” you say. Yes, but only in the nose. If he hadn’t ducked, we’re pretty sure it would have hit him straight in the throat (possible death) or mouth (assured dental nightmare).

We didn’t wind up finishing the round.

I also made a crude diagram for this:

My family was up in Maine on a summer vacation when I was 8 years old, and it rained — we’re talking torrential downpours — for 10 days straight. My parents, aunts, and uncles exhausted every indoor activity they could think of (we even knit potholders???) to keep me and my cousins from driving them to the brink of madness, but by day eight, my dad couldn’t take it anymore. He was like, “Screw the rain, I’m taking the whole family golfing anyway.”

The weather was so bad that the country club was closed, so my dad had to sneak us onto the golf course. We took off our shoes and essentially turned the fairway into a slip n’ slide, reveling in that specific kind of fun that comes from doing something reckless and prohibited. It’s a feeling which, as a child, is made even more exhilarating when it’s sanctioned by an authority figure. In short: Watching your dad break the rules is a total rush.

So we’re on the fairway at the third, living our best lives, when my uncle hits the ball as hard as he can with a seven iron and absolutely DRILLS my 8-year-old cousin, his son, square in the butt with a golf ball. My uncle must’ve sliced it way worse than he was expecting to, because my cousin wasn’t even really in front of him at all. But somehow the ball nailed him and he jumped five feet into the air. It’s one of my earliest memories of knowing I shouldn’t be laughing so hard and having zero power to stop myself.

Anyway, pretty sure my dad got super yelled at when the club’s management found out what we’d done, but they didn’t kick us out as members. My cousin had a big-ass ass bruise for a while, but that soon faded. So, ultimately, the only consequence was that now we have the story of That Time My Uncle Hit My Cousin in the Butt with a Golf Ball and We Almost Got Kicked Out of the Country Club But Didn’t.

A Wilder family classic.

I played golf in high school for one of the worst teams Rhode Island had to offer. The silver lining was we got to play some of the state’s nicest courses — but since they only begrudgingly let us poor folk step foot on their property, it meant we had to play 100 percent on their terms. Which means that when a hail/thunderstorm drowned Warwick Country Club for several hours back in 2002, we had no choice but to play out our round or risk never coming back.

This would have been challenging in any gear, let alone the polo shirt and shorts I’d worn since I was convinced the match would be canceled. I shivered through nine holes of some of the worst golf known to man, at two different points accidentally launching clubs into water hazards since it was too damn wet to get a solid grip on anything. We lost both our matches that day, a fate made even worse when we found out one of our players was extremely academically ineligible and we would have had to forfeit, no matter what.

My buddy is getting married at that country club this summer. If I have time, I might wade into the hazard on the ninth hole and see if I can find my dang five wood.

I’m in my 20s and have never had a driver’s license, but I have driven twice. The first time was in college, because I was the only one who could buy beer at the drive-through liquor store. The second time was in California, when my cousin dared us to race golf carts on one of the big highways in Palm Desert. I almost got t-boned by a semi running a red light, and saw the golf cart crumple before my eyes, a la Car Boys. I am never getting in a golf cart ever again.

Oh, I also went to the driving range once, but that was mostly pleasant, if not a little boring.

I attended a middle class elementary school which had a golf unit. In it, I discovered I was a fairly proficient golfer. Who knew?

Midway through an exhibition of long ball prowess with the other best golfer in the class, we began an informal contest to determine who was the best at driving the ball the farthest.

After I hit my shot — a pretty impressive drive in fairness — I stepped aside to let my counterpart give it his all. “Hit it hard!” I yelled. He did. With the followthrough proceeding to hit me square in the forehead. Evidently in awe of my own long shot ability, I’d failed to give my rival the appropriate room to hit his shot.

I took a few steps back after stumbling. Immediately covered my forehead. I walked woozily over to our instructor and told her I had a headache. She asked me to move my hand. She saw my skull and fainted.

A few staples in the head later, I was good as new. But I was never competent at golf ever again. You win some, you lose some.

I haven’t always demonstrated pinpoint accuracy off the tee box. Some years ago, I must’ve had a lot of pent-up rage because I took a huge, coiling backswing and just focused on smacking the chocolate out of a golf ball. I wasn’t thinking at all about form, control, or fluidity. I just wanted to hit it far.

I hit a ground ball off the tee that bounced off one of the tee markers in front of me, shot back at me, and hit me in the cheek. The grooves in the ball were imprinted on my face for several hours that day. Couldn’t do it again if I tried.

I’ve only been golfing once. I will only go golfing once. One attempt at playing golf was enough for me to say “Huh, maybe no more golf?” the same way I don’t ski anymore because of the trauma 900 splits while falling on skis does to a husky gentleman’s frame — but that’s another story.

My college roommate was outraged that I’d never played golf before, so he immediately made us plans to play the local public course. I asked him what I needed and he said, “Nothing special,” convincing me we could just rent whatever he needed. I rock up to the course in jeans, a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, and carrying a case of Beast Ice.

I rented what I needed, and things were fine — until around the fourth hole I noticed my hands were starting to hurt. Like really hurt. Unusually hurt. I hadn’t held a golf club until that day, so I stare at my hands and all the skin is puffy and blistered and horrible. I didn’t know gloves are a semi-important thing, especially when you can’t hold a club right.

Afraid I’d let my roommate down I kept drinking and played through the pain. By the 11th the blisters that had formed has burst, all the skin was gone from my hands and they hurt so badly it reminded me of those mini-games in Mario Party where you had to rotate the N64 stick until they took the skin off your hands.

For the next week I had to wear surgical gloves at work and bandage myself up the best I could. I also crashed a golf cart into a tree and went to relieve myself in a tree stand before realizing a green was on the other side and some Japanese businessmen were not happy to see me.

The first time I golfed, I was 25. I’m not athletic, I have terrible muscle memory, and golf is quite possibly the worst possible sport for me. I’m better at arm wrestling, even though my arms look like God took a Funyun and split in half.

I married into a golf family, though, so I knew I had to learn fast, which meant spending a little time at the driving range. If you’ve never swung and missed completely at a dozen straight golf balls at a driving range with everyone side-eying you and giggling, I recommend it. Builds character.

During one of these sad trips, I got so frustrated, I gripped the driver like a baseball bat and swung it the same way. POW. it sailed 250 yards, but it had a nasty, wicked slice. So I turned my body to the left, as if I were trying to hit it into the driving range parking lot. POW. Same thing, except the slice took it right back where the fairway would have been. Three more times. POW piff POW. Don’t know what happened to the second one, but I had two drives out of three that were just about the best drives of my life.

I had figured out the secret of golf. Just do what you’re comfortable with. I could at least fake a decent baseball swing after 5,000 hours of practice in that sport. It doesn’t make a difference if the ball is almost on the ground instead of at your belt.

Now I had driving-range swagger. Teed up the sixth drive in my baseball-grip experiment, and POW CLANG SHIT OH GOD BLOOD BLOOD EVERYWHERE wait, no, I’m not bleeding, but the ball did hit off the bottom wall of my little driving-range cubicle and ricocheted right into my damned face. It felt like there should have been blood everywhere.

I will always love and respect the person who asked me if I was okay without laughing. I walked around, dazed, pride hurting as much as my cheekbone, before packing my crap and leaving in disgrace.

That was the last time I swung a golf club like a baseball bat.