What a muck-up!

By John Olesky,

former Beacon Journal Television Editor

Well, it turns out The Back Nine From Hell at Brandywine in Peninsula has some competition from #9 on the front nine.

Tom Stone, brother of the woman I love and have lived with for 13 years, Paula Stone Tucker, and I were on #9 tee. In front of us is the pond that is far below the tee in altitude and between the tee and #9 green.

I hit my drive that didn’t quite clear the water on the fly. But my orange ball with “WVU” and “John Olesky” on it (I have about 800 of those) hit the water and plopped onto the far shore, about one foot beyond the water.

When Tom and I drove our golf cart between the green and the pond, I walked toward the orange ball … and sank into a black, mucky, suction/vacuum equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles that once trapped mastadons, relatives of the elephant, to death.

There I was, a modern mastodon, my legs sunk 17 inches deep into the black, sucking muck.

It took three Brandywine employees, a metal extension ladder placed flat on the ground and a 3 x 10 foot flat board and about 30 minutes of rescue work, directed by me, to extricate me from the trouble I got myself into.

The problem was that the black muck had trapped my feet in my golf shoes, so you couldn’t just pull me out without causing me a lot of pain and permanent damage.

The rescuers and I had to dig up around my two legs all the muck that was within a 2-foot diameter and 20-inch deep hole (to get under my feet).

As the rescuers dug close to my feet, following my directions, and I could feel how close their shovel/spade was to my body, then I would take the spade from their hands and finish extricating my leg by digging myself out.

When we got one foot and the left leg free, I put that foot on the rung of the metal ladder that was lying flat on the ground, so that it wouldn’t sink back into the black, mucky yuck. That was my left leg.

Then we extricated my right foot.

Part of the problem was that I was facing #9 tee and the water, and my back was to my rescuers. If they tried to yank me out they would twist my body and cause damage to it.

Once we got my second, right leg free, I plunked my butt on the board and scooted toward the green. Then the rescuers lifted me to a standing position.

I had the extra problem of having a store-bought right knee, so we didn’t want to dislocate or damage that. Plus my Pacemaker was working overtime to keep my calm.

My stoic Mountaineer and Polish background also helped me stay cool and direct my rescue.

By the time I got home and stripped naked in the garage (with the door shut so I didn’t frighten the neighbors or the squirrels), my right knee was swollen, my right calf, back, right arm and right shoulder had been tweaked and were uncomfortable.

After the naked Mountaineer climbed to the second floor and into the shower, removing what mucky debris was left, only the right knee remained a problem.

I called Tom’s wife, Lorraine, who is a nurse and told her that I had pain pills left over from my nose excavation two months ago to remove cancer. She indicated it was OK to take one pain pill, which I did, and to put cold packs on my right knee for 20 minutes, which I did.

So now I have something else for our family lore, including the time that I rode my wagon off the bumpity reddog road and down into the ravine about 100 feet deep. Tom Retton, our Jackson Street neighbor across the ravine in Monongah, West Virginia, saw me as he was driving by. He went down, carried my lifeless body to our Thomas Street house, knocked on the door and, when my mother answered, said, “Here’s your son.”

That was one of several times that my mother fainted over her wayward son’s adventures.

Monongah residents were used to me going into that holler, as we called the ravine, because I did it with four or five different types of riding conveyances. I was so clumsy that my mother refused to let me have a bike. So I borrowed one from a friend and drove it into a truck, which caused its owner to come screaming at me because I scratched paint from off the truck. It was the equivalent of a deserved “Get off my lawn” episode.

Somehow, I managed to survive my childhood, despite 8 black eyes, one at a time except for a double black eye once, and never because I was fighting. Only because I was a klutz who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. A guy coming out of my Uncle Renzy Fazio’s grocery store once found me hanging upsidedown, holding onto the top railing, and my nose bleeding from hitting the bottom railing.

Just to make it interesting, I was hanging 10 feet above a concrete walkway. If I had let go, that would have been a fatal brain blitz.

I kept the whole town business trying to keep me from killing myself.

As for The Back Nine From Hell, Brandywine’s famous 9 holes where you stay in the narrow fairway or lose the ball or confront snakes, Tom and I combined for FIFTEEN lost golf balls, most of them by me. That’s a record because my daughter, LaQuita, and I lost only 9 golf balls on the first 7 holes for the previous high.

While I was stuck in the equivalent of the LaBrea Tar Pits, I was thinking: “Hell, my coal mining father was covered TWICE in cave-ins and rescuers had to go through 4 or more feet of coal to get to any part of his body, and he lived till black lung killed him in his 70s, so this is a piece of cake by comparison.”

I am eternally grateful to the Brandywine trio that my golfing partner at Sunny Hill (Kent) and Brookledge (Cuyahoga Falls),  Tom Stone, summoned. They did an excellent job of getting a mastodon who will 85 years old on November 5 extricated from some nasty, foot-sucking muck.

Thanks, guys.

I think I’ll wait a while before I play Brandywine again.

And I think I’ll let my golf ball stay stuck atop the black muck, rather try to go for it again.

After all, I have dozens more with “WVU” and “John Olesky” emblazoned on them.

All in all, it was a fun and interesting day.

  Photos by Tom Stone