Tree Golf

While I was working for Amdahl Corporation in Houston, there were a couple of hardware engineers who played a lot of golf. I never played regular golf with them so don’t really know how well they played but Marilyn and I did play tree golf with them in a company sponsored outing they organized.

Tree golf was supposedly their brilliant idea after one of their less than successful rounds of regular golf where they kept hitting their balls out of bounds into the trees. Their thought was that if they were going to be hitting their balls into trees, they might as well play where that was the purpose.

Tree golf’s rules were simple. In a section of woods, nine trees were marked one through nine. Each player was allowed to choose one club from their regular golf bag but that then became the only “stick” they could use for the whole game. The object was to hit each tree in order, counting the number of strokes.

In tree golf typically a lot of beer was consumed, which if truth be known is how I suspect the round of regular golf became the inspiration for tree golf. I don’t know how much beer Marilyn consumed but it may not have been that much because she couldn’t have taken that many sips and swing her stick as much as she did.

Yes, she won the duffer trophy. She was quite proud of it because she had worked so hard for it. I would have put it down to just being a good sport, which she was, but she kept that trophy around until we moved out of Houston. I can’t remember all of its adornment but I do remember the twigs that represented trees, the empty beer can, and a badly sliced golf ball, which would have been unusable anyway with the mounting nail through it.

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Marilyn lost her life to cancer but was able to truly "live" until the very end due to a lymphedema garment from Don Kellogg, inventor and founder of Telesto-Medtech. It is due to the "living" he provided Marilyn and through his suggestion and connection with Saskia Thiadens of the National Lymphedema Network that the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund exists. It needs other people's help to remain a living memorial of Marilyn. Please help other people receive the gift of living by donating to the Marilyn Westbrook Garment Fund. Thank you.