Andy's Snowman

It was an elevated tee box.  The kind that has stairs leading up to it.  
And those stairs had railings on the side of them. 
Probably was some kind of safety issue that some NYS bureaucrat insisted upon.

The tees were all the way in the back of the box.
It was a 384 yard par 4.
 
At the front of the tee box, on each side, were two of those plastic containers 
that hold the sand/grass seed mixture that you're supposed to use to fill your divots.  
What were they doing on a par 4, anyway?
But I digress ...
 
I was a little quick on my first tee shot and cranked the ball directly left at 
about a 60 degree angle from my target line into a whole bunch of prickly bushes 
alongside the tee box.  So I dropped two and re-teed three. 

Hey, nobody's perfect.
 
My second tee shot (3 if you're counting, Jack), was a classic clothes-line-rope 
that had tremendous velocity off the club-head and probably would have travelled 
over 250 yards over the crest of the fairway sloping upwards in front of us.

Probably.

But remember those plastic things somebody had misplaced at the front of the tee box? 
I hit one squarely as the trajectory hadn't quite risen  to proper height yet, and 
the ball bounced backwards to the left, alongside the steps to the tee box, nearer 
to the back of the tee box.
 
Facing a daunting, steep side-hill lie now, I elected a hybrid club for my next shot, 
number 4.
 
Unfortunately, the safety rails alongside the stairs blocked what certainly would 
have been a great recovery at that point, possibly leaving me with a miracle double 
bogey finish. The ball caromed skywards, nearly directly up, but the overspin took 
it left and into those prickly bushes again.
 
I elected to continue playing the hybrid as I dropped 5 alongside those bushes 
(no nearer the hole) and settled in to play my sixth shot.
 
This is when I had some bad luck.
             
Squarely contacting the ball, I followed through beautifully but, as was the 
rub-of-the-green that day, the ball once again hit that damn stair railing and 
this time shot back some twenty yards into the prickly bushes that were also in 
great abundance behind this challenging tee box.
 
With the last ball in my bag, I dropped seven.  Realizing that I was now lying 
seven behind the tee box where I had started, I let discretion be the better 
part of sportsmanship and picked up for an 8.
 
I never take more than 8.
 
Andy