Tonight, Kathleen heads to the Lariat Steakhouse and Saloon to take a chair at the No Limit Hold 'em table. Stan will not go with her, he doesn't play much poker. He has always found it hard to enjoy a game where the object is to take money away from your friends.This odd principle of conscience has certainly never troubled Dick Robertson.
Mr. Robertson is the leader and wagermeister of our golfing foursome here in Tucson. A former Infantry Sergeant in Vietnam, this ex-schoolteacher has never lost the ability to give direction and craft strategy.
He has developed a wide-variety of games designed to pit members of the group against each other in contests of skill, cunning and luck. These games involve an arcane set of rules and formularies whose logic is known only to their creator. As the intensity of play increases, so does the complexity of the scorekeeping.This continues throughout the round, with the wagermeister barking out the progress of the derby at regular intervals and vigorously fending off any challenge to the rudiments of the methodology. At the end of the round, which may have been extended by various spontaneous propositions, the winners are ceremoniously announced and the losers know exactly who they are.
Stan has now played five rounds of golf under this rigorous format. The experience is said by some to have toughened him, improved his game, readied him for more competition. Maybe so. This cannot be known.
What is known is that, despite a handicapping system which purports to even out disparate skill levels and give every entrant an equal chance to prevail, at day's end Stan has always paid money to someone, almost always to Dick Robertson.
We leave faithful bloggers to draw their own conclusions. Stan, of all people, is certainly unwilling to suggest anything unkind about this good and faithful leader who graciously leads us on our daily rounds.
(Photos include pigeons Doug MacKenzie, left, and Dick Krueger.)
