Golf is a tremendous game with a storied history.  Through the centuries, more men (all inclusive, women, too!) have been humbled on the fairways than have fallen in battlefields the world over.  To play well requires graceful fluidity, but even more important is a mental dexterity that may be rivaled but unsurpassed in any other athletic concern.

Golf on television yields very high ratings, even when the game's biggest stars are sitting out, but huge when Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are pacing the field.  This confuses me to no end.  I would rather watch the proverbial paint dry, or set a time machine to take me back to Sr. Lenore's eighth-grade Earth Science class, than to subject myself to watching golf on television.  Part of the reason is that with a few rare exceptions, like the Woods-Rocco Mediate playoff for the 2008 U.S. Open title, you don't get to see the mental gyrations that comprise half the game.

The other part of the reason is because of a regional variation of the game of golf, which has forever tainted the real game of golf.  Oh, it's a very regional variation, specific to the street on which I grew up.  As kids, being lower to the ground than adults, we would happen upon used golf balls in fields, parking lots and sometimes our dads' golf bags.  Sometimes, you might even find a big, old, honking wood in a neighbor's trash can.

Such was the case on Orland Road in the early '70s.  Grand Theft Auto had not been invented yet, so our amusement was pretty much left to our own devices, relatively unsupervised when Mom and Dad were at work.  There we were, about 10 kids, with a pristine name-brand golf ball, a scuffed and cut one, and a colored mini-golf ball, a driver, and fertile imaginations.  And so, the game of "Killer-Ball" was unleashed upon the world.

Rules were simple.  One Player would wield the driver.  Each of the balls would be struck flat off the street, without a tee, usually creating sparks from the metal plate on the bottom of the club as it struck the pavement.  The remaining players would strategically place themselves in the street to catch or retrieve the balls.  Different point values were assigned to the lively new ball, the old one and the dead range ball.

The game required far more bravery than the PGA tour.  Not only is it difficult and dangerous to catch a hurtling golf ball launched just 50 feet away, but the inherent pushing, shoving and tackling on hard asphalt to capture the balls that were not caught often resulted in a variety of scrapes, bruises and open gashes.  Rules prohibited stoppages of play for any reason other than oncoming traffic.

Point totals were calculated and argued over.  

For part of a summer, Killer-Ball became the game of choice in the neighborhood.  The league folded, sadly enough, after Stanley Dunn found a golf-ball sized dent in his new, black Ford LTD.  I can still hear him screaming, "What the hell are you kids doing?" followed by threats to call our parents.  

So we invented other pasttimes, and no one from our block succeeded, or wanted to succeed, on the PGA Tour.  What would be the point?  For sheer excitement, golf and golf on TV, pales in comparison to the virtues of Killer-Ball.