golf

Kevin Bohrer
10/09/07
English 1001

Golf

Andrew Loupe, a student-athlete who excels at golf, is a freshman at LSU. He is also taking freshman writing at LSU. He has been playing golf in the Louisiana community since he was seven years old. When I told Andrew about the student interview I had to do, he suggested that I do him. This sounded like a good idea because I know Andrew has been one of the best golfers in the state since 8th grade.
I went and met him at the driving range at the University Club golf course. He was wearing a white collared shirt tucked into his crisp khakis with a white LSU visor to match. It was here where I got to see his golf skills first-hand, and I must say I was impressed. We walked up to the range and as he picked up the first ball and put it on the tee he looked at me and said “watch this.” At first I laughed, but I couldn’t tell if he was joking or being cocky but either way I watched. He was amazing, he could drive the ball 300 yards perfectly straight and chip the ball anywhere he wanted to almost flawlessly. When I asked Andrew what he does to keep his skills so tuned, he looked at me almost like I brought up a sensitive subject and said “well not only do we practice every day, we have 6 A.M. workouts three times a week where we do things like running up tiger stadium multiple times, 50 yard sprints and a bunch of different conditioning exercises that you don’t even want to know about.” 6 A.M. workouts is pretty serious conditioning if you ask me, I don’t know if I would want to go through that, so I asked him if he thought it was worth it. “You know, I ask myself the same thing sometimes, but I have to remind myself that I want this to be my career after college, so I can’t let a few sacrifices affect my game.” Before that comment I had no idea he had aspirations of being a professional golfer, which was pretty interesting because that meant I could be seeing this guy on ESPN one day.
When he asked me if I wanted to stick around and watch him play a few holes, I quickly agreed just to see how good a potential professional golfer really is. As we walk in the shop to get a golf cart, there are two guys working, who both turn to the door when we go in. As soon as Andrew gets in the store, both of the guys smile, almost like they are sucking up to him, and call his name out as if they were so excited to see him. After Andrew talked to about 10 different older men that all acted like they were his best friend, we finally got in our cart and headed to the first hole. I guess you could say he was a celebrity over there.
As we pulled up to the first hole there was someone standing by himself at the tee. He apparently was meeting Andrew there to play together, which I was unaware of. His name was Clayton and he was also on the LSU golf team. He set up his ball to hit first, and it looked like a good shot to me, it was almost to the green. Andrew lined up his shot next, but when he hit the ball instead of going straight it went to the left into a sand trap. He screamed a few profane words and almost threw his club on the ground. Clayton and I got pretty quiet, apparently golf is a pretty emotional sport. I was also surprised because I figured he would have hit the ball perfectly, but I realized pretty soon that even the best golfers don’t hit it perfect every time. He made up for it on his next shot when he hit it onto the green from the sand trap. He ended up birdying the hole which was pretty impressive considering how bad his first shot was. I asked him if there were any initiations or hazing involved in being a freshman on the golf team. He said “No, the only thing i’ve ever had to do is carry the ice chest to the tailgate at the football games, other than that I’m pretty much treated as an equal.”
After about the third hole, 30 minutes later, that was enough for me. Andrew had not been playing good and it was making me pretty uncomfortable how angry he was getting. He kept reassuring me that he was better than he was playing at that time, I guess he didn’t want me to write a bad paper about him. We drove the cart back to the club house, and of course we had to stop at both holes before to talk to people he knew. He told me “I don’t even know most of these people’s names,” so I made a joke about him being famous and he got kind of offended. I could tell he took golf extremely serious, but you can’t really blame him if he plans on going pro.
Despite his less than perfect play that day, I looked up some of his stats from high school online. He won the state championship his 8th grade year at Episcopal High School in Baton Rouge. Not only that, but he won it two more times after that. He lost his senior year to another up and coming golf star in Baton Rouge, but he says he just played bad that match. His stats were very impressive and I would have to say he was the best in the state during his time in high school.