Armchair athlete v. Husky elite, Part 2

After my recent debacles on both the basketball and tennis courts with Husky standouts Will Conroy and Alex Vlaski, I was anxious to compete once again against a pair of UW athletes in two sports that were more familiar to me -- soccer and golf. I confidently lined up competition dates with sophomore goalkeeper Chris Eylander of the men's soccer team and junior birdie-machine James Lepp of the golf team.

Kicking it with Eylander:

Thankfully, Eylander was an opponent who was more interested in mentoring me on how to play his sport rather than beating me into submission.

Eylander lent me his spare soccer cleats to replace my Nike running shoes, shared his goalie gloves when I was defending the box and gave me a run-down on how to play goalie.

Then, he offered me some practice shots to get a feel for the field.

"Just warm up a little," he said. "You don't want to pull a muscle."

Apparently, not only is Eylander capable of performing inhuman soccer saves, but can foretell the future. Stay tuned.

As I took the first shift in goal to attempt to stop 10 Eylander penalty kicks, I realized the helplessness of being a goalie. The keeper essentially must take a guess at where the kicker will place the ball and dive in that assumed direction.

However, while I was capable of making a guess, I was also adept at second-and third-guessing my original guess.

For example, on one attempt, I had an early beeline on the ball, but my brain backfired, determined to change directions. My mind eventually calculated that my second guess was the incorrect guess, at which point the crescendo of neuronal activity concluded in one decision -- I simply fell down.

After 10 kicks from Eylander, I never once touched the ball. However, he did chip the ball over the net twice -- both of which I deemed as "saves."

When I took my chance from 12 yards out, Eylander was virtually unbeatable. On the shots that I sent toward the bottom corners, Eylander pounced on the ball like some sort of tiger would ambush its prey. When I took aim at the upper corners, I used too much leverage and launched the ball over the net.

I only scored three times out of 10.

Eylander handed me his goalie gloves once again and suggested that we line up for 10 one-on-one breakaways.

Through the first eight kicks of that session, my only save had come when -- as Eylander wound up -- I cowered into a fetal position. The ball hit me in the shin and skirted wide of the goal.

Eylander scored on six consecutive lazy shots and then took a moment to encourage me.

"You have to get crazy out there as a keeper," Eylander said. "Goalkeepers are totally different, kind of like an animal out there. You have to have that animal mentality."

Thankfully, I managed to save the next shot.

As he lined up for the 10th, Eylander aided me even more, hinting: "I am just going to shoot this one, stop it."

So, as the ball sailed through the air, I laid my body out. I managed to knock the ball wide with my right hand. Sure, my hamstring suffered the consequences when I woke up the following morning, but making a legitimate save made it all worthwhile.

While Eylander was in goal, however, my save paled in comparison to his diving stops. I only managed to sneak one ball through his legs, bend one shot into the top corner and roll one more past his right side -- but that was all.

When I realized that the final score was 15-6 in Eylander's favor, I asked him what I could do to improve as a keeper.

"To be a goalie, you've got to work on a lot of things, man," Eylander said with a chuckle. "You have to know how to play your position right, angling, and knowing where your position is. You have to be aggressive and willing to dive for the ball."

Well, at least as aggressive as my hamstring is willing to let me be.

Teeing off with Lepp

While my golf clubs have not seen the light of day in nearly a year, I was hopeful that my days of golf would return quickly to hone my swing for a nine-hole competition with Lepp, a fellow Canadian like myself.

But even before we had teed up our balls, I realized that I was way in over my head.

Lepp and I met on the first tee of the Washington National Golf Course along with his teammate Reid Rader. As we prepared to start our round of nine holes, I picked up my bag to walk forward to the tee.

"We usually tee off from back here," Lepp corrected me. "But if you want, you can go wherever you feel comfortable."

Though I played from their location, "back here" meant another area code. On each and every hole, Lepp and Rader teed their balls on the back edge of the farthest tee box, which was at least 100 yards -- on average -- behind the normal tees.

To say the least, the first hole did not go very well for any of us. I nearly decapitated some innocent bystanders, while Lepp struggled to find a rhythm.

Yet, once we arrived at the green, Lepp began to speak of golfing grace.

"That's a double-mulligan birdie for me," Lepp said as he picked his Titleist ProV1x golf ball out of the cup.

In response, I decided to take a one-mulligan, one-free-drop bogey on the hole and, like a good golfer, I marked down our scores without even denting my conscience.

After the warmup hole, Lepp -- who was named the Big Ten player of the year last season before transferring to the UW -- got his game back on track.

The kinks in my swing, however, did not disperse as quickly, as my next drive took a beeline for the trees and disappeared from sight.

"It looked like it might have possibly hit something on the other side of the cart path," Rader assured me. "And it maybe trickled back across."

"Well played," Lepp agreed with a nod.

While Lepp's consistency grew on each hole, my wayward drives were consistently inconsistent -- a problem that came to a head on the fourth hole.

As I learned on the fourth-tee box, from "back here," we were looking at a 641-yard par five. In fear, I cut two balls into the trees. By the time I hacked my way to 110 yards out, I needed to hole my wedge shot just to save triple-bogey.

It was then that my ball came off the club with utmost purity -- the only pure shot I hit all day. The ball was tracking with the pin. The gallery hushed. Flashbulbs popped. I was posing at the top of my follow through.

But, as the ball came down, I never saw it hit the green. Was it in the hole? No, the ball had sailed over the green and landed in the bushes. I withdrew my hand from the mulligan jar and took a 12 on No. 4.

Thankfully, the fourth hole was my only glaring number on the scorecard on the day. Unfortunately, not even a few mulligans, gimmes and free-drops could salvage my train-wreck score. I shot a 52.

Aided by the grace of a casual round of golf, Lepp finished the day with an uneventful 36 to prove once and for all that there is indeed a decent Canadian golfer on this Earth whose name is not Mike Weir.

And from "back here," I only lost by 16 strokes.