Column: Up for Goccer, anyone?

By Josh Purse

How is that last Thursday night I went to the Irwin indoor football practice facility to play pick-up soccer and ended up shooting a round of golf?

It goes like this.

Fellow columnist Mike Szwaja and I – two kids who have been meeting DI deadlines for years – showed up a few minutes late for our weekly game. We should have known better.

As a result of our missed deadline … ahem … late arrival, the rest of the guys had already begun playing. And when we asked if they wouldn’t mind adding one more guy to each team, their response sounded something like this: “Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.”

Understandable, I guess.

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But there was still a problem. I had already filled a parking meter with an hour’s worth of change. There was no way I was going to abandon my cleats and that bloated parking meter without first having some fun.

So, I invented soccer-golf or “Goccer.” And Mike and I played the first round ever.

In this age of asterisks, I must admit that since last week I’ve done some research to find there is actually a soccer-golf game on the market called SoGo. It comes with some little goals, flags, scoring cards and a bunch more trappings that add up to $34.95. In other words, not worth it.

All you need to play Goccer is a ball. And an imagination – the crazier the better. For example, I would hire Peter Pan as a Goccer course designer way before I’d hire, say, Jack Nicklaus. I’d hire Rube Goldberg before … just about anybody.

The rules of Goccer are simple. Because there really aren’t any.

Just grab a friend and a ball. Decide how you want to play the first hole (it’s entirely up to you) and see who can reach the objective in fewer strokes – using only your feet of course. Rinse and repeat.

Here’s an example of a hole (I think it was No. 5) that Mike and I played. We teed off about 100 yards from a chair that was sitting next to a wall at Irwin. The objective: to land the ball safely on the chair in fewer strokes than the opposing player.

That hole made me wish there was a spoon attached to the bottom of my leg instead of a foot. But somehow I was able to will the ball onto the chair using a combination of skill and prayer mixed with a healthy amount of blind luck.

I might have won that hole, but Mike got the last laugh on the last hole. We headed into the final tee box at Hole 7 tied at three. As you might notice, our final hole wasn’t No. 18 (I only fed the parking meter an hour’s worth). But that’s OK, because anything goes in Goccer.

The last hole resembled less of a golf hole and more of something erected in the game Mouse Trap.

I’ll spare you the wacky details, but just know that the objective of this hole was to land the ball, so it came to rest on a pyramid I constructed out of our four gym shoes.

I got to the green (a completely arbitrarily decided space surrounding the hole) several strokes ahead of Mike. Turns out, though, that getting a soccer ball to rest on a structure that would have ancient Egyptians spinning in their tombs is tougher than it looks. And it looks tough.

So, Mike slow-and-steady-wins-the-raced his ball to the green, set himself up perfectly and tapped in. I, on the other hand, would have pulled out each last hair on my head before ever making the putt. Ashamed, I picked up.

Turns out, sometimes Goccer can be just as frustrating as golf.