Columbia Disc Golf Club lights up the night at Oakland Park
The hole was set up perfectly.
Straight up the hill, maybe 200 feet away, the soft green light of a glow stick could be seen hanging around the top of the 18th hole.
The wind had died down, and the moment seemed ripe to produce what the five men had been waiting for all night: a hole-in-one.
The first player threw his disc, and a hint of green started spinning through the darkness straight at the glow in the distance.
The chatter that had been so common after tee shots earlier in the night died down, and the players watched eagerly to see if the disc would hit the chains in just the right spot.
Jerrad Chaney’s shot looked like it would make it, but there was no sound,and the speck of green hit the ground behind the hole.
Keith Amerson was up next, but he suffered the same fate. He came close, but he was not perfect.
Mark Ehlert, Tony Drennan and Rusty McGrath failed in their attempts as well, and the group would have to wait until next time to try to win the pool that had been growing for longer than they could remember.
The Columbia Disc Golf Club’s first nighttime round of the year took about three hours to complete, and the players walked off the last hole tired, cold and ready for the next day’s league championship.
The night’s event started at 7:30 p.m. when the players began showing up in the parking lot at Oakland Park. They would need the half hour to get ready to play what they call a “moonlighter.”
Drennan said there are usually more than 10 people who come to the Moonlighters.round was unique because of the chilly weather, and some players were getting rest for the weekend’s championship.
They spent the time opening a case of Diet Vanilla Coke, taping glow sticks to their handful of discs and getting slobbered on by Amerson’s black lab, Ace.
Amerson is treasurer of the Columbia Disc Golf Club and helped organize the round. He brought a bag full of glow sticks that the players taped the onto their discs so they would not lose them in the night sky or on the ground.
There were also larger glow sticks that would be hung from the “holes,” which are more like metal baskets with chains draped in the middle to catch the discs.
To be able to play disc golf at night in Columbia, one player has to run ahead and hang the sticks on each hole before the rest of the players can throw their first shot. Amerson said some courses in St. Louis have lights already on the holes that stay charged year round. The manual labor there is somewhat reduced.
“We’re not that serious,” he said.
Once they had attached sticks to the discs they were going to use, and another one to Ace, the five players headed to the first tee.
The night was not ideal for a moonlighter round.
There were too many stars and the nearby baseball field was entirely lit, so tracking the little green specks through the air was difficult.
For these players, though, seeing the location of the hole was more a luxury than a necessity. They had played the course enough times that memory was more important than vision.
They would ask where the hole was placed, back left or short right or deep middle, and proceed to launch their disc hundreds of feet into the air and watch it drift down to within 10 feet of the hole.
Other times they would throw it low and try to skip the disc on the ground and up into the basket. In disc golf, the strategy is endless.
Every hole at Oakland Park is a par three. Instead of being hundreds of yards away like golf, the holes in disc golf are within hundreds of feet.
Ehlert, 51, runs those hundreds of feet when he plays practice rounds by himself. He said he used to run and play 18 holes at Oakland Park in 20-22 minutes.
McGrath had the honor of being the only player to get in some climbing during the round.
Losing a golf ball in a lake is a fear of many golfers, but in disc golf, the fear is losing a disc in a tree.
McGrath found three trees during the round, but he was able to climb up two of them to retrieve his disc.
While McGrath was using limbs to help him reach his disc, the other golfers were trying their best to avoid the limbs that were no longer visible.
What would look like a nice shot would suddenly produce a loud crack as the disc banged into a branch.
The most common sound of the night, besides Drennan’s booming voice, was the clang of metal as discs found their target and came to rest in the hole.
Players would react with yells of “Nice putt!” and give high-fives. Chaney watched on the fourth hole as a putt drifted just past the hole, and he responded with a collapse reminiscent of Greg Norman during his Master’s demise.
Drennan threw a perfect drive on the 11th hole then raised his hand in acknowledgment of his playing partners’ congratulations.
Ehlert led the group as it approached the final hole, and the near misses allowed him to come away the winner with a 5-under par 49.
Amerson shot a 50, Drennan and Chaney carded a 51, and McGrath finished with a 57 and a slightly lighter disc bag.
By the end of the round, Ace was running free of his glow stick and almost impossible to see.