COFFEETOWN HS SPORTS

Coffeetown High School golf star Wade Waters had multiple college scholarship offers this time last week. An unfortunate goose event sent them up in a cloud of feathers.

Waters held a three-stroke lead after the turn in Sunday’s final round of the Copper Hill Classic.

His second shot on the par-five 10th hole landed just short of the green and in the reed-filled swamp that runs on the eastern border of Frogthorn Country Club.

Waters took a penalty stroke near the hazard and skulled his approach wedge over the green and into an adjacent sand trap.

That’s when Waters – who is known for celebrating his high moments with exuberant, unhinged celebrations, and for punctuating his lows with mercurial bouts of rage – started swinging.

The rising Coffeetown senior golf star took out his frustration on the flora and fauna

I heard it all from my vantage point across the fairway.

It was The Lord’s day, but that didn’t stop Waters from cursing all the elements of his creation.

The cattail reeds bore the blame for casting “shadows” in his “F***ing swing.”

The sun was guilty for being “too mother-f***ing bright today.”

And the water and dirt just had to “put all that bulls*** mud under the grass.”

Waters’s outburst was a welcome distraction from the otherwise dull competition of several 60-80-somethings and one furnace of a summer Sunday afternoon.

But Waters’s words weren’t the only assaults on God’s creation.

Today, he probably wishes they were.

So does Betsy, the now-deceased and famous Canadian goose who lived in the Frogthorn wetlands.

After berating the hazard for his errant shot, Wade Waters’s wedge had one more swing in it

I don’t know if Waters saw Betsy with his first swing. He appeared to be scything the reeds from where I stood.

That’s when Betsy and all 34 years of her webbed feet and beak and wings flapped out of the swamp toward him.

After such a long life – a goose record, if the rumored number is accurate – Betsy’s attack was remarkably short-lived.

Waters struck her in the neck with his lob wedge and dropped to his knees as the giant goose fell limp at his feet in the freshly-hacked mud.

Realizing what he’d done, Waters tossed his weapon into the wetlands.

It is yet to be retrieved. Charges of animal cruelty will soon follow.

Waters’s golf future looks about as bleak as Betsy’s visage (she is lying in state on a bed of ice in the Frogthorn clubhouse, before being prepared as a special dinner item for Frogthorn members this week).

“I let Coffeetown down,” a remorseful Waters told me, after confirming that multiple D1 golf programs pulled their offers after hearing about his lack of control on the course.

“Betsy was a legend. I sincerely apologize to anyone I’ve offended in Copper County and in Canada. They gave us a beautiful bird and I don’t necessarily think she left us too soon, because she was very old. But I feel bad that I was the one who did it.”