For this episode, Scot talks sports! One sport in particular. A Japanese sport that may be new to you. It's the wonderful game of Park Golf, and we give it a glowing deep dive. 

Small club, big ball, rubber tee, and you're ready to hit the course. Listen to stories about Park Golf from Japan and adventures I have in America.

I talk with Kris Beyer Jones from Destroyer Park Golf for an interview with the first park golf course in America, and some of my usual unusual hijinks with my friends Jeff Clemens and Alex Yocum.  

Find Destroyer Park Golf at https://destroyerparkgolf.com/

Find the International Park Golf Association of America (IPGAA) at https://ipgaa.com/

Find Wormburner Park Golf at https://www.wormburnerparkgolf.com/

And find the Japanese Park Golf Association at https://www.parkgolf.or.jp/

 

Check out all pics, videos, and transcript on the webpage for this episode: 

https://perfectshowpodcast.com/14-park-golf/

Music from this episode by:

 

Avishka31 - https://www.fiverr.com/avishka31

Bastereon - https://www.fiverr.com/bastereon

Brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire

desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee

Gelyanov - https://www.fiverr.com/gelyanov

Gui Moraes - https://www.fiverr.com/guimoraes

Isehgal - https://www.fiverr.com/isehgal

kgrapofficial - https://www.fiverr.com/kgrapofficial

Nearbysound - https://www.fiverr.com/nearbysound

rito_shopify - https://www.fiverr.com/rito_shopify

Yashchaware - https://www.fiverr.com/yashchaware

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

School - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku/Captain_Glouglous_Incredible_Week_Soundtrack/mall_1328/

 

AI-Generated Transcript:

 

Speaker 1: <time>0:23 </time>

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I am your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that can be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little nugget of perfection Ah, sports. I'm not much of a sports guy anymore. I mean, I certainly had my phases both as a player and as a fan, both in my childhood. That was the end of that sentence. Both of those were in my childhood. That's why it's weird to me that I found a totally new sport and then became an avid player and fan of it completely in my adulthood. This sport may be new to you too, and if it is, please allow me to proudly introduce you to the game of park golf. Throughout my childhood I had played, and then quit, a number of sports, or rather, I would often hit a ceiling on both my natural athletic ability and my willingness to practice things past when they stopped being fun. But as a kid I had done t-ball and then baseball, soccer for a little bit early on, basketball for a bit later, and then track in seventh grade as well. All of those were over by high school, though, where I was on the high school tennis team for one year as a freshman before not making the team again my sophomore year. You know what sophomore me thought of that Whatever, because you know what sophomore me thought of pretty much everything Whatever. But on the fan side of things, as a child growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, I was of course, into the Royals for baseball and the Chiefs for football. Basketball was trickier since there was no pro team nearby. I think the Chicago Bulls were the closest to us geographically, but the Kansas J-hawks were in Lawrence, just a half hour from us, and they pretty much filled all the same fandom needs that a pro team would Now like a lot of things. That all changed when I went to Japan, but first I remember trying to keep up in absurd ways having my dad record football games and then mail me the tapes, but that stopped pretty quickly. The only game that NHK, which is the main Japanese television network, carried live was the Super Bowl, which, because of the time difference their Sunday night game actually airs on early Monday morning Japan time. Some expats tried each year to get something going, but the morning vibe, along with the strangeness of the game being broadcast, but none of the commercials. A lot of the time we were watching the players standing and waiting for ad breaks to end and eating like eggs or donuts or some morning food. I tried to get into some Japanese sports too. I went to a couple of Japanese baseball games, I tried to watch some sumo, but it wasn't until I moved to Hokkaido that a sport truly took hold of me again. Now I'd have guessed that sport would have been skiing. I had liked skiing as a kid and I'd even tried to go skiing once in Japan, but they didn't have any boots in my size, so actually I ended up spending my first ski trip in Japan just sitting while everyone else skied. When I applied for my next job in Japan, it was with the JET program, a program that places native English speakers into schools and town halls to help with language and culture exchange. But in order to get a position on JET, I had to go back to the US for an interview. I had put Hokkaido as one of my top choices and I was keen not to have a repeat of my first Japanese ski trip. So there, during the hottest part of the summer in Kansas, the flattest state in the US. I bought some ski boots in my size and hauled them back to Japan with me. I did end up getting placed on the northern island of Hokkaido Very, very far north Hokkaido actually and I skied some, but my real sport was something we accidentally stumbled on during my first summer there, and that sport was park golf. I had lived in Japan for over a year in Kyushu, and it wasn't until I moved to Hokkaido that I even heard of park golf. And that's because, even though park golf is an international sport, technically, it was invented in Hokkaido, japan, and with the more spacious nature of Hokkaido compared to the other Japanese prefectures, that's where the vast majority of the courses are as well. Wikipedia tells me park golf started in 1983, invented in the town of Makubatsu, japan, which is also on the northern island of Hokkaido, although it also says the sport is like a cross between golf and croquet, which I think is off. There's no wickets or hitting other players' balls or anything. I'd say it's more like the midway point between regular golf and mini golf. You get to crack the ball when you hit it more than mini golf, and the ball is bigger, like a baseball or a billiards ball, so you have a much larger target than a normal golf and you can put extra English, extra spin on the thing when you hit it. No spinning windmills or statues, but plenty of land and sand challenges. Rules run roughly the same as golf. You count your strokes for each hole and add them up at the end. Lo