All You Can Eat
Chicken Tenders

There were four of us, once: three guys and me, the only woman on the lease, in a house with a sagging porch and a refrigerator that hummed in a minor key. Twenty years later, a Saturday in April, we met again on the first hole at PopStroke Port St. Lucie, a little grayer, a little slower, every bit as competitive.

Danny still reads putts by lying flat on his stomach. Marcus still talks through your backswing. I still three-putt from anywhere inside twenty feet.

By the turn we were tied and starving, so we stepped off to the patio.

All you can eat chicken tenders. We ordered them, then ordered them again. That is the whole beautiful premise: they keep coming. Golden. Crisp. Hot enough that you blow on the first bite and burn your fingers on the second anyway. A basket arrives, a basket empties, a basket arrives. It is the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine I have ever witnessed.

We stopped keeping score somewhere around the fourth round. Of tenders, I mean. Between baskets, Danny and Marcus renewed a foosball grudge match from our porch years, spinning the rods like it still mattered. The golf we kept careful track of.

On the back nine Danny drained a downhill slider with two feet of break and celebrated like he'd won the Masters. Back on the patio afterward, we toasted him with a tender each, held aloft like cigars.

The scorecard says Marcus won by one. I have filed a formal protest. It will be heard over the next basket.