Sit down. I won a golf tournament. Well, not individually. And it was actually a team game of "best ball" and they won third place in spite of me.

This golf thing is getting out of hand. Now that I’m an athlete, I gave up a winter trip to Naples, Florida, the shopper’s paradise, for a week in Hilton Head—an island with six golf courses and twenty alligators to every permanent resident.

Of course, when the tourists descend on the island it’s like the boardwalk in July—thousands upon thousands of straight people. To borrow a phrase from Jerry Seinfeld, "Not that there’s anything wrong with that." But given it’s a golf resort, there just had to be lesbians around but I never saw any evidence of them. Except us, of course.

When we found out that they’d give us $100 if we sat through a time share lecture we saw visions of greens fees dancing in our heads. In hindsight I’d rather have made a buck as a professional alligator wrestler.

The wait in the lobby before being shuttled off to a sales person was so long they had a magician entertaining, and I use that term loosely. It was like being stuck in an elevator with David Blaine, except this guy had no magic skills. Wait a minute, does David Blaine have magic skills other than a highly practiced death wish?

Anyway, this Blaine-like magician kept telling hideously insulting "wife" jokes while he insisted on executing a trick where he set a twenty dollar bill on fire. After we’d been stranded with him for over 45 minutes he did manage to entertain us by setting his pants pocket on fire. We got our $100, so at least the guy wasn’t a liar liar with his pants on fire, but it was painful—for everyone concerned.

For golf, though, the resort was perfect. Every day we’d be up and out early, playing the game with the gators watching our every move. One time I whacked the ball directly at a gator’s jaw. Ooh, is it the alligator you run away from in a zig zag or a crocodile? Since retrieving that hook shot could have turned me into captain hook, I just took a stroke, tried not to have a stroke and fled zigzagedly.

The courses were long and tough, with deep ravine-like sand traps. The hardest thing for me was getting out of the sand traps—and I don’t mean the ball.

I’d say that I got to practice my short game on the greens, but actually my long game is my short game and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. But I had fun. One time I teed off and my ball hit the water, skipped across it like a stone and bounced up into a sand trap. That’s multitasking.

At any rate, my winter golf prepped me for our CAMP Rehoboth Women’s league this spring and summer and ultimately gave me the illusion of grandeur needed to participate in the July 10th tournament. It was 96 degrees by 8:30 a.m.

From the minute we registered I realized our folly. First off, the course was what was called a"links" course, explained to me as a very long, narrow "targeted" Scottish style course with hilly moguls, deep sand traps and a ridiculously narrow fairway. It looked we’d be taking the Battaan Death March.

Our foursome completed the first hole in fifteen minutes. At this rate we’d be back to the Clubhouse by Tuesday. Luckily, since it was the "best ball" format, if one of the other three hit a respectable shot, all I had to do was sit in the golf cart and perspire. It would have been 110 degrees in the shade had there been any shade.

However, one good thing about this fancy course was the service. A refreshment cart showed up every few holes asking us if we wanted anything to drink—and drink we did—water, Gatorade, more water, anything to keep us cool. We drank so much, that by the last time the cart came around and the gal asked, "Want anything?" I requested a catheter.

One of my teammates laughed so hard she made the catheter request moot.

As our carts sped from one hole to another, trying to keep marginally ahead of the team breathing down our golf shirts, I felt like I was in a car loaded with Borscht Belt comics running the road in the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Arriving at a hole, we’d whack at the balls and then run to find whatever shots landed in the skinny fairway. "I’m not stopping to find my ball," Bonnie yelled. "I’ve got plenty of balls."

Well, that’s true.

By the time we finished what seemed like 128 holes and the battle of bunker hell we were drenched, exhausted and a thoroughly sorry lot. So imagine our surprise at winning third place among the women’s teams.

In hindsight, what helped us most was not spectacular golfing, but shopping. Since this was a charity event, you could purchase Mulligans (do-overs) and Sandies (get-out-of-the-sand trap-free cards). I may be a lousy golfer, but I’m a shopping professional—so I purchased quite a few of these goodies before we got started and, as most shopping sprees do, it made all the difference in the world.

So, tourney win behind me, and league play continuing I seem to be sticking with this golf thing. Truth be told, the only reason I took up golf in the first place was to write a column about it. Who knew I’d actually like it.

But the bad thing is that I’m improving. When I started, I was a team joke. It was incongruous and hilarious. I was the league mascot. Everybody wanted to play in my foursome because the whole idea of me taking up a sport, and one that required special equipment at that was a laugh a minute.

But after little more than a year, the sad truth is that I’ve improved just enough to ruin my game. I am now just a garden variety awful golfer, no longer a novelty, no longer so amusing. In fact, occasionally I make less than double par. It’s so sad.

So for your protection and mine, this is the last you will hear about golf from me. Unless of course, I wind up in the LPGA or playing in the Dinah Shore Classic.

And I imagine you’ll see me gator wrestling on Animal Planet long before that happens.