TOO broke to join a golf club? Have the wrong clothes, wrong shoes, wrong friends? Did we learn nothing from Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack? Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore?
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Fear not. Saturday is World Urban Golf Day, a street ball jamboree teeing off in 60 cities worldwide - including ours.
Newcastle player Chris Connors describes the game as "golf's cooler, younger brother".
"The ball can go absolutely anywhere - there are shots taken from rooftops," he tells Topics.
"You can really enforce the play-it-as-it-lies rule."
We're talking accurate chip shots here, not booming drives. In a normal game, players pick targets in the street. Saturday's comp, though, will take place over seven "holes", designed for off-the-wall trick shots and more.
Players hit a modified ball - softer than the real thing - with pitching wedges that quickly look the worse for wear. But in urban golf, says Chris, a club with no scratches is as uncool as a cricket bat without cherries, or a scuff-free skateboard.
"It shows you're not really having a dig," he says.
World Urban Golf Day starts noon Saturday at the Hamilton Station Hotel, Islington.
THIS mind-bending parking spot (pictured) brings to mind a supervisor crying at a worker with a spray can: "You had one job!".
The botched effort, pointed out by a Newcastle reader, can be seen on Moroney Avenue at Newcastle East. Not quite the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but hey. It's ours.
"Went to get my car and had to firstly tell the guy who pulled up beside me to reverse so I could squeeze past to put bub in the car seat, then he left and another guy pulled in and I had to do an amazing reverse out without scraping him - and then noticed him puzzling over the same thing," reports our reader.
The Moroney Triangle is one of a freshly painted block of angle parks. There's already a Facebook page dedicated to "Newcastle crap parkers", but what about crap parks? Seen one? Send us a photo.
AS reported by Denise Pollock, of Honeysuckle (Topics, October 10), there would appear to be a hearse around town with the number plates "DED".
Which reminded John, of Elermore Vale, of the time in the early '60s when a Maitland funeral company registered its shiny new Peugeot 203 hearse - and got a set of unfortunate plates.
"The number plates they were issued began with 'CRY'," recalls John. "Roads and Transport wouldn't let you change your plates, back then. You had to accept what you were given."
WE'RE quickly finding out that no Novocastrian overseas is safe from bumping into people from home.
Carol Ryan's family, of Hamilton South, were just in the United States. At the top of the 50-storey replica Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas, four blokes noticed that Carol's granddaughter Alexandra was wearing a Jets cap - "and feigned horror".
"'Oh no, not the Jets, go Wanderers', they said," says Carol.
"A week later we were at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington at the earthquake section trying to look up how our Newcastle earthquake rated amongst others, when a voice behind us said '28th December, 1989 - I was visiting from Sydney and was at the ANZ bank in King Street, near Marketown, when it hit. I'll never forget it'. What a coincidence."
We know what you're thinking but no, it wasn't Super Hubert.
