Disc golfers must occasionally face the more dangerous aspects of nature in pursuit of their favorite sport. Ticks, chiggers, biting flies and skeeters, poisonous plants, thorny plants, rattlesnakes, scorpions… I even saw signs at one of the Lake Tahoe courses warning golfers of small animals that could possibly be carrying the plague. The plague for cryinoutloud!

Despite the dangers, I've never had much difficulty in avoiding these nasties. The worst I can recall was during coverage of Worlds 2000 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Through the course of the week I was often rolling around in tall grasses, capturing unique photo angles of the disc golfers as they drove off the pad. It was a few days later when I realized that I had picked up about 25 chiggers (chigger larvae to be exact. Adult chiggers look like ticks but don't bother people), which are microscopic worm-like critters that attach themselves to your skin and throw a little parasite party at your expense. They also itch like crazy, causing bumpy red sores that last up to a month. Very unpleasant.

Earlier this season the disctv crew landed in St. Charles County Missouri - just outside of St. Louis - for the Gateway Open. Quail Ridge Park is brand new, and as is sometimes the case with new courses, it was packed with ticks. PACKED. I was pulling at least six of the little bloodsuckers off every day.

I've always been a little more paranoid about ticks, since some of them carry lyme disease. It's one thing to have a bug burrow its ugly face into your skin and feast on your blood, but quite another to get sick as a result. Like many disc golfers I don't have health insurance, which always adds to any potential paranoia.

Over the last couple of years I've talked with a number of disc golfers who have had the misfortune of contracting Lyme disease. It was named in 1977 when arthritis was observed in a cluster of children in and around Lyme, Connecticut. The cause: bacteria that were transmitted by the bite of infected deer ticks. Today deer ticks cause more than 16,000 infections in the United States annually. The symptoms include a bull's-eye rash around the original area of infection, along with fever, fatigue, headache, muscle and joint aches. The incubation period from infection to onset of symptoms is typically 7 to 14 days but may be as short as 3 days and as long as 30 days. Victims are treated with antibiotics. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the transmission of the bacteria that causes Lyme disease from an infected tick is unlikely to occur before 36 hours of tick attachment, so always check yourself out well the night after playing a tick infested course. If you find one attached, remove it with tweezers (forget any wives' tales you've heard that say otherwise). More info: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/lyme/

So back to St. Louis. Ticks, ticks, lots of ticks. I was reminding John and Leo to do tick checks at the end of the day, and my concern for their well-being was met with derision as they proclaimed me officially paranoid. They would soon change their tune. Meantime, I was removing most of my hitch-hikers at the course, and every night would find one or two that had managed to get attached. No biggie, until a couple days after returning to Chicago.

I noticed a very small dark spot - no bigger than the size of a pinhead - that I had never noticed before. Upon closer inspection, I was horrified to find that a tick had attached itself to my, uh, to my Johnson.

Not good. Very bad, in fact. Talk about getting creeped out. Dude, you couldn't have picked a worse spot. And now you must die…

I was especially cruel in bringing about the death of the little tick. I would have been even crueler if I could have found implements of torture small enough to do the job, but alas, you can get only so medieval on a tick's ass.

Brian

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