Unsung Hero

Early 1971. January 31st until February 9th to be precise. Idi Amin began his “liberation” of Uganda. Rolls Royce collapsed. An Earthquake in California’s San Fernando Valley killed 65 people, the Viet Nam war raged on and George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord was the first number one solo hit of any ex-Beatle.

A busy week and a half by any standards, but it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The Americans! God love “em, they knew how to cheer people up. At a time when Communism still loomed large in the national periphery, the hope and love of the sixties confined to the realms of nostalgia, Uncle Sam came up trumps and launched the Apollo 14 space mission.

Whoa, hold it there, sport! Didn”t you just say there was a bloody losing war going on? That’s right and by the skin of its teeth the Apollo 13 mission was dragged home less than a year before. Apollo 13, the fable of. A good old fashioned American Morality Tale: Don’t spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on an unwinnable cock war!

Communism may have been exposed for its flaws over time and so shall capitalism because God, or whoever, simply didn’t design the Earth to be run by any swinging dick but himself. Or Himself. Or Herself. How the fuck do I know? The point is you can’t win a war on two fronts. Hitler couldn’t do it and he was very organized. I’m not saying that the post-war US Government didn’t know what it was doing, I’m sure it made perfect sense at the time: Destroy communism by bombing it in Asia and by embarrassing it in space. The Final Frontier. Quite frankly, in hindsight, the whole situation was a bit of a mess.

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man…

Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. No, me neither, but it turns out that this guy was the second man and first American in Space. What a guy. More importantly, he may quite possibly be a He, but this is purely speculative, you understand. You see, Alan Shepard was the commander of the Apollo 14 mission and subsequently the fifth American on the moon. And what a commander! As a Sci-Fi hungry western public we were being promised Star Ship Enterprises and Moon Base Alphas left, right and centre. All by 1999. Time was short, man, get up there, quick, on the double! Boldly go where no man has gone before!

Alan Shepard took his golf clubs, or one, anyway. A 6-iron, I think. It doesn’t matter what club you use, given the lack of gravity up there, that ball travelled, Shepard’s words, for “miles and miles and miles”. Yeah. So where is it now? My opinion, nay, my deep-seated belief, is that that ball flew through space, gaining velocity until it was sucked through a black hole into a parallel universe.

Now picture the scene: A tribal people, not too dissimilar to humans, picture them congregated around some Stonehengesque monument in a deep trance awaiting the arrival of some higher presence. A from the very heavens comes a pure white spherical…thing, adorned by hundreds of identical dimples. It lands calmly in the centre of the “henge”, let’s say. These people, they are terrified and excited in equal measure. The elders approach their celestial guest and look closely… It has written across its face six mystic symbols: DUNLOP.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. probably has no idea whatsoever. But mark my words, people of Earth. Long after the demise of both communism and capitalism, the human population dwindling in the aftermath of pollution, war and famine, the people of the DUNLOP kingdom shall come in their golf ball shaped mother ship and lend us a much needed helping hand.

Or perhaps that ball just landed in a crater and Alan yelled “ALBERTROSS!”